Earth Equity News

Working to Save the 'Living Dead' in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. By Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com, September 23, 2009. [Fourth in a series of interviews with participants at the 2009 Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) conference.] "The Atlantic Forest may very well be the most imperiled tropical ecosystem in the world: it is estimated that 7% (or less) of the original forest remains. Lining the coast of Brazil, what is left of the forest is largely patches and fragments that are hemmed in by metropolises and monocultures. Yet, some areas are worse than others, such as the Pernambuco Endemism Centre, a region in the northeast that has largely been ignored by scientists and conservation efforts. Here, 98% of the forest is gone, and 70% of what remains are patches measuring less than 10 hectares. Due to this fragmentation all large mammals have gone regionally extinct, while the medium and small sized mammals are described by Antonio Rossano Mendes Pontes, a professor and researcher at the Federal University of Pernambuco, as the 'living dead'. The threats to the region and its species are numerous: from widespread hunting to forest exploitation for burning wood and construction material, from a boom in sugarcane biofuels to poor governance. Behind all of this is extreme poverty and a lack of education, according to Pontes. 'Absolute misery and indecent salaries for the lowest classes… prevent them from having access to the very basic daily items, such as animal protein, gas butane for cooking and other purposes, construction materials, and so on.'"