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>> BRUCE PENGRA: Well another one of the really big stories of environmental change is the
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deforestation in the Amazon. An interesting part of the story starts at
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the river a long ways to the north actually. If we zoom in here along the Amazon way up
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here in what looks like virgin forest still -- and a lot of it is --
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you can see a road that leads from the Amazon here
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and along through more or less untouched rainforest for hundreds and hundreds of
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miles. And as you get south far enough you start
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to see clearing along the road where farmers are starting to clear the
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forests and farm.
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The road facilitates the farming, the road facilitates the population
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coming out there. And then all along that road the land is cleared
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and when there isn't any land next to the road another road is cut,
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often in another direction and people start clearing that.
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And progressively you get this fishbone pattern that expands and expands and grows together
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into things that look more like this. And the forest is just a handful of little
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scraps anymore that are scattered throughout
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between farm fields where it's either a low spot that swept
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or for some other reason isn't ideal to farm.
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Amazon basin deforestation is along an arc and the states of Rondonia, Mato Grosso, and
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Para and from 1999 to 2012
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it's quite striking. This whole area here in Eastern Para state
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if you go back to 1999 the vast majority of it is
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intact forest and you can just see the herringbone roads come out through the
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forest and then roads come out from those and the land
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clearing and the forest disappearing.
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And it's made all the more obvious with these two protected areas here
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which don't disappear... makes it really quite compelling to see.
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As you look at this, these are... a lot of people called Amazon the lungs of the
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world. It's a little bit at a time when you're on
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the ground and you clear an area for soybeans and you can feed some people.
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But when you look at it in the bigger picture again as Landsat allows you to do
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you can see that it's not something we can do forever.