NOVO PROGRESSO, Brazil -- Drawing his .40-caliber pistol, Severiano Pontes dashes across the steaming, muddy jungle floor, a hunch telling him what he would find around a bend.
The thick Amazon rain-forest canopy suddenly opens to a clearing where massive Jatobas and other hardwood trees have been reduced to 40 waist-high trunks lying on the ground. Fires set to help clear the underbrush still smolder nearby, sending sinewy gray smoke columns into the sea-blue sky.
Pontes and his environmental agents patrol the Amazon to prevent illegal clearing, part of Brazil's new, aggressive effort to preserve a jungle the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River. The government says such teams are the main reason that deforestation has slowed this year to its lowest level in two decades.
But more often Pontes' agents arrive too late.
Instead, they find graveyards of felled trees resembling twisted, blackened fossils and earth covered in a gray layer of ash. They leave with their hands and faces coated with charcoal dust and a barbecue smell that lingers even after showering hours later.
Pontes holsters his pistol and pulls out a tape measure to record the size of the trees lost. The evidence will help their agency, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or Ibama, impose fines and other penalties.
"These trees have been cut, you cannot reverse that," Pontes says. "What must be done at this point is swift punishment to stop more from being knocked down."
Global initiative
World leaders set to gather in Copenhagen next month to draft a new accord on fighting climate change already admit the much-anticipated summit won't produce a global treaty. There are too many disagreements among countries on how to reduce heat-trapping carbon emissions blamed for warming the planet.
So far, the Brazilian government has focused mostly on enforcement.
The Brazilian Amazon is arguably the world's biggest natural defense against global warming, acting as a "sink," or absorber, of carbon dioxide. But it is also a great contributor to warming. About 75 percent of Brazil's emissions come from rainforest clearing, as vegetation burns and felled trees rot.
Advocates have long pressed to defend the world's rain forests, to save animal and plant species, safeguard watersheds and protect indigenous people's homelands. For Brazil, water vapor from the forest is also vital to its rainy climate. But the government now has another reason to protect the Amazon: A new global climate agreement is expected to reward countries for "avoided deforestation," with cash or credits tradable on the global carbon market.
But policing a giant region that is mostly impassable because of thick vegetation is daunting for any country, rich or poor.
So the Ibama strategy has been limited to selective shock and awe, targeting states such as Para -- home to Novo Progresso -- where deforestation rates from August 2008 through this July, the period Brazil uses to calculate its annual deforestation, were three times that of other Amazon states.
Ibama doubled the number of agents to 1,400 to cover the Amazon. About 50 at any one time are concentrated in Novo Progresso, a county the size of Maryland with its 14,800 square miles and 21,500 residents, most of whom make a living off jungle clearing.
They say it worked: Novo Progresso has since dropped off the list of top deforesters.
Critics say Brazil's increased enforcement is not behind the dramatic drop in deforestation. Rather, the fall in destruction tracks the global recession and the decline in prices for cattle, soy and timber -- the products that are killing the Amazon.
The destruction will resume unabated when profits again outweigh the risk of getting caught, environmentalists argue.
In the jungle, there is this simple truth: Until the region's 25 million inhabitants believe it is in their economic interest not to slash and burn the forest, it will continue to fall.
Not giving up
Soaked by a brief but hard rain, dark green paramilitary pants soiled with red earth, Pontes keeps yelling out measurements as another agent jots down the figures so a fine can be handed out based on the amount of timber.
A native of Para state, Pontes says he wants his area to be prosperous, but not at the cost of decimating the forest.
The last tree accounted for, he yells to his team that it is time to head back to their base in town.
"I'm trying to bring some order to a region, to industries that are working beyond all limits of acceptable behavior," Pontes said. "I believe this is the work God gave me to do."
He turns and walks up a muddied hill to his white, four-wheel-drive pickup truck, bright yellow tape measure in his right hand and a foot-long chunk of a destroyed tree in the other.
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