Inside the Tapajos National Forest, where 228 people have joined in a cooperative known as Coomflona, workers display sandals and wallets made of latex from rubber trees, necklaces and earrings made from the seeds of plants and tiny bottles of plant oils, pictured below at right.

More important, they talk about how they are harvesting timber from the rainforest with extreme care, strictly limiting the number of trees that are cut, preserving younger specimens and removing the older ones with minimum impact.

These activities and others like them -- harvesting acai or Brazil nuts, ecotourism, or developing oils for medicinal or cosmetic use -- are absolutely vital to protecting the Amazon because they generate the income needed by the people who live there.

They're often called sustainable livelihoods, meaning that they are ways to make a living that preserve or restore the environment.

Without them, people would resort to cattle ranching -- small-scale agriculture, soy farming or illegal logging -- the very activities that already have deforested nearby areas, as shown at left.

Yesterday (July 21), I visited Coomflona with a small group of reporters from the U.S., UK, France and Brazil. Before the visit, we took a charter flight from the small city of Santarem over the Tapajos forest to see the contrast between protected zones and denuded areas. Below is an image of the forest and another of deforestation, taken from the plane:

After the flight, we drove an hour from Santerem to the coop -- a potential solution to the problem of deforestation, albeit at a small scale. Coomflona, which began in 2005 with lots of Brazilian government and international support, has organized people from nearby communities to exploit the rainforest in sustainable ways.

"The secret is to find the right tools to create income for the people, while preserving the forest," says Darlyson Fernandez of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, a government agency that supports the operation.