Roads are ruining the rainforests

“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads.” That might sound like an eco-terrorist’s threat, but they’re actually the words of Eneas Salati, one of Brazil’s most respected scientists. Thomas Lovejoy, a leading American biologist, is equally emphatic: “Roads are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.”

As I write, indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon are stridently protesting the proliferation of new oil, gas and logging roads into their traditional territories.
The roads bring loggers, gold miners and ranchers who often subjugate the indigenous people. Even worse, the invaders can bring in deadly new diseases.

Throughout the tropics, infections such as malaria, dengue fever, enteric pathogens and HIV have all been shown to rise sharply after new roads are built. Some indigenous groups, such as the Surui tribe of Brazilian Amazonia, have been driven to the edge of extinction by roads and the invading loggers, colonists and diseases they bring.

What can we do to slow the onslaught? First, we must vastly improve environmental impact assessments for planned roads. In many developing nations, EIAs focus solely on the roads themselves, completely ignoring the knock-on effects. In Brazil, for instance, EIAs for Amazonian highways focus only on a narrow swathe along the route, often recommending only paltry mitigation measures, such as helping animals to relocate before building begins. EIAs for certain mines, hydroelectric dams and other large developments focus only on the project itself while ignoring the impact of the roads it will invariably spawn. New roads will continue to drive rainforest destruction so long as the EIA process is so fundamentally flawed.

The second thing we have to do is fight to keep the most destructive roads from being built – the ones that penetrate pristine frontier areas. There is no shortage of battles to wage. A proposed highway between Colombia and Panama, for example, would expose one of the world’s most biologically important areas, the Choc