Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.
The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico.
The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis.Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil.
In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded by pastureland will lose species in a process biogeographers call “ecosystem decay.”
If so, it will have taken local opportunists – armed with chainsaws, bulldozers, and chants of “land, land, land” – little more than a century to destroy a rain forest 10 million years old and composed of some 390bn trees. Perhaps then, in the hot, brutal and not-too-distant future, when historians chronicle humanity’s destruction of its own home planet, the killing of the Amazon will rank at or near the top. And all the reasons why it had to be done – so pressing at the time – will seem trite until, stripped away, two fundamental causes remain: ignorance and greed.
Every day there's one of these stories of ecological devastation, human indifference and political lethargy. The world as we know it, the biosphere that is essential to all life on our planet, is being relentlessly picked apart and we're just letting it happen, in some cases subsidizing it to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
I think we should tread carefully when condemning Brazil's forest management.
ReplyDeleteI have done business with Canada's forest giants and nowadays their less organised offspring who are now competing for the remnants of a once mighty resource.
As an old mayor of Prince Rupert once said.
Once we had fishing , now that is gone.
Then we had forestry , now that is gone.
NOW we have and need oil and gas!!
Such is our ignorance of our 'leadership' !
As I slide into retirement having done business with many aspects our our economy it is disconcerting to experience the downfall of what should have been RENEWABLE resource industry family incomes squandered at the alter of Neo Liberalism and greed.
I say that as those I know in the fishing industry and forest industry cannot or are unwilling to ask.
What the fuck went wrong?
TB
Our ethos became one of "because we can' with little regard to whether we should. It has been a mentality of maximized pillage. If we had thought about it at all we would have seen how this ends.
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