Saving the Amazon.(using global positioning systems and satellites to monitor the environment)(Brief Article)

The people of the Amazon basin live by a cruel calendar. Each year starting in January, farmers, ranchers and loggers topple a swath of forest the size of Hawaii. In July, when the rains stop, they set the remaining debris on fire. But this July morning, deep in the frontier state of Mato Grosso, the sky is as blue as a robin's egg, the chain saws are silent and not a bulldozer is in sight. Beneath the wings of a twin-engine Cessna, the steamy wilderness scrolls by as boundless and unblemished as Brazil itself must have looked when the Portuguese arrived half a millennium ago.

After years of nothing but dire news about the destruction of Amazonia, the world's greatest tropical rain forest, it seems at last that something is being done to reverse the trend. Don't get too excited-- the Amazon is hardly out of danger. Slashing and burning are habits as old as Brazil. Last August, wildfires had bucket brigades hustling over an area the size of Europe, including some stretches of Mato Grosso. But illegal burnings don't occur nearly as often as they did a few years ago. The reason: a few honest civil servants, using an existing technology (satellite imaging) and some straightforward gumshoe work, have begun to accomplish what countless United Nations meetings have failed to do: come up with an enforcement method that works.

There's no doubt that the pressure of bad publicity had something to do with Brazil's latest success story. During the 1980s, lumbermen, herders and small farmers swept into the rain forest with chain saws and bulldozers in perhaps the greatest frontier push of the 20th century. The tide began to turn in 1988 when a rancher murdered Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and defender of the rain forest, turning him into an ecomartyr. The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 sent Brazilian authorities scrambling to clear the country's name.

No one expected change to come from Mato Grosso. With its year-round growing season and pockets of rich red soils, this sprawling 90,000- square-kilometer territory had become the front line of Brazil's agricultural expansion, sown thick with soybeans, cotton and other crops. No wonder Mato Grosso alone once accounted for half the forest cutting in all of Amazonia. In the Amazon, where soils are notoriously weak (life-giving nutrients come from trees and plants, not from underground) farmers and herders had to cut and burn ever deeper into the forest just to get by. Yet even by Amazonian standards, the pillage was getting out of hand. "It was chaos," says Paulo Leite, head of forestry resources for Mato Grosso's ...