Rain Forests

The fight against global warming has given a new boost to a long-stymied environmental cause: saving the rain forests. Under a scenario that has gained widespread support, developing countries would be paid billions of dollars a year to not raze their trees. The money would come from rich industrial nations, which would pay to offset their voluminous greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Brazil announced that it will create a landholder registry and send 700 more federal police to the Amazon River basin to monitor and prevent deforestation. The initiative is designed to identify illegal deforestation and ban the sale of livestock and produce grown in illegally deforested areas, with violators subject to fines and loss of credit from government institutions.

Police arrested 46 people, including 16 agents of the federal environmental protection agency, suspected of illegal logging in the Amazon rain forest and southern Brazil, the Environment Ministry said. The suspects, arrested in four states, are accused of selling an estimated 32 million cubic feet of illegally logged hardwoods worth an estimated $25 million, the ministry said in a statement.

More than half the dust needed to fertilize the Brazilian rain forest originates on a dry lakebed in Africa, according to a team of researchers. About 50 million tons of dust are transported by the wind from Africa to Brazil's Amazon basin each year, and 56% of the dust originates in the Bodele Depression on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, new satellite measurements indicate.

Re "Rescuers Hear Only Silence From Sea of Mud," Feb. 19 The reporting of the mudslide disaster in the Philippines fails to address the causes of this catastrophe and seems to treat it as an act of God, thus absolving people of any responsibility. Failure to recognize and correct the human involvement in this tragedy will just lead to thousands more deaths in the future. In 2001, a team of scientists from Humboldt University of Berlin reported that forest cover on Leyte Island had decreased markedly since the late 1980s because of illegal logging with the support of government officials.

The rain forest is so dense around farmer Xing Chunlan's ramshackle house that she thought of the trees as no more than weeds. When she found out she could make money selling timber, she was ready to get her ax. Then she heard about the man who paid cash to let trees live. "He gave us more than $300 for this one," Xing said, pointing to a 100-year-old tree so lush that the rustling leaves shade much of her backyard. Its exposed roots spread across the earth like giant hands.

Leaders of seven Central African nations signed a treaty in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, pledging to help save the world's second-largest rain forest. The forest encompasses 500 million acres across 10 countries and is home to more than half of Africa's animal species. But illegal logging, poaching, ivory trafficking and the bush meat trade are destroying it. Environmentalists say 3.7 million acres are lost each year.

The death of a myth begins with stinging eyes and heaving chests here on the edge of the Amazon rain forest. Every year, fire envelops the jungle, throwing up inky billows of smoke that blot out the sun. Animals flee. Residents for miles around cry and wheeze, while the weak and unlucky develop serious respiratory problems.

Until recently, Michael Somare, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea, felt that global economic forces were pressuring him to cut down his country's lush tropical rain forest, the third-largest left in the world. But Somare believes he has found a financial incentive to save his nation's forests, one that should be far more valuable to the world than hardwood timber or coffee plantations. Forests serve as natural air filters that suck up the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming.

At the end of a busy day cutting trees with chainsaws, the four timber thieves camped in the Sumatran jungle. Three of the loggers rested on a raised wooden platform, while Siadul, the fourth, prepared food below. He was sitting on the ground eating his dinner when a hungry Sumatran tiger, driven from its habitat by the relentless logging of the rainforest, leaped out of the darkness onto Siadul's back, ripped out a chunk of flesh and began dragging him away. Nature had taken its revenge.