The Amazon is in danger... Let's really save it!

Biggest water source of the planet, greatest reserve of animal and vegetal life on Earth, the Amazon is important for we all, live we or not in one of the countries that it integrates. However a thousand threats hang over the forest, tending to transform it into the Sahara of the future.

I will now mention only three of the most visible and destructive ones: 1. The wood extration, 2. The introduction of cattle and 3. The plantation of soy for exportation.

Each tree, in the region, is the home and the support of thousands of species, such the diversity of life and such the complexity of the existing cooperation between them.

When someone knocks down a tree in the Amazon, is committing an ambient recklessness that provoke nightmares and that makes to weigh great uncertainty on the future of mankind. It is not necessary, however, to extract trees from the Amazon. There are other Brazilian regions, as the Cerrado Mineiro*, where already was constructed and evidently it's possible to construct great forest bulks again, with marketing purposes and also with important ambient profits.

The cattle and the soy that advance on the forest, disintegrate the fragile, fine and delicate alluvium ground of the Amazon, taken and brought for infinite floods and ebb tides and fixed exclusively for the dense forest.

Idle to affirm that both the activities can be developed in other regions, with lesser ambient impact and also with bigger yield.

The economic future of the Amazon does not need to pass for its destruction and it is chemistry and drug-chemistry, as, by the way, the whole civilized and educated world knows.

At least 20% of the forest are renewed annually, simply falling in the form of leaves and twigs. If we imagine for a moment the happening of this process in the millions of squared kilometers of the forest, then we will perceive that it is not necessary to knock down nothing to reach all these noble chemical substances infinitely more valuable that the soy, the cattle or the wood.

We are speaking of the gradual substitution of petrochemistry, drug-chemistry and other billionaire chemistries by the inevitable and obvious chemistry of direct vegetal origin.

And I write "direct vegetal origin" because the proper oil, that today provokes so many wars and madnesses, has its origin in the vegetal life, despite fossilized and increased of animal organisms and minerals.

Thus, it is necessary to legislate in direction "to close" Amazon to this predatory and primitive forms of economic exploration and to prepare and to equip communities and entrepreneurs of the region, so that they can start to appropriate the treasures that we mention, with great benefits for the local communities and without knocking the forest down.

Only the national states of the region can make it, in benefit of its populations and of humankind, that for the legitimate way of the international trade, will be able to get its good portion.

I am seated ahead of the computer, typing on my keyboard, giving thanks to God for living at a time we all can be Gutemberg, we can communicate with each other and I can communicate me now with you, to ask you to help us with your community and with local and national authorities you can reach.

Finally, to congratulate here to the National Conference of the Bishops of Brazil for choosing the Amazon as subject of its "Campaign of the Fraternity" of 2007.

Thank you very much,

Emilio de Lima.

* Formation of Forest Bulks in the Tropics, Maurício Hasenclever Borges in The Amazonian Challenge; the Future of the Civilization of the Tropics, Publishing company UNB.