Economist: IN 1998 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then Brazils president, said he would triple the area of the Amazonian forest set aside for posterity. At the time the ambition seemed vain: Brazil was losing 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles) of forest a year. Over the next 15 years loggers, ranchers, environmentalists and indigenous tribes battled it out--often bloodily--in the worlds largest tropical forest. Yet all the while presidents were patiently patching together a jigsaw of national parks...