Articles by Glenn Hurowitz

Newsweek’s cover story deserves Pulitzer — and global action

Newsweek's Sharon Begley and Scott Johnson should get the Pulitzer Prize for last week's Newsweek cover story, "Slaughter in the Jungle." It was the most moving story of the year and clearly based on truly intrepid reportage. More importantly, I hope it provokes action to stop this brutal global slaughter of wildlife.

Scott Johnson went into the rainforest in the war-torn Congo, home to much of Africa's remaining 700 mountain gorillas. Miles from the nearest town, he discovered and recorded the worst massacre of gorillas in more than 25 years.

The rangers found the first corpse less than a hundred yards away, in a grove of vines and crooked thicket. The mammoth gorilla lay on her side, a small pink tongue protruding slightly from her lips. She was pregnant and her breasts were engorged with milk for the baby that now lay dead inside her womb ... They have not been killed for their meat or their pelts or their internal organs. In fact, no one is quite sure why they've been killed.

Be sure to check out Johnson's astonishing photos of the gorillas. What makes them so powerful, I think, is that they capture our commonality with our fellow creatures: in life, the gorillas seem inspired by the same needs and emotions as we are; in death, their poses and deep, mournful expressions evoke a crucifixion -- in this case, they are sacrifices to human greed, violence, and apathy.

It's clear, however, that whatever the facts and the tragedy of this assassination are, the gorillas are looking extinction in the eye because of many of the same threats that are menacing wildlife around the world.

Soros, Goldman Sachs financing destruction of Brazilian forests

Well, that whole beating George Bush thing in 2004 didn't work out, so now billionaire financier / Democratic fundraiser / anti-Communist crusader George Soros is back to his first love: making money -- apparently even when it comes at the expense of the planet.

Sabrina Valle of the Washington Post is reporting that Soros is one of the biggest investors in growing sugarcane ethanol in the Brazilian cerrado, "a vast plateau where temperatures range from freezing to steaming hot and bushes and grasslands alternate with forests and the richest variety of flora of all the world's savannas."

That could soon come to an end. In the past four decades, more than half of the Cerrado has been transformed by the encroachment of cattle ranchers and soybean farmers. And now another demand is quickly eating into the landscape: sugarcane, the raw material for Brazilian ethanol.

"Deforestation in the Cerrado is actually happening at a higher rate than it has in the Amazon," said John Buchanan, senior director of business practices for Conservation International in Arlington.

"If the actual deforestation rates continue, all the remaining vegetation in the Cerrado could be lost by the year 2030. That would be a huge loss of biodiversity."

The roots of this transformation lie in the worldwide demand for ethanol, recently boosted by a U.S. Senate bill that would mandate the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, more than six times the capacity of the United States' 115 ethanol refineries. President Bush, who proposed a similar increase in his State of the Union address, visited Brazil and negotiated a deal in March to promote ethanol production in Latin America and the Caribbean.