In the NY Review of Books this week, there's a story by John Terborgh on the fate of the Amazon rainforest which is pretty much required reading if, like me, your understanding of the whole mess was just "people are stupid, so we're screwed."

The article talks about why the Brazilian government in the 1970s decided to give people tons of money to settle and farm land that was terrible for settling and farming, and why there's such a demand for logging there, and how other countries with Amazon territory have behaved differently. When you look at human effects on the world from a distance, we look like a blind swarm of locusts; but from closer up it's just a lot of people making short-sighted decisions based on what makes economic and political sense at the time, and what they know how to do technologically.

The cool tone as Terborgh goes through these details at first makes him seem a little breezy about the danger of the situation; but by the end of the story, not so much, as he brings up at least two ways things could get much worse even if logging didn't keep speeding up. One is that the environmental effects of the cleared areas make the untouched areas much more liable to catch fire. The other, which I'd never seen anyone mention before, is that science might find a way to make rainforest soil into good farmland and then we'd have a whole new dilemma; that's what happened to Brazil's grasslands.

Terborgh concludes vaguely that the only hope is "significant international intervention" because Brazil is "a country obsessed with maximizing development," a place where "cycles of boom and bust have encouraged a get-rich-quick mentality and lack of allegiance to place." Sounds familiar. So who's going to intervene over here?

(Damn, the NY Review has been on fire lately, and they put a lot of their stories online: the last few issues have really good pieces on global warming, Gertrude Stein, Islamic law, Turkish politics, and Vladimir Putin, and a jaw-dropping transcript of Bush lecturing the Spanish Prime Minister about Iraq.)