TV Reviews : PBS Special Documents the Ravaging of the Brazilian Rain Forest

The achievement of documentary filmmaker Adrian Cowell’s “The Decade of Destruction” cannot be overestimated. Tracking the horrific process of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon jungle since 1980, Cowell’s cameras become all-seeing eyes, peering in on the vast region from nearly every possible angle. The overwhelming impression--especially if you watch all four episodes--is of Cowell being everywhere at once, exposing grim, unprecedented exploitation.

The PBS miniseries begins tonight with a two-hour opener, “In the Ashes of the Forest,” at 9 on Channels 28 and 15, and at 8 on Channel 50. It continues with hour installments Wednesday through Friday nights, at 10 on Channels 28 and 15 and at 8 on Channel 50.

The core theme of the five-hour epic (the last, about the life and death of ecologist and rubber tapper Chico Mendes, was not available for review) is the link between the forest’s exploitation and Brazil’s massive social inequities. Bypassing an explanation of the ecological effects of ravenous denuding, Cowell may wrongly assume that viewers already understand Amazonia’s crucial importance to the global ecosystem--one of “the Earth’s lungs,” as an enlightened politician puts it. But rather than being another nature special, “Decade of Destruction” becomes a ghastly examination of social planning going terribly wrong.

With more than 12 million homeless--mostly urban outcasts or failed sharecroppers--Brazil has been trying to solve an impossible dilemma with an impossible dream. Touting the rewards of the Amazon to anyone willing to brave it, the government began a crash forest development program in 1980. Brazil viewed its wild interior as a huge cash cow for paying off its massive foreign debt; its milking was to be funded in part by the World Bank.

Peasants streamed into the western region, burning forest for farming and invading homelands of Indian tribes never before encroached upon by the outside world. Government-sponsored mining consortiums, competing with and defeating a wildcat prospector operation right out of the California Gold Rush, launched an industrial program fueled by charcoal-based energy. The forest, like our own Wild West, was there for the taking.

Cowell traces how Amazonia’s promised land became a fallow land, a cruel shuffleboard where millions of hopeful poor scamper from one get-rich-quick scheme to another as government plans fail and the forest dies.

Can Amazonia be saved? Cowell wisely makes no prediction. The World Bank has confessed to some tragic errors of judgment, since its loans literally helped pave the forest over. Recent environmental initiatives under President Fernando Collar and his eco-czar, Jose Lutzenberger, are aggressive if not far-reaching. But there are still the desperate millions and the virgin forest, and Brazil’s, and the globe’s, tragedy seems far from over.