John Cain Carter ’93 RM has watched the rich rain forest of Brazil’s Amazon basin go up in smoke as squatters and other outlaws cleared the vast tracts for fields and pastures.

While Brazil law requires landowners in the region to set aside some 80 percent of their land in conservation easements, the reality is the law was easily ignored.

“Command and control wasn’t working,” he said. “You need incentives, you need carrots to push people in the right direction.”

So in 2004 he founded Aliança da Terra, or Commitment to the Earth, a Brazilian non-government organization that advocates environmentally responsible land management in the Amazon rain forest.

Carter partnered with Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist at Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Center and one of the world’s foremost experts on the Amazon, and IPAM, the Amazonian Environmental Research Institute, to form a registry of Brazilian ranchers and farmers who are committed to good land stewardship. Scientists and Aliança employees geo-reference a property, gathering stats and information on wildlife, fire hazards, erosion, riparian zones, and deforestation. Then the landowner signs a Recuperation Management Plan, which is put into an auditing system that tracks the landowner’s compliance on a yearly basis.

The alliance provides economic incentives to encourage farmers and ranchers to use sustainable practices, including the ability to market their products under the alliance label — a tangible sign to consumers looking for eco-friendly options.

By the end of this year, Carter hopes to have 12 to 15 million acres of land under the alliance’s umbrella.

“We’ve built up momentum and now it’s like a revolution” he says. “We have hundreds of members coming into the system, all being proactive, all doing the right thing.”  — KH

Related stories:
Cover story: The Crucial Crusade of an Amazon Cowboy
Rewarding producers who do the right thing
Green acres: Texas ranchers preserve land to protect habitats and heritage
What you may not know about TCU Ranch Management

More information:
www.ranch.tcu.edu
www.aliancadaterra.org.br