Another piece of the Atlantic Rainforest falls

Someone forwarded to me a video about Ford Motor Co.'s new, modern manufacturing plant in Brazil with a comment about globalization and what it means for American workers, but what caught my eys was the statement: “...amid the remnants of the Atlantic Rainforest...”. This is one of the world’s top 25 “biodiversity hotspots,” one of the most biodiverse ecosystems and most endangered and it’s just about gone. It hosts a huge number of species that occur nowhere else, including several monkey species. I have photo of two species, the Golden-headed Tamarin shown above, and others posted at http://picasaweb.google.ca/Lee.Coquitlam/Primates# that I took in the Lisbon Zoo. By 2003 the Atlantic Forest was down to about 5% of its original area (around 70,000 km2) and shrinking fast. It has (or had) 261 species of mammals, 73 of which occur no where else in the world. Species are still being discovered there, but it seems that it is being destroyed so fast that many of its species will be lost before they are ever “discovered” by scientists—although the local people who eat them know that they are there! I guess when they are gone, we can thank Ford for their small part in this environmental catastrophe.


I’ve never been there. Maybe I will one day, but I'd better hurry or it will be gone.

Globalization is bad, not just because it engenders poverty in the already-poor while enriching the already-rich. What it means for the environment is that as long as any country has resources left, another country will buy them, in many cases from the politicians and their friends, leaving their own people without productive land and resources. The economies of the rich countries can run as long as there are resources somewhere that they can buy, but every year fewer countries have resources left for sale, or for domestic use. The politicians haven’t noticed that the global economy has transitioned from one of producing countries competing for buyers for their resources, to consuming countries competing for access to dwindling resources. Meanwhile, the countries with no more resources for sale or local use often become “failed states” and a strategic threat to the interests of countries like the USA and Canada. It can’t last forever.