Deforestation in Brazil Rises Over 12 Months

This is bad:

Concerns over the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest resurfaced at the weekend after it emerged that deforestation jumped by 64% over the last 12 months, according to official government data.
Brazil's National Institute for Space Research this week said that around 3,145 square miles - an area half the size of Wales - were razed between August 2007 and August 2008.

The Lula government has been trying to deal with this in a number of ways, such as sending more military groups in to patrol the forests and trying to crack down on ranchers who cut down forest or sponsor crimes against environmentalists in the region). These efforts may be making some progress in slowing deforestation down; the article does mention (in what I certainly hope is a new trend and not a brief shift) that deforestation has dropped over the last couple of months, including a 25% drop from May to June of this year (meaning the growth of deforestation could have been even higher that it actually has been for the last 12 months). That it could have been worse, though, does not take away from how terrible the deforestation already is.

Clearly, despite any governmental efforts, it apparently hasn't been enough, probably both because the government hasn't done enough and because, unfortunately, in the Amazon there is only so much the Brazilian government can do. But a 64% growth of deforestation after 3 years of decline is nothing but bad, and indicates that current policies just aren't working.