In the early 1970s, the Brazilian military dictatorship harnessed cutting-edge technology to map the Amazon rainforest more precisely than ever before. “Financed by a USD 30 million grant from the Brazilian government,” the New York Times reported in July 1976, “the venture, known as the Radam Project, has discovered a 400‐mile‐long river in the western Amazon that had been hidden by dense foliage and almost continuous cloud cover.” Evoking the spirit of adventure associated with colonial-era explorers, the regime embarked upon a broad effort to develop a jungle terrain two‐thirds the size of the continental U.S.
But this was not purely a discovery mission. The Radam Project found that “the value of commercially recoverable timber in the Amazon runs into the tens of billions of dollars,” according to The Times.
It also enabled a clearer assessment of the rainforest’s potential for raising livestock and planting cash crops. Acir Avila da Luz, the director of the Radam Project, told The Times that “originally, people thought that the Amazon, with its heavy vegetation, was extremely fertile … then the pendulum swung the other way, and the Amazon was thought to be completely unfertile except for jungle plants. We have managed to convince people that the truth is somewhere in between.”
He added that “we cannot claim to have discovered any mines. But we have cut down on the odds and...
Search
