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The Book of the Week is “How to Save the Amazon, A Journalist’s Quest for Answers” by Dom Phillips and various authors, published in 2025. This hodgepodge of a volume listed various issues related to the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, which spans eight different countries. Nevertheless, the title was misleading in that all the articles except for one about Cost Rica– were about the Amazon region in Brazil.
Over the decades, there has been a tug of war between monetizing of, and attempting to enforce laws to protect the Amazon region, involving:
- changing politics
- supply and demand for real estate
- supply and demand for products such as fossil fuels, fish, fruits and nuts.
Anyway, simply enacting laws, and then underfunding and understaffing the laws’ enforcement NEVER works in such an environmentally delicate, resource-rich region where the people born there have a simple lifestyle, and aren’t sufficiently powerful to defend their way of life against exploitation of their land.
For decades, business people have worked around the Amazon river in gold mining, commercial fishing, logging, rubber tapping, farming, oil wildcatting, and cattle ranching (beef production).
On and off, Brazil’s government agencies, and the Pastoral Land Commission (a Catholic organization) have assisted the Indigenous people who have small farms in the region. There had been programs similar to those implemented in the western United States in the 1800’s, of homesteading and sharecropping. BUT, more than half of the population of Brazil consists of Amazon-region residents (Indigenous peoples) whose dark skin makes them subject to discrimination.
There are tens of different Indigenous peoples who choose to live in the region, isolating themselves from the rest of the world. Their mentality is described in the song, “Colors of the Wind” from the Disney movie soundtrack Pocahontas. One Indigenous individual interviewed by one of the authors wrote, “That land could be owned by a single person is unthinkable to us because everyone’s survival depends on it.”
The Indigenous peoples and NGOs are the only people who should be stewards of the land, because they live and work there, on the ground. Outsiders are mostly bureaucrats and exploiters.
One can get a bank to finance cattle-ranching, as beef production is a major way to make the land productive. So the government encourages homesteaders to go into cattle-ranching. However, it deforests the land.
The entrepreneurs behave like organized crime syndicates– ruthlessly killing people who obstruct their illegal profiteering, and donating big bucks to political candidates to perpetuate their lawlessness.
In addition, ironically, the Indigenous people aid and abet the entrepreneurs! They serve as slave labor in the entrepreneurs’ businesses because their education and skills are insufficient to make a living otherwise.
Bottom line: the Amazon rain forest is one of the few remaining resource-rich regions on earth that has yet to be completely looted– that could still be used for more good than evil.
Read the book to learn about: the annual Davos-like conference called COP where the (mostly greedy, power-hungry) attendees pretend to wring their hands over the destruction of the Amazon rain forest; the entrepreneurs who do agroforestry; the dreamers who want to turn their land into environmentally friendly utopias; and the one small cause for optimism that can improve the situation (hint: high-technology satellite images can measure deforestation).