You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

AMAZON DESTRUCTION CONTINUES

Listen
Media Options
Listen

Related

Spanning over seven million square kilometers throughout nine countries, the Amazon Basin, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, is home to nearly half of the earth’s species and holds one-fifth of all its fresh water. It is estimated that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has already been destroyed.

When the last Earth Summit was held five years ago in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest was one of the hottest issues of the day. Pop stars, politicians and Hollywood actors and actresses jostled with each other for the best photo-ops to proclaim their allegiance to saving the so-called Lungs of the Earth.

But in a new report released this week, environmentalists charge that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest has dramatically increased in recent years.

Guests:
• Atossa Soltani, the director of Amazon Watch and one of the authors of a new report, Arteries for Global Trade: Consequences for Amazonia, on large infrastructure projects that are threatening millions of acres of rainforest and indigenous areas.
• Prathap Chatterjee, an environmental reporter with Inter Press Service Third World News Agency. He’s spent much of the last six months in the Amazon region, mostly in Peru and Brazil.

Related Story

StoryNov 15, 2024A New Crusade? Trump Taps Christian Nationalists Pete Hegseth & Mike Huckabee to Top Posts
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top