For the people who live in the Brazilian rain forest, the perfectly logical thing to do is cut it down. Large swaths of the rain forest are burned or chopped down each year (4,621 square miles in 2008) because that land is worth more to its human denizens deforested — for the value of the timber and the cleared farmland — than it is intact.
The ecological fallout is, of course, immense. The Amazonian rain forest is perhaps the most densely populated place on Earth — inhabited by a vast variety of plants and animals that we have not yet begun to map — and it is also the largest terrestrial carbon sink on the planet, absorbing 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in a normal year.
The argument for deforestation has always been that the economic benefits to local communities are too great to overlook. But now a new study in the current issue of Science suggests that's not true. A team of researchers from Portugal, France and Britain studied nearly 300 Brazilian municipalities on the frontier of the Amazonian rain forest, assessing their development levels — based on income, life expectancy and literary rates — before deforestation and afterward.
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