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Activity 9, Brazil: National Progress or World Disaster?

Breno Augusto dos Santos, a geologist, was making a helicopter survey of a portion of Brazil's vast Amazon region.  In the midst of the largely uncharted jungle, he spotted two partially bare mountain ranges-even from the air he could see the rust-brown color, which made his heart leap.  He landed to take samples, but that was only a formality.  He knew he had discovered a huge deposit of iron ore.

Breno's discovery became more important than just iron ore-though it may prove to be the largest single deposit in the world.  Eight years of research and testing have led to an estimate of 17 billion tons of ore in the two ranges-enough to fill world iron needs for up to 300 years.  It was the first of many discoveries that led to an opening of the great Amazon frontier. Bauxite (aluminum ore), copper, nickel and dozens of other metals necessary for industry have been found and are being developed.  Banks and corporations from all over the world eagerly supplied the backing for this development.  Forest products, the potential for oil, and the building of hydroelectric power plants were additional lures to further exploitation of these resources.

Getting at these treasures was not easy and continues to present challenges.  New farms, towns, and cities were needed almost immediately to feed, house and service all the workers involved in the projects.  Roads and railroads were carved out of one of the most uncooperative environments in the world.  Steaming jungles, where rainfall may exceed 100 inches a year, are crisscrossed with treacherous rivers.  The great iron ore deposits are in mountain ranges that rise 3,000 feet above the jungle floor; the new roads made the inaccessible readily available.

These obstacles, like the tremendous amounts of money, equipment, and labor needed, were and will continue to be overcome.  The stakes are worth every risk. As one American maintenance supervisor said of the initial discoveries: "We've had geologists and mining engineers here from all over the world.  None of them can believe it.  It's just too damned fabulous to be true."  But true it was, and this truth has provided for the continuous debate over the advisability of the economic progress that has been occurring.  The question remains: is this progress?

The burst of activity in this area 2/3 the size of Canada has had, and will continue to have, an enormous environmental impact, one the indigenous peoples of the region have already felt.  Unprotected from many diseases previously unknown in the region, thousands have died.  The number of Indian groups has already dropped dramatically.  When the first Portugese explorers arrived in Brazil, there were 1-5 million indigenous people.  Today, 200,000 indigenous people live in the Amazon region.  A national organization is making a strong effort to ease the situation by relocating some of these people so that they may maintain their traditional lifestyles.  The chances are that life for these scattered bands will never again be the same.

No one yet knows what impact economic development will have on the environmental balances within the Amazon region.  A Brazilian official has warned that these projects require "large doses of scientific humility, since we must recognize our virtually total ignorance about the Amazonian forest and concentrate efforts to reduce that ignorance through programs and projects of objective research."  One effect that has caused many scientists to initiate major studies is the impact that the loss of major rainforest vegetation will have on the general climatic factors governing the world's oxygen supply, and its related effect on what is now being called "global warming."  These factors have, over the past ten years, brought into existence several major scientific conferences to examine and debate the potential effects on the global environment.  What might have been considered a matter of "national economic progress" for Brazil and its people, has become a debate over the potential "disaster" for all the people of the world.

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