Yes, South America is quickly approaching equality with North America when it comes to annual soy production. However, the destruction of the rain forest quickly degrades the land. So it's a desperate delayed suicide.

The US has made it clear at the WTO conference that we will not antagonize the staunch GOP farmers by threatening their farm-subsidy giveaway--not this close to the Fall elections.

So what it amounts to is that we are bleeding, badly--environmentally, financially with a trade deficit off the charts, as well as both leaving a record national debt burden for the next generation and sacrificing the lives and sanity of our youth for world domination.

And all in order to avoid living life on life's terms. We refuse to change. We'd rather die than change. At the least that makes Uncle Sam a dull boy. At the worst it's our gentile form of suicide.

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That the Amazon is disappearing should come as no surprise to anyone but the rate at which it is being razed is absolutely frightening. This article makes mention of the stored CO2 in the vegetation, but it doesn't even take into account that a little more than two-thirds of the world's biodiversity exists in that perfect niche. A new species of monkey was recently discovered there as well as several new species of micro-fish. It is literally god's (mother nature's or just nature's) gift to the world. It is probably the most precious piece of real-estate on earth and it is being destroyed to boost exports from Brasil.

Sadly, Brasil is caught in a situation where much of its export income is derived from agricultural endeavors. Brasil is a massive country with lots of land and water but unfortunately much of that land must be taken under cultivation, often times chipping away at the forest to cultivate soy, rice, raise cattle or simply cleared of valuable timber. Until all people of the world realize that WE WILL PERISH without the Amazon, it is increasingly likely that Lula's will to see Brazil reach Moody's investment grade status will only contribute to further deforestation. The world literally needs to reward Brasil and offer it incentives to stop logging, ranching and farming areas that are far more valuable as the lungs of the world. How do we do that? Hopefully we offer poor Brasilians in the northeast other options but that has yet to materialize. In addition we simply MUST assist with ensuring the integrity of existing reserve areas and patrols to preserve what remains. Personally I would love to see a Pan South American "Amazonian Guard" that protects and manages that precious resource.

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I saw an estimate that it would take $50 billion to safe the rain forest, which has to mean buying and protecting right? Well I say to you Bill and Warren and of course the real power, Melinda. Use your giant fund to safe the rain forest or we are all doomed.

Cargill is a corporation of short term greed, damn you to hell, assholes. PSYCOS the bunch.

Where can average people like ourselves pool our cash to buy and protect this precious planetary resourse? I did a search but was kind of dispointed. IDEAS+ACTION=HOPE.

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What do humans do in response?

Well, instead of waking up, evolving and turning ourselves around, all I have been hearing about is war, violence and aggression. MORE war, violence, and aggression.

Have we bred our worst characteristics into such a violent species that we can't stop this aggression? Will we succeed in destroying ourselves? I used to think not, now I am not so sure.

We reward bully managers, reward the most aggressive winners in sports, look the other way and say "boys will be boys". We think winning is the only criteria. We barely react when our own government is stolen by the unjust powerful elites. We somehow believe that since they won, they must have some right to rule. We somehow have learned to accept the worst, nastiest, aggressive characteristics as strenghts.

These aggressive characteristics will be our doom. They are ugly, backwards and unwarranted. They overpower nature, destroy life, and waste precious resources. We can't even stop making more bombs, more poisons, more ways to destroy, wound, eradicate. Enough to kill the earth is not enough for us, no.

We really need to stop.

I want to say to any man, or woman who picks up a weapon...STOP!

I want to say to Chavez, you are right, the eagle must stop trying to rule/control the world but buying weapons from Russia? STOP! Are you no better?

I want to say to every oppressor, bully, monarch, corporation, dictator, wife-beater, rapist, street-tough, STOP!

I want to say to Bush and his cronies, you lied, you robbed and you refuse to be honest.

You are killing the planet.

But it isn't just the most violent.

ALL of us as aggressive consumers are killing the planet too.

Born to shop? Oh really?

Why not be born to live in balance?
Why not born to live in and create beauty?
Why not born to make peace.
Why not born to help sustain?

Will there be no peace until we have extinguished ourselves?

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While the author mentions boycotting soy products, the vast majority of soy goes into the mouths of livestock (cows, etc), not humans. If we ate the soy directly, we would not need to be destroying the Amazon to grow plenty.

So (as usual) the environmentally friendly boycott would be against meat.

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The past 500 million years have recorded a number of runaway global warming episodes: the end-Permian, the end-Triassic, the Paleocene-Eocene, and two in the Jurassic.

Humans are emitting CO2 up to a hundred times faster than the volcanic eruptions that likely triggered past runaway global warming episodes (and 30 times faster than the trigger for the end-Permian, which resulted in the death of most life because of oxygen deprived ocean depths).

• There is an estimated 400 billion tons of methane trapped in permafrost ice.

• An estimated 50% of surface permafrost will melt by 2050, and 90% by 2100.

• Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as CO2-the sudden release of just 35 billion tons of methane would be like doubling the CO2 in the air.

• Ocean bottom ice will start to melt-releasing some of the estimated 10,000 billion tons of methane trapped in it.

• The only solution is biological sequestration-removing the CO2 from the air after it is emitted.

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As a wetlands biologist, I was taken aback by the article's implication that all the Amazon's carbon would be released when the forest died - apparently instantaneously. This is not strictly true. It will take time for the vegetation to be broken down to release the carbon. How long, I have no idea - in temperate climates (I'm in the Great Plains) it takes years for a tree to completely rot away, and that's with the help of trillions of insect, fungi, and bacteria always present in the ecosystem. It's my understanding that the reason clearing Amazon forest for agriculture is so foolish is that the soil is so thin - what I read is that the jungle is so thick that leaves, animal bodies & parts, branches, etc., never reach the forest floor. Much of the decomposition takes place in the canopy. There is, therefore, no thick decomposing layer of Amazon basin soils, so the armies of decomposers are inadequate to handle the entire forest at once.

What will be gone is its capacity for continuing to squester atmospheric carbon dioxide. That's bad enough. This is dreadful news. Unfortunately the great ship of "modern" civilization takes incredibly long to turn around and change its ways.

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I have translated an article from Folha de São Paulo, Brazil, about the embargo on Amazon soy from deforested areas and what it actually means.

Embargo in the advance of the Amazon soy is innocuous , says NGO
RAFAEL GARCIA
LOCAL NEWS
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ciencia/fe2607200602.htm
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

Agribusiness promises to revise it in two years.

The two year moratorium for buying soy produced in deforested areas of the Amazon, that the crop retailers are proposing is too short to have a practical effect, stated yesterday the environmental group Greenpeace. According to the NGO – one of the main actors pressuring the soy retailers in the Amazon - , the majority of the land with trees felled in 2006 will only have soy ready for harvest after the end of the moratorium.

"Nothing stops a producer who will plant soy in three years to deforest now”, says Paulo Adário, director of the Greenpeace campaign in the Amazon. Adário says that he was taken by surprise with the announcement of the Abiove (Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oils) and Anec (National Association of Grain Exporters), the day before yesterday.

Greenpeace was heading the discussion among environmentalists and crop retailers to establish a letter of commitment, but the alone anticipated the announcement of the document. The statement incorporates consensual points among environmentalists and crop retailers, towards a more strict control of the source of the soy, but adopted a deadline for the embargo that Greenpeace did not want to accept.

According to Paulo Adário, a verbal agreement was settled for the moratorium to be revised in 2008, but the terms of the agreement depend on the implementation of the necessary measures for inspection for the two years period.

"It is necessary to produce geo-referenced maps of the Amazonian farms to cross them with the satellite data”, says the environmentalist.

The Amazonian division of the Friends of the Earth is another NGO manifesting skepticism with regards to the impact of the embargo announced yesterday. Roberto Smeraldi, director of the organization, believes that the importance of the announcement is more indirect "As traders start recognizing that their buying policies are directly relevant in deforestation – before it was denied", he says.

Smeraldi says that the companies also have to open their information about their suppliers to facilitate the work of inspection.

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