Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,  January 2012

It’s been 20 years since hopeful, bright-eyed world citizens by the thousands convened on this spectacularly beautiful tropical city to save the planet. The United Nations sponsored event, dubbed the “Earth Summit,” formulated and adopted an “Agenda 21” to point governments of the world and their subjects toward an environmentally sustainable strategy for the 21st century.

It’s time for an evaluation. A “Rio Plus 20” conference will convene here June 22-23, 2012 to assess progress and failure in what was to have been a concerted effort to deliver a livable, conscientiously-motivated planet for future generations. 

Just a handful of New Mexicans attended the 1992 Earth Summit; I was among them. (See Corrales Comment Vol. XI, No.8, June 6, 1992 “Earth Summit Special Edition”) More notably also among the participants was then-U.S. Senator Al Gore, who went on to run unsuccessfully for president and then dedicated himself to fighting global climate change and to stopping the poisoning of the air we all breathe.

Brazil figures dramatically in the future global quality of life. The tough issues of global warming, carbon sequestration, the  seemingly inescapable scarcity of fresh water and unbridled excessive consumerism in First, Second and Third World countries are all drawn sharply into focus in this vast land that holds such a large percentage of the world’s oxygen-generating, carbon-capturing forests and a significant proportion of the world’s fresh water.

The Amazon basin, most of it in Brazil,  carries 16 percent of all the river flow on the planet. It drains an area roughly the size of the continental United States. The Amazon River and its tributaries carry eleven times the volume of water in the Mississippi River.

While some evidence exists that rampant destruction of the Amazon rainforest has been slowed, that follows almost 50 years of rapacious development by unscrupulous would-be cattle ranchers who looked at the lush jungle and envisioned intensely grazed pasture.

Back in the early 1970s, while I worked at the Time magazine office in Rio, I was invited to join a press junket covering the Amazon Basin arranged by Brazil’s military government. The general’s purpose was to demonstrate to the world press corps that opening up the Trans-Amazonic Highway was a necessary but benign project.

As we flew over the vast, horizon-to-horizon carpet of forest canopy, the barely visible clearing for the road did, in deed, seem almost inconsequential. But it was clear to me and the other journalists on that trip that a myriad of side roads already being cut through the wilderness would in no time drastically and irretrievably destroy much of world’s biggest rainforest.

That prediction was easy and tragically accurate. Today, the Amazon forest is disappearing at a rate of 200,000 square miles a year. An area the size of France has already been cleared for pasture, where an estimated 80 million cattle now graze. 

More than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen has been produced in the Amazon forest.

Earlier this year, Brazil’s director of the environment, Andre Aranha Correa do Lago, reflected on the coming “Rio Plus 20” conference. “The negotiations on the question of climate change at the Earth Summit in 1992, which at the time many people thought was premature, is the most important thing that has happened over the past 20 years.”

 Not foreseen, he said, was the rise of consumerism in developing countries, particularly Brazil, China and India.

Jeff Radford