Will dams on Amazon tributary wreak global havoc?

[balantz]

Will dams on Amazon tributary wreak global havoc?

McClatchy, Posted on Sunday, April 5, 2009



VOLTA GRANDE, Brazil — The Xingu River, the largest tributary of the Amazon, runs wide and swift this time of year. Its turquoise waters are home to some 600 species of fish, including several not found anywhere else on the planet. A thick emerald canopy of trees hugs its banks, except in places where man has carved out pastures for cattle.

Now man, in the form of the Brazilian state power company, wants to harness a section of the Xingu by building the world's third-biggest dam.

Called the Belo Monte, the dam would drown 200 square miles of tropical rainforest — an area equivalent to the sprawling city of Tucson, Ariz. — and would flood the homes of 19,000 people. It would be only one of more than a dozen dams that the Brazilian government is planning to construct on tributaries of the Amazon, the world's mightiest river.

Belo Monte would be only the latest assault on the Amazon tropical rainforest, which is home to one in 10 of the world's known species and covers an area as large as the United States west of the Mississippi River.

Stephan Schwartzman, the director of tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, said that 18 percent of the Amazon, an area nearly two times the size of California, had been cleared since the mid-1960s.

He added that deforestation peaked in 2004 and has since declined because of falling beef and soybean prices and because the government has stepped up enforcement of protected areas.

What happens to the Amazon rainforest has wide consequences, because a shrinking rainforest hampers the planet's ability to rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that trees and other green plants absorb.

Brazilian government officials, however, say that Belo Monte and the other dams are necessary to switch on more living room lights, power expanding companies in the world's ninth largest economy and create jobs as Brazil begins to slide into recession.

The impact of Belo Monte on the Indians who'd be displaced is central to the dam's opponents. Under Brazil's Constitution, Indians must "be heard" when dams would affect their land, which potentially gives them veto power over new dams.

More: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/65374.html

[angstlessk]

1. it is sadly amazing how xenophobic I am when I was thinking .com

and had to read the heading twice to understand it was not dams on Amazon.com, but the actual river to which it referred!

[balantz]

2. It's a surreal world we have going on, isn't it?

;)