Soy in the Amazon

The annual destruction of the Amazon rainforest is tallied every August and announced to a world sadly accustomed to the idea that its greatest tropical forest is being wiped off the face of the Earth. Invariably, the area of destruction is so large that the loss is expressed in terms of states or countries—a Vermont here, an Ireland there—roughly equivalent measures meant to make the scale of the catastrophe more readily apprehensible, as if all of us could say, for example, that this many Connecticuts make a Texas or that there are so many Switzerlands to a France. Oddly, the effect of the news seemed to be a lulling of concern, as if the Amazon could go on disappearing indefinitely, without ever actually doing so. Just as the rallying cries of Save the Amazon faded to background noise, however, the alarm sounded again. From August 2002 to July 2003, the rate of deforestation suddenly spiked, jumping 40 percent from the previous year. Satellite data revealed that fully 10,000 square miles of rainforest—a New Jersey’s worth—had gone up in smoke. Mato Grosso accounted for nearly half that total. The following year, it happened again. Another year, another New Jersey. Poof. Gone. Now it is estimated that 20 percent of the Amazon’s 1.6 million square miles has been lost to human development.

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