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Beyond the Amazon - Why the Rainforest's fame get in the way of preserving other ecosystems

Words by Flavia Pardini


The Amazon is everywhere: from newspaper headlines to ministerial meetings, international business deals and popular culture. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where this fascination with the rainforest comes from; whether it's to do with the widespread opinion outside Brasil that it's an international asset or the sway that the region's biodiversity holds over mankind. The fact is that the Amazon has a small population compared to Brasil's other six biomes

As well as the Amazon, Brasil is also made up of savannas, caatinga, pantanal, pampas, Atlantic forest and an extensive coastline, although the difficulties faced by these ecosystems after centuries of human occupation hardly ever appear in the media. And the situation is getting worse: be it the accelerated cutting down of the savannah - which, according to estimates, is disappearing twice as fast as the Amazon - the transformation of the Southern regions into monocultures cultivating eucalyptus, the desertification of the Caatinga, the mass sedimentation of the Pantanal's rivers or the disorganized occupation of the coastal region.

The sense of urgency surrounding the rainforest is linked to a concept of "purity". "Historically, when you sum up all the change mankind has inflicted on Brasil, the Amazon has suffered less", explains Carlos Nobre, a researcher at the National Institute of Spacial Studies (INPE). So much so that across the globe, the Amazon represents the archetype of the "wild landscape", explains Erle Ellis, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of a map of the world's different biomes, taking into account the changes mankind has inflicted on the areas in question.

"Of course there are foreign researchers who know as much about Brasil as the Brasilian public does, but in general, major donators tend to channel their resources into the Amazon", explains Claudio Valladares Padua.

"The rainforest's charisma is well-deserved, but it's also a construct", affirms Jose Augusto Padua, lecturer at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. "The aesthetic importance of the rainforest captures people's imaginations and then there's also the issue of biodiversity. But the region shouldn't become a fetish, there shouldn't be a hierarchy amongst the different biomes in which the quantity of biodiversity determines what's important or not".