Source: New Zealand Herald
NOVO PROGRESSO - Drawing his .40-caliber pistol, Severiano Pontes dashes across the steaming, muddy jungle floor, a hunch telling him what he would find around a bend.
The thick Amazon rainforest canopy suddenly opens to a clearing where massive hardwood trees have been reduced to 40 waist-high trunks lying on the ground. Fires set to help clear the underbrush still smoulder nearby, sending sinewy grey smoke columns into the sea-blue sky.
Pontes and his environmental agents patrol the Amazon to prevent illegal clearing, part of Brazil's new, aggressive effort to preserve a jungle the size of the United States west of the Mississippi River.
The Government says such teams are the main reason that deforestation has slowed this year to its lowest level in two decades.
But more often Pontes' agents arrive too late. Instead, they find graveyards of felled trees resembling twisted, blackened fossils and earth covered in a grey layer of ash.
They leave with their hands and faces coated with charcoal dust and a barbecue smell that lingers even after showering hours later.
Pontes holsters his pistol, confident armed ranch hands who often defend the illegal clearings are not around, and pulls out a tape measure.
"This one, let's start with this one here!" Pontes yells, pointing to a huge chunk of a Jatoba, trees that grow higher than 35m and are popular for flooring in the US and Europe.
"We've got to measure all this up."
The evidence will help their agency, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) impose fines and other penalties.
The Brazilian Amazon is arguably the world's biggest natural defence against global warming, acting as a "sink", or absorber, of carbon dioxide. But it is also a great contributor to warming. About 75 per cent of Brazil's emissions come from rainforest clearing, as vegetation burns and felled trees rot.
Advocates have long pressed to defend the world's rainforests, to save animal and plant species, safeguard watersheds and protect indigenous people's homelands.
For Brazil, water vapour from the forest is also vital to its rainy climate.
But the Government now has another reason to protect the Amazon: A new global climate agreement is expected to reward countries for "avoided deforestation", with cash or credits tradable on the global carbon market.
In the last year, the Government says its stepped-up patrols have confiscated about 230,000cu m of wood, have frozen development on more than 400,000ha of land and have resulted in US$1.6 billion ($2.27 billion) in fines.
But policing a giant region that is mostly impassable because of thick vegetation is daunting for any country, rich or poor.
So the Ibama strategy has been limited to selective shock and awe, targeting states such as Para - home to Novo Progresso - where deforestation rates from August 2008 through this July, the period Brazil uses to calculate its annual deforestation, were three times that of other Amazon states.
Ibama doubled the number of agents to 1400 to cover the Amazon. About 50 at any one time are concentrated in Novo Progresso, with its 38,300sq km and 21,500 residents, most of whom make a living off jungle clearing.
They say it worked: Novo Progresso has since dropped off the list of top deforesters.
Critics say Brazil's increased enforcement is not behind the dramatic drop in deforestation. Rather, the fall in destruction tracks the global recession and the decline in prices for cattle, soy and timber - the products that are killing the Amazon.
In the jungle, there is this simple truth: Until the region's 25 million inhabitants believe it is in their economic interest not to slash and burn the forest, it will continue to fall.
"If they take my cattle, they take my life." Rancher Waldiron Henrique Lopes says it simply. "And if they come to take my cattle, they're going to have to take me out in a sack, because I'm not leaving this piece of land alive."
Lopes, 39, is running 1100 head of cattle on 2400ha - about 75 per cent of which is still untouched rainforest.
He arrived in 2003 after spending more than a decade scraping together cash and loans to buy the land for about US$140,000, then rented a bulldozer and tore a winding 90km road through the forest that connects his property with Novo Progresso.
Though Lopes holds a piece of paper he said proves his ownership, his ranch falls on the vast majority of Amazon territory that has never been titled as far as the Government is concerned.
In 2006, Brazil created the Jamanxim National Forest as part of its plan to protect rapidly shrinking forests, making 13,000sq km west of Novo Progresso off-limits to development. About 500 ranches - including Lopes' - and up to 400,000 head of cattle were already within the boundaries of the reserve.
In the past few months, Ibama agents have raided Lopes' ranch at least three times to serve him with more than US$3 million in fines and orders to remove all his cattle.
"If I didn't eat for 100 years I couldn't pay these fines," Lopes said.
If Ibama would let him stay, he would not clear more land and he would agree to any reforestation project.
Brazil's Operation Arco Verde started last year to promote sustainable development in the Amazon by giving low-cost loans to landowners who agree, among other things, to reforest their property.
On paper, it gives the 43 counties with the highest rates of deforestation economic support, help with land titling and education about sustainable practices.
But Lopes had never heard of it. Neither had most residents of Novo Progresso. Town officials say they only see armed Ibama teams escorted by machine-gun-toting soldiers of the elite National Force.
The protection is justified. Angry mobs have trashed agents' field offices and physically run some out of other towns, though none have been killed.
Since Ibama started its enforcement efforts three years ago, Novo Progresso has shrunk from a thriving town of 40,000 people with 34 operating saw mills to just half that.
Only two saw mills are operating - and only part time. More than 8000 jobs have been lost.
Rather than declaring victory, Ibama agents suspect the illegal loggers have just moved to regions where there is less enforcement.
A native of Para state, Pontes says he wants his area to be prosperous, but not at the cost of decimating the forest.
"I'm trying to bring some order to a region, to industries that are working beyond all limits of acceptable behaviour," Pontes said. "I believe this is the work God gave me to do."