Two new National Parks created in the Amazon Rainforest

In Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has just created two new national parks in the Amazon rain forest. Additionally he has expanded another park to protect an environmentally sensitive region where the government has plans for a major highway project. The decree puts 3.7 million acres of rainforest under protection of development.

"The protected land lies in an area where President Silva declared a logging moratorium after the killing last year of Dorothy Stang, an American nun and environmental defender.

Stang, who spent the last 23 years of her life defending poor communities against the loggers and land grabbers who abound in the Amazon, was killed in a land dispute with a local rancher on Feb. 12, 2005.

Her killing sparked an international uproar, and within days the government declared the creation of two national parks and two reserves areas where people can live as long as they do not damage the forest, along with the logging moratorium along the BR-163.

Two gunmen have been convicted for Stang's killing and two ranchers are awaiting trial on charges of ordering her death."

Environmentalist weren't as excited about the anouncement.

""The moratorium proved to be effective because it gave the state power to act against those who thought they could illegally seize public lands," said Claudio Maretti, coordinator of protected areas for the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brazil. "But the government should be quicker to declare protected areas in other regions." "

After the decree the total area in the Amazon under some form of federal protection is now about 113 million acres.

The Brazilian Amazon spreads over 1.6 million square miles, about the size of western Europe. Experts proclaim that as much as 20 percent of the forest has been destroyed by farming, logging and development. They estimate that last year the forest lost a near-record 10,000 square miles.

Tags: amazon, rainforest, brazil, amazon rain forest, environment