Why Focus on Brazil?

    The possibility of narrowing the scope of Mission 2006 to the Brazilian region of the Amazon was mentioned. It wasn't meant that we should abandon the idea of protecting the Amazon as a whole, but all of our research should be to be consistent. It is simply not feasible for some groups to reach the level of depth in their research necessary for drawing informed conclusions and creating a persuasive presentation in December. This is especially true of our legal/political/public relations group and probably the socio-economic group as well.

    We debated the costs and benefits of making such a change in the scope of the project, and we believe that all the groups ought to at least be researching the same region of the rainforest.  Oherwise research will be disconnected, making inter-group communication less worthwhile, and we may end up with conflicting and fragmented findings when the time comes for us to make our final presentation. In other words, if we try to maintain some consistency in our research, it will be a ton easier to connect the dots and draw conclusions in the final stages of this project.

    This shouldn’t be a very big deal for most groups, since most of the Amazon is in Brazil, and we’d all agree that the Brazilian Amazon alone covers a fairly huge area. Even within the country of Brazil, our group is already limiting our research to a couple key states. We believe that if we can develop an effective strategy for monitoring and preserving the Amazon in any single state, then we will already have a strategy for preserving the Amazon as a whole.

 Summary: in order to support our general strategy for monitoring and preserving the Amazon, we ought to use specific “case studies” as evidence of our findings, and these case studies ought to be reasonably consistent from one group the next. This will make our final presentation much easier, because the overall structure will be less bound to individual group presentations.