Forget champagne, watches and cars: in the next James Bond film, the villain might be found in a Brazilian Atlantic forest hideaway, stroking a long-eared jerboa in a diamond collar.

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Drive east and you see the same, an undulent landscape carpeted with buildings completed or under construction, roads thick with traffic, and a few forlorn patches of the original Atlantic Forest or more recently transplanted eucalyptus trees to break up the relentless jumble of concrete.

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As I rolled off the boat into heaving waters caused by constant huge Atlantic swells, I entered a great swaying underwater forest of kelp.

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After almost 10 years of contentious wrangling between the community and developer Forest City Ratner, the first completed building in the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment opened in September.

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Forest City Ratner, currently engaged in a vast project for the Atlantic Yards on the Brooklyn waterfront, which includes a basketball stadium for the Nets designed by Frank Gehry, has made token changes in cooperation with community representatives, although questions remain about densities and scale.

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It has rampaged eastwards into northern Alberta for the first time. (It has also made localised attacks on forests in all 11 western American states.) Scientists now fear the voracious beetle is about to invade the jack pines of the boreal forest, which could see the plague sweep across northern Canada to the Atlantic coast.

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Forest City plans to work with engineering firm Arup and manufacturer XSite Modular to build the modular units at a 100, 000-square-foot factory space in New York City Forest City is looking at sites in Brooklyn then ship them to Atlantic Yards.

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