January 24, 2012 Why Stop Deforestation“ABC News takes viewers around the world to witness the key environmental challenges each continent faces and present working solutions from each place. The coverage outlines the most pressing environmental issues, including increasing and decreasing water levels, deforestation, species extinction and power usage. -Africa: Elizabeth Vargas reports from an eco-lodge reserve near the Kruger wildlife area in South Africa to show how conservation can save species. -Europe: Chris Cuomo reports from the city of lights, Paris, reporting on how people can conserve power and ways that science could help take carbon dioxide out of the air. -South America: John Quiñones is in the Brazilian rain forest reporting on how conservation groups are working to replant the rain forest and how these forests can be worth more as a standing resource than as logs and soybean fields. -North America: Jay Schadler reports from an astonishing solar power plant in Arizona on how alternative power solutions will help the energy grid. -Australia: Bill Weir at the Great Barrier Reef off the Australian coast reports on how desalination plants may be an answer to water shortages. -Asia: Cynthia McFadden from China explores what is perhaps the most fundamental issue of all – Is the world willing to make the changes needed? Antarctica: ABC News reports on what progress has been made on the hole in the ozone. ABC News also assembles seven leading experts on the environment — from scientists to businessmen — to weigh in on the most important problems and the most promising solutions. Airdate: 4/20/2007 “
January 24, 2012 Why Stop DeforestationWarren Dean chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most endangered in the world. It contains a great diversity of life forms, some of them found nowhere else, as well as the country’s largest cities, plantations, mines, and industries. Continual clearing is ravaging most of the forested remnants.Dean opens his story with the hunter-gatherers of twelve thousand years ago and takes it up to the 1990s–through the invasion of Europeans in the sixteenth century; the ensuing devastation wrought by such developments as gold and diamond mining, slash-and-burn farming, coffee planting, and industrialization; and the desperate battles between conservationists and developers in the late twentieth century.Based on a great range of documentary and scientific resources,With Broadax and Firebrand is an enormously ambitious book. More than a history of a tropical forest, or of the relationship between forest and humans, it is also a history of Brazil told from an environmental perspective. Dean writes passionately and movingly, in the fierce hope that the story of the Atlantic Forest will serve as a warning of the terrible costs of destroying its great neighbor to the west, the Amazon Forest.
