Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25245
FRON T:: u.s. antes up for the largest eco-pot in history It's been a tough year for the environment. Big George W. has never been mistaken for a tree hugger and his triple eco-triage of vetoing the Kyoto Protocol. trying to reopen Alaska for oil drilling and appointing James Watt-uh. make that Gail Norton as Secretary of the Interior. did little to assuage our fears. Stirringly. last June. in an almost unnoticed moment of mental clarity. Bush and some unlikely bedfellows-Conservation International. the Nature Conservancy. the World Wildlife Fund and the Peruvian government-signed a historic agreement to protect some of the most biologically rich rainforests on earth. The impetus behind the agreement is something known as a debt-for-nature swap. Most of the world's great ecological treasures lie within the borders of developing nations: collectively these nations have incurred an internation- al debt upwards of $1.3 trillion. The interest payments alone play havoc on many of their eco-treasures. To make the high payments. debt-ridden nations often sell rights to timber. min- erals and oil: money also comes from crops and cattle. Your basic environmentally unfriendly endeavors. As a way out of this morass. in 1987. Conservation International came up with a concept: trade debt relief (by for- giving monies owed the US) for conservation efforts in those same nations in the red. Since then. conservation organizations have engineered a number of debt-for-nature swaps. And to facilitate such exchanges. the US passed the Tropical Forest Conservation Act of 1998. For the recent Peruvian swap. Conservation International. the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund each committed around $370.000 and the US government allocated $5.5 million to cancel a portion of Peru's debt to the US. As a result. the Amazon nation will save about $14 million in payments over the next 16 years, and will allot $10.6 million toward conservation over the next 12 years. The extra cash will go to preserving about 27.5 mil- lion acres (roughly the size of Virginia) of Amazon rainforest. divided into 10 critical chunks. The new protected areas are home to some of the planet's richest-and most threatened- biodiversity. Striking species that are found there include pink river dolphins, jaguars, scarlet macaws, walking palms and giant water lilies. To insure these saved plots remain in good eco-standing, the cash influx will be managed by local Peruvian conservation groups with a solid track record. All told this is the largest debt-for-nature swap ever engineered. not a bad showing for an otherwise dark year. -Steven Kotler