Green initiatives protect Amazon rainforest

Just three years ago, the manmade fires here were so fierce that smoke would blot out the sky, turning the days dark. Towering rainforest trees exploded in flames, their canopies cleared to let pasture grow for cattle.

The ash that snowed down onto this jungle town was shin-deep. Dirty layers hid red-hot timber chunks, glowing coals that burned the bare feet of children walking through the cinder drifts.

Paragominas was losing forest faster than any other place in the Amazon.

Today, the town has become a pioneering "Green City," a model of sustainability with a new economic approach that has seen illegal deforestation virtually halted. Experts say the metamorphosis is the best hope for showing the 25 million people who live in the Amazon that the forest is worth more alive than dead.

The transformation came after Brazil cracked down on 36 counties responsible for the worst deforestation in the Amazon. A resulting economic embargo left the town with two options. It could fight against change, or it could embrace a new path and promote development with minimal harm to the environment.

"Our city was on the government's 'black list,' " Mayor Adnan Demachki said. "There was no way out other than the new path we had chosen."

His "Green City" plan aims to halt illegal deforestation through a mix of enforcement, creation of the Amazon's only local environmental police force, and promotion of an economy that doesn't rely on clearing jungle. Instead, the focus is on sustainable development — using managed forestry for a wood industry, and introducing modern farming techniques to increase production while using less land.

In the past year Demachki's success has earned him high praise from environmental authorities that once criticized his town. He's traveled around the country to spread the gospel of his Green City.

"Paragominas is an example of how to successfully overcome deforestation and begin the transition to an economy that conserves the forest," said Mauro Pires, head of the Environment Ministry's department that fights Amazon destruction. "They changed their stance and followed their leaders down an alternative path, one that coexists with the forest."

The Amazon rainforest is arguably the biggest natural defense against global warming, acting as a giant absorber of carbon dioxide.

As it's cut, the world not only loses this defense, but the destruction itself adds to the problem. About 75 percent of Brazil's emissions come from rainforest clearing, as vegetation burns and felled trees rot. That releases an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Nearly 20 percent of Brazil's Amazon has been cleared.

The Paragominas experiment is significant, experts say, because it shows it's possible to convince people at the local level that saving the forest is in their best interest.

In 2008 the Brazilian government for the first time set a concrete goal to decelerate rainforest destruction, aiming to reduce it to 1,900 square miles by 2017. Armed field agents targeted Paragominas and others on a blacklist of 36 counties, handing out massive fines, confiscating cattle herds and shutting sawmills.

In Paragominas, home to about 100,000 people, federal agents closed nearly 300 illegal sawmills. The town lost 2,300 jobs within a year and the federal government cut off agricultural credits.

Paragominas leaders knew they had to change. So they took an unheard-of leap of faith in the Amazon: They asked the very environmental groups that had been castigating them to help them go green.

The strategy was both revolutionary and simple.

In a reversal of the slash-and-burn mentality that had long ruled the Amazon, landowners would turn to basic conservation and agricultural methods that had been used in the U.S. since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. They would rotate crops to keep land fertile, avoid overgrazing pasture, stop cutting native jungle and instead plant trees to use for wood products.

Demachki turned to the president of the local rural producers union to help sell the switch. Together, he and Mauro Lucio Costa reassured the farmers and ranchers in the vast county that the Green City project would allow them to thrive without cutting down more forest.

"To talk of the Amazon without remembering those of us living here is to speak of utopia, it's fantasy," Costa said. "You want sustainability, you speak of untouched forest, but if you do so without giving people a livelihood, you have no chance at succeeding."

Desperation leaves people susceptible to illegal woodcutters who will pay for a poor man's tree.

Together, Demachki and Costa reassured the farmers and ranchers in the vast county that the Green City project would allow them to thrive without cutting down more forest.