“Since colonial times Brazilian authorities have been responsible for relentless destruction of the rain forest. Nothing has been left of the highly biodiverse Atlantic Rain Forest that once stretched out over most of the Brazilian Southeast. The magnificent Amazon Rain Forest faces a similar fate, as the Brazilian Government is allowing it to be destroyed at an ever-increasing speed. Large-scale development schemes are sanitized by using eco-friendly slogans, such as “sustainable development or management”, that are intended to deceive us. They allude to gaining our confidence that they are ecologically minded, when in fact their motives are entirely monetary. My recent discoveries, though, may well serve to hinder these corrupt schemes. For if there are out there big tree-dwelling, ground-dwelling and even aquatic mammals not known to science – a dwarf tapir, a giant peccary, a white deer, a dwarf manatee, another river dolphin, to name a few – what do we really know about its flora and fauna? Very Little. About its ecology – the utterly complex web of relationships between plants and animals? Even less. Then what do we know about the sustainability of this ecosystem? Absolutely nothing.

It is no coincidence that in response to my publications, environmental authorities, pushed by politicians involved in lucrative development schemes (e.g., Mato Grosso soybean connection), bit back in 2002 with a vicious persecution of me and a few other foreign so-called “biopirates”. After an unjust Kafka-an process I was sacked from my senior-scientist position at the Federal Institute for Amazon Research (INPA), my rehabilitation center caring for a number of monkeys (incl. some new species), birds and other endangered animals was torn down causing the animals to perish, and a number of lawsuits were brought against me which have been subsequently rescinded.” (I think this was written before this recent conviction)

Like I said, a disgrace.

I am going to write to the Brazilian government, but has anyone got any other ideas?

stupid guys in Brazil…………………………..

That probably had nothing to do with what van Roosmalen was doing there, which makes him an easy example. With little corporate defenses and a clear technical violation, his incarceration makes for a free shot across the bow, perhaps?

The fact remains that while corporate profits are driven by the osmotic engine of ’standard of living’ across semi-permeable borders, and US or other courts are willing to uphold such blatant thievery, well then the actual conservationists who are scarcely making a dent by following the rules will also be burnt at the stake as straw men set up long ago to collect arrows. I guess that is too many metaphors in one setting, but I’m kind of sick to my stomach just now.

Thank you Loren for posting this.

I ask you so I don’t get in trouble for copyright infringement.

Could you send them a copy of this blog to the Brazilian Government?

Then they could see how we are taken back on this.

Thank You Big Time

For The Love Of Apes

There appeared to be a discrepnacy between Roosmalen and Ibama, the countries environmental protection agency, interpretation of the governing documents surrounding the necessary paperwork and politics of protection.

Those events carried over it now appears to this sentence.

News of the fines circulated briefly in 2002, CNN carried some accounts (some may still be online).

Craig Heinselman
Peterborough, NH