MAURO LUCIO IS living the dream. Having started work as a cowboy at 16, he is now 48 and raises cattle on 50 square kilometres of Paragominas municipality in Pará state. The animals on his ranch are healthy, the grass thick and the fences solid. Along the avenues on his estate, wooden posts name the many different varieties of trees he has planted between the fields. His wife serves delicious food while his three daughters play happily on the verandah of the handsome wooden ranch house.
The only thing that is not ideal about Mr Lucio’s estate is its history. Until around ten years ago it was part of the rainforest. The biggest trees, up to 100 feet tall, were sold for timber, the rest burnt. In this way Brazil has lost around 19% of its Amazonian forest. And Brazil makes up around 63% of the Amazon region.
Special report
All creatures great and small
Dead as the moa
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Where eagles dare
Hearts and minds
The long view
Trees of knowledge
Averting the sixth extinction
Sources & acknowledgmentsReprints
Related topics
Amazon
Brazil
Environmental problems and protection
Deforestation
Nature and the environment
Half of the world’s plant and animal species are believed to live in rainforest, so destroying it is a sure way of wiping out large swathes of biodiversity. Species are put at risk not just when forest is burned but also when clearing cuts up the remaining forest into smaller and smaller fragments. A study conducted over three decades by Thomas Lovejoy, an American scientist, shows that creatures die when the forest becomes more and more fragmented, partly because it dries up and partly because some species are deprived of the range they need to survive.