Everything is connected to everything else

Brazil, like many nations, needs foreign capital in order to develop.

Connection: So it gets funding from the World Bank.

Connection: The World Bank is more interested in satisfying the desires of its investors than in actually aiding the countries that are its clients, so...

Connection: ...it presses Brazil, as it has pressed many other nations, to adopt economic policies that promote agriculture for export rather than for local consumption, the better to service it's foreign debt.

Connection: This results in rising exports of beef and soya...

Connection: ...which require increasing amounts of cleared land...

Connection: ...which leads to massive deforestation on a scale that not only threatens thousands of plant and animal species unique to the Amazon rainforest but...

Connection: ...could, scientists fear, affect global climate. Thus, the BBC for April 8 says that

[e]nvironmental groups are calling for urgent action to slow deforestation in Brazil's Amazon jungle.

About 9,170 square miles (23,750 sq km) of forest were lost in 2003, just up from 8,983 square miles (23,266 sq km) in 2002, the Brazilian government says.

The scale is not as high as in the mid-1990s, but it confirms the world's largest forest is disappearing rapidly.

Brazil's environment minister, Marina da Silva, said that the growth rate of deforestation had been halted but that "23,000 (square kilometers of forest lost last year) is still a very worrying number." Especially when we remember that stopping the growth rate of deforestation is hardly the same as stopping deforestation. If from now on 23,000 sq km were lost each year, the growth rate of deforestation would be zero. But the forest would keep right on disappearing.

Like all good physicists, I think of processes as being reversible. The process we have seen here is that economic troubles for Brazil lead to deforestation and possible effects on climate to the detriment of all. Reversing that says the key to preventing deforestation and its possible climatic impact is economic justice for the people of Brazil.

It took environmentalists a long time to figure it out, but now they are probably more aware of it than others: Economic justice and environmental quality are soulmates.