“A road is always the death of the rainforest, and that’s been borne out by literally every case you can think of.”

archived (Wayback Machine)

Today, outside Puerto Maldonado, a sandy wasteland spreads along both sides of the highway. The area, known as La Pampa, used to be lush tropical rainforest. But after years of gold mining, it is a denuded expanse where shallow toxic waters pool in sickly brownish-yellow puddles and pale leafless trees spike across the horizon. Small settlements have sprouted along the highway—and within them, prostitution, human trafficking and violence, much of it connected to organized crime.

Luis Fernandez, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation has extensively studied the impact of small-scale mining on deforestation in the Amazon. He says Madre de Dios has always been known to have alluvial gold deposits. But the wastelands of La Pampa are there for one reason: “The highway, the infrastructure,” Fernandez said. “If you have to bushwhack through the jungle, you might find a lot of gold, but it’s going to cost you a lot of money, so you don’t.”

[...]

After miners exhausted the creeks and rivers, they moved into the forest and cut down patches of trees to mine there. “Then that starts to fragment the forests,” Fernandez explained. “And then you start to get to even bigger areas. And once they start to interconnect, you change the water table, and then you start to lose a lot more carbon. … These big standing forests are starting to dry out because you’re changing the groundwater, and then they burn.”

[...]

“Access is everything,” said Meg Symington, vice president of global integrated programs at the World Wildlife Fund, who has extensively studied the Amazon. “Ninety-five percent of deforestation happens within five-and-a-half kilometers of a road, or one kilometer of a river.”

Fuck roads.