TV programs worth watching
Sun September 21 — Sat September 27

The Amazon rainforest has been described as "the lungs of the planet". 
Its continued destruction by fire and clearing has far reaching potential 
consequences.

In 1988, Brazilian trade union leader Chico Mendes, campaigner for the 
rights of the Amazon's rubber workers, was assassinated. But at the United 
Nations Environmental Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, his policy of 
protecting the forest by helping the people who live within it was seen as 
the best way forward.

A decade later, as the Cutting Edge documentary Fires of the 
Amazon (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday) shows, it still is. But the outlook for 
Amazonia is even bleaker.

Today, Chico's ex-aides and associates are the Mayor of his hometown of 
Xapuri, the Governor of his state of Acre, and the leader of the opposition 
in the Brazilian Senate. His closest associate, Mary Allegretti, is the 
Federal Government's Secretary for Amazonia. The underdogs of Amazonia have 
come to power.

Progress has been made. In Fires of the Amazon, Mary Allegretti shows us 
the rubber tapper reserves that she and Chico set up. Protected by 
legislation, the reserves cannot be challenged; and every year somewhere in 
Amazonia, a handful of new reserves are set up.

Co-operative factories for rubber and Brazil nuts have begun to provide 
higher prices for forest products, and Duda Mendes, Chico's brother, says 
his income — from the sustainable logging of timber — has increased 
fourfold.

But the Brazilian Government's planned "Avanca Brasil" development program 
will fund the paving of half a dozen highways through Amazonia. A recent 
report in the American journal Science estimates that this will leave the 
area 28-42 percent deforested by 2020, with vast additional areas of forest 
degraded.

It also appears that selected logging inside the reserves, while it leaves 
most of the trees standing, thins out the density of the forest and punches 
holes in the canopy, making the forest vulnerable to fire.

In the past, standing Amazonian forest was too damp to be flammable. But 
now, Dan Nepstad of the Institute for Amazonian Environmental Research 
estimates that in periods of drought induced by the regular weather event 
El Nino, 30 percent of the forest is vulnerable to a "really mega fire 
event".

According to the British Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre for Climate 
Prediction, thanks to global warming drought alone will have killed off 
most of the forest before the end of the century.

And that should make everybody an environmentalist!

The Daleks make their first appearance in this week's vintage episodes of 
Doctor Who (ABC 6.00pm Monday-Thursday). Supposedly the most 
malevolent creatures in the universe, Daleks look like the result of mating 
a pepper pot with a kitchen tidy.

They can't run, they need a flat smooth surface on which to travel, they 
can 't go down stairs, they have no arms (or anything else) with which to 
grab their victims, they can only roll along what are presumably the 
corridors of the BBC crying "Exterminate! Exterminate!" and (according to 
the scripts) spreading fear in all directions.

To the BBC's delight, they became almost instant cult items and the first 
BBC merchandise success. They were the brainchild of Terry Nation, comedy 
writer for Tony Hancock and later writer of the action series McGyver 
(regularly and mercilessly lampooned on The Simpsons).

Unfit To Command, screening on The Big Picture (ABC 8.30pm 
Wednesday), is a hard-hitting study of the sinking in 1964 of the destroyer 
Voyager, the scapegoating of the captain of the Melbourne which sank her 
and the naval, political and legal cover-up that followed.

Written and directed by David Salter, the program exposes the culture of 
the Navy at the time, a culture that saw protecting "the good name of the 
service" as far more important than the rights of any individual person.

The cover-up was so blatant that it split the ranks of Liberal Party MPs 
themselves, and ended more than one career.

The program disappointingly fails to explore the culture within the Navy of 
safeguarding your career by keeping quiet, but at least it raises it.

The Navy in the early '60s provided Australia, in the eyes of Prime 
Minister Menzies and other political and military leaders, with security 
from "the Communist threat". They did not want anything to undermine the 
position of the military.

This aspect is not covered either. But all in all, it is a well made 
program that packs a punch.

According to US Defence Department documents, 66.6 million litres of 
chemicals were used in Vietnam.

Herbicides and defoliants were the most frequently used, so too were 
asphyxiates, tear gas, nerve gas and insecticides. Agent Orange, one of the 
main defoliants used by the US, was tainted with the deadly poison dioxin, 
100,000 times more toxic than anything found in nature.

As second and third generations of children are born with deformities, the 
US still does not acknowledge its part in the contamination in Vietnam. 
However, it does recognise the effects of Agent Orange on US veterans and 
their children!

Battle's Poison Cloud, screening on True Stories (ABC 10.00pm 
Thursday) looks at the effects of this hideous problem that continues to 
plague the population of Vietnam.

Just a few years ago there were only about 100 White Rhinos left in the 
whole of Africa. Today, the numbers are between 10,000 and 12,000. As 
wildlife conservation campaigner Saba Douglas-Hamilton says in Africa Bush 
Rescue, "it's one of the great success stories of wildlife conservation".

But other aspects of the BBC program, filmed in South Africa and screening 
on Richard Morecroft Goes Wild (ABC 6.30pm Saturday), are much less 
rosy. At a wildlife rescue centre Saba meets up with a range of orphaned 
cheetas, leopards and a baby baboon, whose parents have been shot in 
"canned hunts".

Basically, entrepreneurs fence a relatively small area of land, then 
release wildlife into it and charge "big game hunters" a bundle of money to 
go into the enclosed area and shoot the animals (which can't escape, so 
you're guaranteed a kill).

As the woman at the resue centre says, "it's all about money".

This program appears to be part of a series with Saba Douglas-Hamilton 
exploring different facets of Southern Africa's wildlife scene. This 
episode is mainly about two vets who specialise in wildlife treatment, and 
do about 600 km a day.

Curiously, the ABC appears to have only this one episode.