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text that follows is a PREPRINT.

Please cite as:

Fearnside, P.M., W.F. Laurance,  A.K.M. Albernaz, H.L. Vasconcelos and
L.V. Ferreira. 2005. Response [to Bruna and Kainer]. Science 307: 1044-1045.

ISSN:
0036-8075

Copyright:
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

The original publication is available
at   http://www.sciencemag.org

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ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF AMAZONIAN ROADBUILDING

Bruna and Kainer (1) imply that Brazil’s Amazonian
road building could help to promote “community-based timber management,
the extraction of non-timber forest products, and other strategies advocated
for slowing deforestation.”
Our collective experience in Amazonia over the past quarter century
suggests otherwise.  While their
optimistic view may apply in a few, rather-rare situations—such as
limited areas of Acre where socially cohesive groups of long-term forest
dwellers prevail—it seems entirely foreign to the major hotbeds of
deforestation, such as those in Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Roraima, and
southern Pará.

For example, when
completed, the Cuiabá-Santarém Highway (BR-163), one of the top
priorities of the Brazilian federal government (2), is likely to create
an 800 km-long swath of forest degradation across southern Amazonia.  The highway is being paved to transport
soybeans from Mato Grosso to the Amazon port of Santarém, almost entirely
for the benefit of large corporations and landholders (3).  The planned route is already swarming
with land speculators, cut-and-run loggers, cattle ranchers, and soybean
investors—hardly the cast of characters likely to promote a
“community-based” utopia focused on maintaining forest for
non-timber products.  Far from being
anomalous, the BR-163 typifies the ecological impacts that often accompany
major new highways in the Amazonian frontier (4-6).

Moreover, contrary to
Bruna and Kainer’s suggestion, we do not advocate a “sweeping
rejection” of proposed transportation and infrastructure projects in
Brazilian Amazonia.  This would
indeed be naïve and divorced from reality.  We do, however, believe that a limited
subset of the proposed projects—particularly those that would create
major corridors between densely populated areas and the remote Amazonian
frontier—will be so damaging environmentally that their potential
societal and economic benefits are clearly outweighed (3-7).

The notion that
society has “needs” for new infrastructure, whereas it merely has
“concerns” for the environment and its services, is a false
dichotomy that implicitly will always lead to choices in favor of
infrastructure.  The implied conclusion
that planned projects should never be rejected or delayed, but only
“balanced” with environmental add-ons, would clearly imperil Amazonian
forests (7).  Current efforts to
reduce rampant forest loss are likely to fail, we believe, unless the Brazilian
government addresses one of the most fundamental causes of forest destruction:
the dramatic proliferation of new transportation projects throughout the heart
of the Amazon basin.  Our recent
Letter to Science (2) was intended to highlight this important
inconsistency.

Philip M. Fearnside1*, William F. Laurance2,
Ana K. M. Albernaz3,
Heraldo L. Vasconcelos4, Leandro V. Ferreira3

1Coordenação de
Pesquisas em Ecologia, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, C.P.
478, Manaus, AM 69011-970, Brazil . 2Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute, Apartado 2072, Balboa, Panama.
3Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Avenida Perimetral 190,
Belém, PA 66077-530, Brazil.
4Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal de
Uberlândia, C.P. 593, Uberlândia, MG 38400-902, Brazil.

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.  E-mail: [email-masked]

1.
E.
M. Bruna, K. Kainer. Science 304, ---- (2004).

2.
W. F. Laurance, A. K. M.
Albernaz, P. M. Fearnside, H. L. Vasconcelos, L. V. Ferreira. Science 304,
1109 (2004).

3.
P. M. Fearnside, Environ.
Conserv. 28, 23 (2001).

4.
W.
F. Laurance et al., Science 291, 438 (2001).

5.
P. M. Fearnside, Environ.
Manage. 30, 735 (2002).

6.
W. F. Laurance et al., J. Biogeogr. 29, 737 (2002).

7.
W. F. Laurance, P. M. Fearnside. Science 295, 1643 (2002).