A Petrobrás of the forests?

Authors

  • Sergius Gandolfi Universidade de São Paulo, Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, Departamento de Ciências Biológicas
  • Ricardo Ribeiro Rodrigues Universidade de São Paulo, Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, Departamento de Ciências Biológicas

Keywords:

Amazon Forest, Sustainable Forestry, Biodiversity, Forest Regeneration

Abstract

The urgent need to preserve the largest forest stocks in the world involves the search for a model targeted to the perpetuation of these forests through its rational use - or at least a portion of such use - bound to a program of employment and income generation, and also the cooperation in the solution of society’s key issues, such as popular housing. Continuous burnings across the Amazon forests not only destroy the ecosystems and the local biodiversity, but also destroy timber and non-timber resources that could be being fully exploited. Despite the fact that the occupancy of the Amazon region by means of a rational exploitation system represent a complex and difficult task, from our standpoint, it passes through the creation of a forestry civilization or a forestry community for which the existence of the forest itself is the means, the manner and the reason for the existence of the communities living either within or on the outskirts of their boundaries. The research on the ecology of tropical rainforests carried out over the last decades, provides some alterna-tives for the creation of utilization systems, in which the forest - even if already harvested - will regenerate locally, creating a permanent cycle of utilization and maintenance of the biodiversity of these forests. We propose a new paradigm, with the creation of a "Petrobrás of the Forests", as a useful and sovereign instrument to help building this knowledge and defining policies for their application, enabling the resolution of key issues, such as income generation for these marginal communities, thus contributing for the solution of the popular housing deficits, and especially, for the maintenance of the remaining biodiversity of the Amazon Rainforest. *( Petrobrás = Brazilian State Oil Company)

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Published

2003-01-01

How to Cite

Gandolfi, S., & Rodrigues, R. R. (2003). A Petrobrás of the forests?. Biota Neotropica, 3(1). Retrieved from //www.biotaneotropica.org.br/BN/article/view/1114

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