Authoritarian Efforts Toward an Amazonian Working Landscape

The Brazilian government has recently begun working towards a new “Plan for a Sustainable Amazon (PAS),” which acknowledges the necessity for both acts of founding and preservation in the inhabited and ecologically critical region of the world.  As Harvard law professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the man spearheading the PAS project, accurately notes, “The Amazon is not simply a collection of trees…it’s a group of people: 25 million Brazilians.”

            The plan, in theory, seeks to promote the individual and collective environmental stewardship amongst the residents of the Amazon, who are driven toward deforestation by global economic forces.  This is accomplished through economic incentives for residents who learn about environmental conservation and pledge to stop deforesting their land, as well as those who take part in sustainable-use activities.

            While this may sound like a promising initiative, there are those who critique it as an authoritarian attempt to impose specific land-use activities, however environmentally-conscious as they are, on a wide range of land and cultures.  Additionally, the emphasis on economic reinforcement techniques may not truly establish an ethic of use within the Amazonian people.

            The project is a unique and promising direction for government-sponsored conservation efforts; the success of the PAS may be revealing as to the potential for such policy implantation elsewhere.

See the May 15 BBC article for more information: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7399109.stm