Will Noah’s Ark Depart From
The Amazon River Floodplains?
Author(s)
I. M. Madaleno
Abstract
The Amazon rainforest constitutes the widest green spot on Earth. However,
man’s desire to exploit the incredible ground and underground natural resources
is provoking destruction as deforestation pathways widen, rivers fall short on
water and climate changes. Research undertaken in Brazil was aimed at the
collection of local food, knowledge and practises, a quest intended to recover
ancestral ecological experiences on a virtual Noah’s Ark before the announced
death of this Garden of Eden. This paper contrasts traditional agro-pastoral and
extractive practises gathered among Caboclos along the Amazon River banks
and floodplains with modern and capital-intensive agribusinesses settled
alongside the BR-163 motorway. This contribution argues that ancestral
environmentally friendly farming practises should be protected, both because
they preserve the remainder of the woodland and its immense biogenetic richness
and the Amazon Basin Rivers and their bounteous potential for life. Successful
and long sustained cultivation on fertile riverbank alluvial soils, rebuilt by floods
year after year, possesses a favourable demonstrative effect, valuable for other
tropical sites, constituting a good array of best practises towards sustainable
development.
Keywords: Amazon rainforest, floodplains, BR-163, sustainable development.
1 Introduction
The Legal Brazilian Amazon (LBA) was first established in 1953 (Law 1 806)
and recently redrawn by force of the 2007 Complementary Law nº 124. It
comprises 8.5 Brazilian states, located west of 44ºW of Greenwich. The LBA
totals 5,088,688 km2, about 60% of Brazil, where demographic growth after the
Second World War reached 518%, well above the national average of 254% (see
Keywords
Amazon rainforest, floodplains, BR-163, sustainable development.
Related Book
Other papers in this volume
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