Win Wenger writes: “It’s very expensive to try to override what people are doing for their own reasons. Five percent or more of the Amazonian rainforest, part of our Earth’s lungs, disappears to slash-and-burn agriculture and cattle farming each year, and in turn a few years later turns into desert. International efforts to buy up rainforest to preserve it, and to pressure state and national governments into policies more conducive to conservation, are not only expensive but stir much resentment and suspicion.
“There is another, easier, simpler, and immensely less costly way to save not only a large part of our world’s priceless oxygen supply, and absorption of those world-heating greenhouse gases we insist on continuing to produce in our own country, but also the thousands of rare and endangered species before we even learn of their existence much less their potential value to us, and literally thousands if not millions of specialized substances of potentially great health and pharmaceutical value to us. This is that way:
“Change the incentives among the people who are now in that Amazonian situation or who are acting upon it. A total investment of probably less than five(!) million (not billion!) dollars, easily within reach of even a single philanthropist or nature-advocacy group, can not only result in preserving what remains of the Amazonian rainforest but in its actual restoration!!! Here is how to do that.
The Solution
“Amazonian iguana require a forest habitat. A very efficient feed converter, such lizards make an excellent meat animal, tasting similar to chicken. The change in incentive, the solution that can save the Amazon and all its richnesses, is: