In the long term, such movements ought to provide a lifeline for the Amazon forest.
The Amazon forest provides a relevant example: due to the interaction of deforestation, fire and climate change, it is predicted that the Amazon could undergo a widespread dieback in the future, with parts of the forest moving into a self-perpetuating cycle of more frequent fires and intense droughts, leading to a shift to savanna-like vegetation.
"And people go gaga when they find 5 new species in the Amazon rain forest, " says Barton.
The Amazon rain forest covers a huge area, roughly half as large as the United States, with about 60% of it in Brazil.
Over the past decade, Brazil has cracked down on clear-cutting, especially in the biodiverse Amazon rain forest, reducing the rate of deforestation by 80%.
Now suppose we made you either Indiana Jones or Lara Croft and dropped you into the middle of the Amazon Rain Forest and you had to get home?
Growing crops to feed animals requires a lot more land, energy and fertilizer than growing them to feed people, he says: 70% of the land that was once Amazon rain forest is dedicated to grazing.
Drive just 10km east from Papallacta and you enter the Amazon Basin's cloud forest, which covers the slopes and the valley in green growth.
When Belo gets built, around 20, 000 will have to relocate, hundreds of acres of virgin forest will be flooded, and the Amazon tributary, the Xingu River, will be diverted to feed the turbines that will potentially generate 11, 200 megawatts of electricity if all goes swimmingly well.
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On Thursday, however, questions abounded as to whether the service will amount to simply a "me too" move, following Apple and Amazon's well-worn trail through the digital-music forest, or a significant step toward making Google an e-music player.
One of his greatest concerns is to preserve a surprising and recently discovered world beneath the Amazon - a series of caves lurking in the iron ore under the forest floor.
Having chopped down almost all of the Mata Atlantica, the forest along Brazil's east coast, they have moved into the Amazon, where they have recently been joined by Malaysian plywood firms.
And while most deforestation still occurs on the Amazon basin's southern rim, it is increasingly common in the heart of the forest.
"If extreme droughts like these become more frequent, the days of the Amazon rainforest acting as a natural buffer to man-made carbon emissions may be numbered, " forest ecologist Simon Lewis, from University College London, has said.
"The mere expectation that the amendment to the Forest Law and its consequent weakening would be approved set off a disturbing wave of renewed deforestation in the Amazon region, as has been unequivocally demonstrated by data recently released by the Brazilian Space Research Institute (INPE), " they write.
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