The 82nd Rainforest Thread ~

Applying Capitalism to Protect Dwindling Brazilian Forestland

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 25, 2008; A10

AGUA BOA, Brazil -- Driving a farm truck across the mud roads of the eastern Amazon region is agony on axles, a careful slalom around slippery ruts and yawning craters. The scenery is unromantic: mostly cattle pasture and soybean fields, with the occasional stand of naked tree trunks charred by last year's fires.

Farmers have an incentive to keep traveling these roads, though: money. The world's soaring demand for beef and grains has turned this frontier into a ripe business opportunity, even as the forest has paid the price.

But what if global capitalism actually valued standing forest? Could these same farmers and ranchers -- for years considered by many environmentalists as the lowest links in a chain of destruction -- actually become frontline protectors of the Amazon?

The idea has been so energetically embraced in many parts of Brazil that the fundamental character of the environmental movement along the Amazon's most vulnerable edge has changed. Instead of being considered obstacles to conservation, farmers and ranchers are being wooed by many environmentalists as potential partners.

Here in the state of Mato Grosso, where Brazil's agriculture industry is strongest, nonprofit organizations are teaming with banks to create loans that favor environmentally friendly farms. Industry coalitions are meeting with farmers to try to draft certification systems for "responsible" soy and beef. Pilot projects are testing carbon-trading systems that offer money for ranchers with forested land.

"There's been a recognition that the traditional command-and-control approaches to conservation have not really worked," said Daniel Nepstad, a scientist who heads the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Center's projects in the Amazon. "It's the economy that makes the drivers of deforestation change their behaviors."

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government has supported environmental certification and carbon-trading programs, and last year offered land concessions throughout the Amazon to private logging companies that promised sustainable timber harvesting. Critics charged that Lula wanted to "privatize the Amazon," but his backers maintain that strictly regulated private enterprise is the most pragmatic way for the country to develop a region they consider the key to the country's future.

"When people talk about sustainable activities, especially in Europe and the U.S., the images they have in their minds are of almost artisanal activities -- Indians and poor farmers wandering in the forest and taking sap out of the trees," said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil's minister of strategic planning. "We're not talking about that. We're talking about large-scale institutional innovation and big business. And that, therefore, presents an entirely higher order of difficulty to us."
Inducing Farmers to Keep Trees

The enterprising ideas are already starting to take shape in towns like this one. Last week, thousands of farmers drove toward Agua Boa's auction yard. Nearly 30,000 cows from local farms were sold in seven hours. But before the auction, the same ranchers that unloaded their cows into corrals here were being sized up as valuable commodities themselves.

"We want to be environmentally responsible, and if the international community wants to save the Amazon, that's fine with us," said Maurício Tonhá, the mayor and organizer of the Agua Boa cattle auction. "But they have to be willing to pay for it."

Marcos Reis used to work with Tonhá, caring for cattle on his ranch and others nearby. Now he works for a nonprofit called Alianca da Terra, or the Land Alliance. He tries to convince the ranchers that their trees could soon be worth money. If they have their land holdings catalogued, a professional mapping of exactly which areas of their properties remain forested, they could be first in line to cash in on new incentives.

It can be a tough sell, because current real estate values show trees as obstacles to prosperity: An acre of standing forest costs about $175 here, while the same acre cleared for plantation sells for about $1,215.

"But now's the time to get involved," Reis told rancher Marcelo Vercisi Coelho this month. "There are programs that have already begun to make it worth it."

Reis explained to Coelho that his organization had recently begun compiling a database of local land holdings, and a Dutch bank had begun using that database to select farmers to participate in a program that pays them to reforest.

The program is based on fledgling carbon-trading markets. Companies in violation of emissions standards are now buying allowances from companies that emit less than the limit. Rabobank is paying a handful of farmers here $8,000 upfront to reforest areas near wetlands, with the idea that it might eventually earn credits for that investment.

The going rate paid to emit one ton of carbon dioxide is between $5 and $10 in most markets, according to Greg Fishbein, director of conservation finance for the Nature Conservancy. If effective mechanisms -- such as databases measuring the amount of carbon stored in a property -- are established, that might be enough to make it profitable for these ranchers.

According to studies, each acre of forest can store about 200 tons of carbon dioxide. Nepstad said that if the farmers of Mato Grosso could sell credits for between $3 and $5 per ton of carbon, they would have little incentive to clear more land.

"If Mato Grosso were a country, it would be in the list of the top five carbon emitters in the world," said Nepstad. "So this is a very big deal."
A Seat at the Table for Ranchers

Brazil's farmers are required by law to be some of the most environmentally conscious in the world. But almost all of them here blatantly ignore the law, without apology.

Since 1998, a government decree has required landowners in many parts of Mato Grosso to keep 80 percent of their property forested, allowing them to cultivate only the remaining 20 percent. In the face of a recent increase in deforestation rates, the government finally demanded compliance and last week required farmers to report how much of their land they had preserved.

The vast majority let that deadline pass without acting, according to Reginaldo Greczyszn, a rancher in the town of Querencia.

"If we have to reforest the land to get up to that 80 percent, how could we possibly survive the income loss?" Greczyszn asked.

A lot of environmentalists wouldn't sympathize with him. But John Cain Carter, a native Texan who founded Alianca da Terra after running a ranch in Mato Grosso for 10 years, has based his nonprofit on the idea that people such as Greczyszn deserve to be heard.

Carter criticizes other environmental advocacy organizations working in the region for sacrificing achievable improvements for unrealistic ideals.

"Listen, the ranchers are just tired of being treated like villains," he said. "The international community is demanding of Brazil what has never been done before in the world. There's never been a frontier society that's protected the environment. And if the ranchers don't get on board, then there's no chance. The Amazon will be gone."

That's why Brazilian farmers are playing a central role in a group called the Round Table on Responsible Soy Association, which aims to unite the agriculture industry with environmentalists and food buyers to create international environmental standards for soy cultivation.

The group -- funded partly by the World Wildlife Fund and the governments of Switzerland and the Netherlands -- has been criticized by some for giving the soy industry too much voice.

"Some environmentalists have called for some of the participating NGOs to leave the group, but if that were to happen, we'd go back to a world of bitter debate between NGOs and big industry," said Christopher Wells, president of the group and a manager at Brazil's Banco Real. "That's where we were five years ago. I don't see any other way other than this."

Similarly, there is a burgeoning effort to encourage slaughterhouses in Mato Grosso to certify that the beef they buy is "environmentally friendly." Ranchers like the idea because of the possibility it could open up a new market for premium beef. But even the most energetic backers of such plans realize that consumers, not ranchers, are ultimately the keys to the success of such programs.

Much of the international demand driving the agricultural industry in the Amazon comes from Asia, particularly soy-hungry China. The fact that a product might not be labeled environmentally friendly will do little to stem that demand, suggested Miguel Lovera, chairman of the Global Forest Coalition, an international alliance of environmental and indigenous advocacy groups.

"You're just going to have all the good stuff going to Europe and the U.S., because they can pay for the premium product," he said. "But there's still a huge market for soy and other products, no matter what kind of label you put on them."

T. Rex Closer to Gizzards Than Lizards
One of Fiercest Dinosaurs Shows Similarity at the Molecular Level to Chickens

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 25, 2008; A02

Protein retrieved from a 68 millon-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone closely resembles the main protein in chicken and ostrich bones and is only distantly related to lizards', strengthening the popular idea that birds, and not reptiles, are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.

The new work builds on a 2007 analysis showing remarkably close similarities between T. rex collagen and collagen from modern-day chickens, but that work did not include comparisons to other living species. Collagen is the primary protein in bones.

"We had made a very loose connection at first," said John M. Asara of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who led both studies. "Now we're able to make out robust evolutionary relationships and, with very high confidence, basically group the T. rex dinosaur with birds."

More is at stake than T. rex's prehistoric pedigree. Asara and his colleagues say their novel approach has the potential to redraw the evolutionary tree based on molecular data instead of the traditional comparisons of skeletal remains. Bones can be deceiving, because unrelated animals can have similar structures.

Key to the new finding -- and the cause of some controversy -- is the Asara team's assertion that it retrieved a smidgen of intact collagen from the fossilized thigh bone of a T. rex. Biological materials generally degrade in the environment, and scientists who work with ancient DNA feel lucky when they find a sample that is 100,000 years old. Yet the T. rex protein specimen is more than 100 times older than that, leading some scientists to wonder whether it might be a more recent contaminant.

Mary H. Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who oversaw the protein's extraction, said she was confident that what they were dealing with was dinosaur collagen, preserved because of favorable conditions in the Montana soil where the bone was buried.

"There is no evidence of contamination," Schweitzer said, emphasizing the painstaking method developed by the team, which captures less than a millionth of a gram of protein for every five grams of bone.

But not everyone agrees.

Pavel Pevzner, director of the Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology at the University of California at San Diego, said his own research, soon to be published, refutes Asara's work. He said he cannot describe details until they are published, but he was blunt in his response to the new study, which appears in today's issue of the journal Science.

The findings are "a joke," Pevzner wrote in an e-mail. "Serious evolutionary biologists will laugh reading this piece."

It was unclear whether Pevzner disputes the link between birds and dinosaurs or simply distrusts the methods the team used.

Proteins are strands of amino acids, and the order of those various amino acids determines a protein's identity and function. In the new analysis, the team compared the order of 89 amino acids from the T. rex sample to the equivalent collagen sequence from a chicken, an ostrich, an alligator and a green anole lizard, a reptile commonly used in laboratory research.

The results indicate that T. rex, chickens and ostriches are evolutionary siblings, all descended from a single unidentified predecessor. Alligator collagen is more distantly related, and lizard collagen is more distantly related still.

"Birds are a type of dinosaur the way Saint Bernards are a type of dog," Schweitzer said, "or like a poodle is a type of wolf."

A second analysis by the team backed up scientists' long-standing suspicions that extinct mastodons and modern-day elephants are close cousins.

Eddy Rubin, a geneticist and expert in ancient DNA who heads the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., said he is "pleased to see" that the Harvard group was doing the hard work of duplicating and expanding upon its initial results, which were unusual not only because of the starting material but also because of the team's reliance on a novel method for analyzing tiny samples.

"Extraordinary results demand extraordinary evidence," Rubin said, conceding that in the past, at least, he "had some concerns" about the data.

"It's very exciting if they really are getting proteinaceous material from these terrifically ancient samples, because in some ways these sequences are time machines," Rubin said. "We can't go back in time, but these samples tell us things about these creatures that we can't tell from their bones and other features."

If further tests confirm a capacity to extract and accurately analyze smidgens of protein from fossilized remains, he and others said, it would be a boon to scientists who are trying to work out the branching pattern of the evolutionary tree of life.

Schweitzer said she welcomed challenges to their results. "If they can show our data are wrong, that's great," she said. "That is the way science progresses."

For his part, Asara said he is so sure of the results he can almost taste them.

"Based on this data," he said, "you can be very confident that T. rex would taste more like chicken than it did last year."

Tomorrow Setanta, the hamburgers and I are going to



the microsite
http://www.rom.on.ca/darwin/evolution_revolution.php

~~~

aktbird57 - You and your 300 friends have supported 2,885,821.7 square feet!

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Where I live in NE TX - there is a herd of approx. 15 deer - give or take a few each season - that graze their territory each year for the 15 years we've been back here to the place of my birth. ((Actually, Atlanta, TX is the birthplace of Bessie Coleman, the first female African American licensed pilot of aeroplanes in the entire world. Just Google the name.)) Each season they - the deer, cross my front lawn on a regular basis. I live on 25 acres about five miles from the small town of approx. 5700 people. It's also the very same town that Ellen DeGenres - the TV person graduated High School. I like venison too - but, have for years not harvested one. I say harvested because to say a person "hunts" deer and "gets/kills" one is a travesty of vocabularity. I like venison, but, have only harvested five in the 15 years I've been back. I would watch the tracks of the deer and on a certain day I would go and stand and wait. The longest time to harvest one was about ten minutes. On that day I had to wait approx four minutes for the deer to give me a heart shot. Each one, I have been careful to give a heart shot. That is the most humane way for me. It is a quick kill and then I sit a respectful distance from the animal for a prayer to it. I am greatful for the food that the animal gives me and my family.

It has been many years since I've harvested one - I see them cross my front yard many times. They are really impressive.

sue, reminding you. Interesting articles! Thanks

Nuther late day n' clicks.

Hi to all the Wildclickers


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Danon,
For years Frank went deer hunting. Ritualistic almost social occasion - he met up with two guys from Long Island up in the Catskills. He would track them, look for their signs, and shot only when he had a good, clear shot.

When we went to SC, not only did he not know anyone and had no 'buddy', but the concept of tree stands turned him off.

So he decided that he was through, his heart wasn't in it, he didn't want to kill anything anymore.

Clicked.

All clicked too!

Another day, another click. Hello all.

Good morning all.

Not a good day for "green" people in Toronto today. Public transit strike. We'd had a group of plans that involved taking transit, now we'll be driving. That's not good

sumac, I too am through with the venison. Have been for years.

Happy weekend all.

Sorry about your need to change plans, ehBeth. That is more than a bit of a bother.

We made it to the Darwin exhibit.
Marvellous.
Seeing his very own notebooks, and letters he'd written as he was developing his thoughts around evolution - very exciting.

So glad ya all decided to shoot wildlife with a camera instead!

The exhibit sounds terrific, ehBeth!

Standing at the door of John Muirs office, scanning through photo albums that sit on the diningroom table at the house - i get a sense that the man had just stepped out for a few moments, and at any minute he'd return to say 'hi' to visitors. Quite a place.

Another late day - but home tomorrow - HURRAY!

Georgous weather! Beginning the house improvements - New carpets, lino, paint, and a few window dressing changes. Decorating is one of my fav things besides gardening. Should be an interesting summer.




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Maggies site is not running tonight - so i'll transfer the governors response regarding Montana's Bison.

Governor Brian Schweitzer
Office of the Governor
Montana State Capitol Bldg.
Helena MT 59620-0801

Thank you for your message regarding Yellowstone National Park bison management.

I would like to direct your attention to the recent Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on the Interagency Bison Management Plan, its shortcomings, and the inability to move to Step 2 of the Plan (expected to occur during the winter of '02-'03).

The GAO conclusions track very closely changes that I have been advocating, including consummation of a grazing agreement with the Royal Teton Ranch, allowing for removal of that cattle herd, and passage through the ranch for hungry bison.

The State of Montana will continue to work with the land owners, livestock interests, wildlife and conservation groups, and the federal agencies that bear responsibility for bison management. At this point, negotiations have been completed with the Royal Teton Ranch, site of the largest cattle herd near the park. As directed by the Interagency Bison Management Plan, this agreement will better secure Montana's disease-free status while providing more tolerance for bison. Half of the funding for this agreement has been committed by the National Park Service. Montana will now be working to secure the remainder of the funding with the National Wildlife Foundation, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the National Parks Conservation Association, and others.

As is urged by the GAO report ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08291.pdf), we will continue to seek and support vaccine research that provides protections against brucellosis, work with other willing landowners on creative grazing and management agreements, and utilize fair-chase hunting to manage bison in a manner similar to other large game species.

I appreciate hearing from you. Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.

Sincerely,

BRIAN SCHWEITZER
Governor of Montana

Very good response from the gov. Thanks for posting it.

In for a break, veggies and plants go in the ground. Today!

Sunday! All clicked!

I may add that there has been no documented cases of bison transfering disease to domestic cattle. The 'toleration' of wildlife's long overdue.

From Defenders Victory:

Advocates saved Alaska's voice by helping to defeat Governor Sarah Palin's legislation that would have cancelled a vote this summer on the state's brutal aerial wolf hunting program -- a program that Alaskans have voted down twice before

Rally for ranchers like Larry and Bette Haverfield in Kansas. More than 16,000 activists like you spoke out to support efforts to return the once-thought-to-be-extinct black-footed ferret to their land. And last December, the Fish & Wildlife Service came through, releasing the first black-footed ferrets to be seen on the Kansas prairie in 50 years.

Protect the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Defenders rallied our conservation partners and local residents to save the Refuge, home to snow geese, tundra swans and the world's only wild population of red wolves. Thanks to this near constant pressure, the U.S. Navy abandoned plans to build a harmful landing field near the important refuge.

Thanks WildClicker Defenders! Good Job!



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