With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

slowly. Despite many decades of effort, most of this jungle, the size of
western Europe, remains intact. Climate change, on the other hand, could
overwhelm it in a few years.
Until recently, many ecologists have thought of the Amazon rainforest
much as their glaciologist colleagues conceived of the Greenland ice sheet: as
big and extremely stable. The Greenland ice maintained the climate that
kept the ice securely frozen, while the Amazon rainforest maintained the
rains that watered the forest. But, just as with the Greenland ice sheet, the
idea that the Amazon is stable has taken a knock: some researchers believe
that it is in reality a very dynamic place, and that the entire ecosystem may
be close to a tipping point beyond which it will suffer runaway destruction in
an orgy of fire and drought. Nobody is quite sure what would happen if the
Amazon rainforest disappeared. It would certainly give an extra kick to
climate change by releasing its stores of carbon dioxide. It would most likely
diminish rainfall in Brazil. It might also change weather systems right across
the Northern Hemisphere.
One man who is trying to find out how unstable the Amazon rainforest might
be is Dan Nepstad, a forest ecologist nominally attached to the Woods Hole
Research Center, in Massachusetts, but based for more than two decades in
the Amazon. He doesn't just watch the forest: he conducts large experiments
within it. In 200 1, Nepstad began creating a man-made drought in a small
patch of jungle in the Tapajos National Forest, outside the river port of
Santarem. Although in most years much of the Amazon has rain virtually
every day, Tapajos is on the eastern fringe of the rainforest proper, where
weather cycles can shut down the rains for months. The forest here is, to