Brazil launched a $435 million program yesterday to fight illegal logging, mining, and drug trafficking in the Amazon rainforest, which is home to about 50 percent of the world’s plant and animal species. The program will establish an air surveillance system and send police out across the region’s 1.9 million square miles. Last year, illegal logging and farming destroyed an area of the Brazilian Amazon larger than Hawaii. In a more local effort to protect Brazil’s environment, Fabio Luis de Oliviera Rosa, a fellow with the nonprofit Ashoka organization, is working with rural people around the country to make their farming practices more sustainable and to improve their lives through the use of solar-generated power.
