Wild Amazon faces destruction as Brazils farmers and loggers target national park

[Judi Lynn]

The Sierra Ricardo Franco park was meant to be a conservation area protecting rare wildlife

Jonathan Watts in Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade
Saturday 27 May 2017 19.05 EDT


To understand why the Brazilian government is deliberately losing the battle against deforestation, you need only retrace the bootmarks of the Edwardian explorer Percy Fawcett along the Amazonian border with Bolivia.

During a failed attempt to cross a spectacular tabletop plateau here in 1906, the adventurer nearly died on the first of his many trips to South America. Back then, the area was so far from human habitation, the foliage so dense and the terrain so steep that Fawcett and his party came close to starvation.

He returned home with tales of a towering, inaccessible mesa teeming with wildlife and irrigated by secret waterfalls and crystalline rivers. By some accounts, this was one of the stories that inspired his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World about a fictional plateau jutting high above the jungle that served as a sanctuary for species long since extinct elsewhere.

In their wildest fantasies, however, neither Fawcett nor Conan Doyle are likely to have imagined the modern reality of that plateau, which can no longer be certain of protection from geography, the law or Brazil’s international commitments.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/27/brazil-wild-amazon-faces-destruction-farmers-loggers-sierra-ricardo-franco-park

Environment & Energy:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127110662

[secondwind]

1. The book is worth reading:

The Lost City of Z. They just made a movie of it.