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07/28/2007: "Human expansion destroys environment, not incandescent bulbs"
The 1000-square-kilometre Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project has shed light on how species will suffer as the forest breaks up. Now it too in danger of fragmentation, says William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Brazil (Nature vol 448, p 409).
The nearby town of Manaus has grown rapidly since being declared a free-trade zone in the 1970s, with a population of 1.7 million people. Settlers are now moving onto the land around the project and criminals raided a research camp last year. A fire lit by the new arrivals also destroyed several study plots.
[ The price of "freedom" -- something you are told to desire from fear of being told what you are doing is unreasonable -- is that most people will do something unreasonable, and they will wreck everything we share, including society, environment and culture. Would I give up some "freedom" for sanity? Yes, I would, especially considering that "freedom isn't free" -- you have to constantly fight wars in Iraq and Viet Nam for it, apparently, and there are still things that if you say 'em in public, your job gets taken away and you can't get another and end up suffering at the command of this society. "Freedom" -- doesn't exist. ]
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526143.500&feedId=gaylogger