Doing Bad by Doing Good?  

Anavilhanas Ecological Station, Brazil.  Depending on one's point of view, the World Wildlife Fund's financial support of a nature reserve here on the Rio Negro is either part of a laudable attempt to conserve the Amazon jungle — or the leading edge of a nefarious plot by foreign environmental groups to wrest control of the world's largest rain forest from Brazil and replace it with international rule.  

In 2003, after signing an agreement with the WWF and the World Bank, the Brazilian government created the Amazon Region Protected Areas program. Since then, more than a score of national parks and reserves covering an area larger than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined have been brought into that network and provided with an infusion of new funds.  

The program's objective is to set up "a core system to anchor bio-diversity protection for the Amazon," Matthew Perl, the WWF's Amazon coordinator, said during a June visit to the area, a sparsely populated archipelago of 400 islands northwest of Manaus. "It's part of a strategy to buy time, bring each protected area up to certain standards of management and pool resources for monitoring and enforcement."  

But that effort has aroused the suspicions of powerful business and political groups in Brazil that want to integrate the Amazon into the country's  economy through dams, mining projects, highways, ports, logging and agricultural exports.  

"This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations," said Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and co-author of "The Green Mafia," a widely circulated anti-environmentalist polemic. "It is evident these interests want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and other valuable natural resources."  

“In the Amazon:  Conservation or Colonialism?” Larry Rohter, July 26, 2007.  

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2007 by a local nonprofit organization.  

1.   Where is the problem here?

(a)  A new mafia has taken hold of land in Brazil.

(b)  There is a clash between profit-making developers and preservation-minded conservationists.  

2.  What should the conservationists do?

(a) Educate Brazilians that the preservation in Brazil is part of a global effort, not some conspiracy against Brazil.

(b) Invest in eco-friendly development of the Brazilian rainforest.

(c) Sit with Brazilian economic interests and speak about creating wealth in Brazil in other ways.  

December 20, 2007