Special Report: Brazil backslides on protecting the Amazon

Ivo Lubrinna has been wildcatting for gold in the jungle here for more than 30 years. It's a notoriously messy business, as crews strip away topsoil in the forest and along riverbanks and use mercury and other pollutants to draw precious metal from mud.

Brazil's well-established environmental movement is aghast. Rousseff's policies, they say, endanger the world's largest rainforest, the storehouse of one-eighth of the planet's fresh water, a primary source of its oxygen and home to countless rare and undiscovered plant and animal species, as well as tens of thousands of native tribespeople. The short-term economic gain, Rousseff's critics say, isn't worth the potential long-term cost to the global environment, as well as Brazil's economy.

"This is a government willing to sacrifice the resources for thousands of years in exchange for a few decades of profit," says Marina Silva, a former environment minister and a pioneer of Brazil's green movement.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/03/us-brazil-environment-backslide-idUSBRE8720GP20120803