text: The creation of conservation areas and indigenous reserves led to a decrease of around 75% in deforestation starting in 2004. In Lula's first year in office, in 2003-04, 25,000 square kilometers of Brazilian forest were destroyed, the second-worst devastation since 1977. In late 2006, the Instituto Soicioambiental environmental group said that deforestation in Lula's first four years had been worse than in any four-year period since 1988. By 2009, Brazil's Amazon destruction—though lower—was still about 7,000 square kilometers a year, larger than the US state of Delaware. Critics said, however, that Brazil's lowest rate of deforestation in 2009 was a function of the global financial crisis. Paulo Adario of Greenpeace said that it was a function not of efforts to protect the climate, but of the fact that the "demand for beef, soya and wood ha[d] dramatically fallen".
  In 2009, Lula gave a speech in which he said that "gringos" should pay Amazon nations to prevent deforestation.
  In February 2010, Lula's government approved the construction of a controversial hydroelectric mega Belo Monte Dam in the middle of the Amazon rain forest in the Brazilian state of Pará. It was to be the third-largest hydroelectric dam in the world. Environmental activists protested the building of the dam. It was expected to cause a significant decline in the water table, resulting in significant losses of aquatic and terrestrial fauna, and adversely impact aquatic mammals.  Approximately 20,000-40,000 indigenous people were to be resettled with little or no compensation, and 516 square kilometers (199 square miles) of rain forest were to be flooded for the dam's construction.
  Foreign policy
  In 1979, Lula was asked in an interview which historical figures he admired most. He answered: Gandhi, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong. Upon being asked to give additional examples, he added Fidel Castro saying: "I admire in a man the fire to want to do something, and then his going out to try to do it."