Chainsaws, bulldozers, and fires are the tools of rainforest destruction, but roads are the enablers which link markets to resources and empower loggers, farmers, ranchers, miners, and land speculators to convert remote forests into economic opportunities. - As William F. Laurance insists, “actively limiting frontier roads is by far the most realistic, cost-effective approach to promote the conservation of tropical nature and its crucial ecosystem services.” -- However, governments will continue with road construction to supply the world market until they realize the ultimate costs of those roads far exceed the short-term benefits, for Brazil and for the world. --- Once the ecocide is complete and the Amazon destroyed, the people of Brazil will be in a statistically similar position of development and a state of general welfare as they were before, but the abundance of natural resources that would have sustained itself indefinitely will be gone, therefore, objectively leaving them worse-off. --- --- For the most part, the development occurring in Brazil is a biological and social one-way street; where roads advance, trees fall and the inhabitants of the forest – human and nonhuman – are forever changed.