The best way the rest of mankind could help to save the Amazon would be to show Brazil that it could make a better living from keeping its forest and exploiting it sensibly than from destroying it. Up to now, commercial companies from the rich world have done virtually nothing to support research into the marketable products of the rainforest. The job of identifying new medicines, aromatic oils and timber, and of showing how they might be sustainably exploited, has been left almost entirely to an underfinanced handful of Brazilian research institutes. By strengthening these institutes, and by turning the Amazon into a vast research laboratory, willing governments could help to internationalise the rainforest by the back door. Pack it with botanists, climatologists, hydrologists and pharmacists who will bring in spending power and bring out new ideas: scientists are likely to be more successful conservationists than innocent Indians or under-equipped forest guards.
Sometimes rainforest products in western shops could be sustainably managed but are not: chicle, the latex that makes chewing gum stretchy, is occasionally extracted by tapping trees, but more often, especially in Brazil, by cutting them down. Companies could make sure that such products are grown in a way that helps preserve the rainforest, and then advertise the fact.