Ambroise Tézenas

Commission for The New York Times magazine (USA)

State of Amazonas, Brazil
article by Jonathan Franklin

Johan Eliasch, chairman of Head, the ski and sporting goods manufacturer, and the grandson of a Swedish property developer, has taken his business skills and invested them in a new industry - Amazon Forest conservation. Eliasch, who has a personal fortune estimated at £360m, has bought 400,000 acres in the Brazilian Amazon, near the river town of Manicore. In his parcel of land, Eliasch estimates that some 80m tons of carbon are trapped in the forest - about the same amount the entire Swedish population will produce over the next 15 years at current rates (53m tons per year).'The key to saving the Amazon and the rest of the world's great rainforests is actually very simple: just put a fair price on the role they play in providing a quarter of the world's oxygen, a fifth of fresh water and 60 per cent of its species,' declares Eliasch. Eliasch's interest in the Amazon came about from a concern that one of the effects of global warming was its destruction of the European ski season due to the lack of a critical component - snow.
The efforts by Eliasch to protect the rainforest have hit a nerve among some people in Brazil who are suspicious of foreigners coming in with plans to invest in the Amazon.
Eliasch, who admits that shutting down sawmills and putting hundreds of workers out of a job is controversial, insists that hacking down the rainforest is a wildly inefficient use of natural resources.
'Once timber is cut, there is little that can be done with the land that is is sustainable,' argues Eliasch. 'Timber extraction provides big profits at the expense of local communities.'
'Providing communities with unfettered access to harvest a forest that is protected in perpetuity provides better and more reliable incomes.'
Still, some people remain unconvinced, and it might be years before Eliasch is able to fully utilise his business acumen within the complex world of conservation.