18 months ago the Amazon was burning. An unprecedented number of wildfires were threatening “the earth’s lungs” with irreversible damage, and it thus fell on the global community to make sure that we forcefully protected the source of 20% of the world’s oxygen from an inept government happy to watch it all burn.
This is another good longform take that covers a few things I skipped over here for length:
- Brazil's historical anxiety about settling the Amazon so as to ensure it could preserve its borders/claims
- The ways in which the government is able to undermine its own enforcement arms (e.g., paying agencies to issue fines, then just never collecting on them)
- How easy it is for ranchers and loggers to get around official restrictions / conservation measures if they feel like it (again much easier when the government isn't taking enforcement seriously from the top down)
- The issue of land titling and how it factors in (which from my reading seems super complex and varied by region/province)
- How selective logging is often the beachhead that leads to larger deforestation efforts (and how degradation from selective logging and mining etc is causing its own class of massive problems)
I also like the line of graffiti that the reporter found: "When the law ignores reality, reality takes revenge on the law." I feel like that cuts to the heart of it from a local POV.
Hmm - not sure why anyone mentioned carbon sequestration or oxygen production, neither of them are a significant issue related to the tropical rain forests. Instead it is major loss of biodiversity,
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/amazon-rainforest-deforestation-crisis/article37722932/
This is another good longform take that covers a few things I skipped over here for length:
- Brazil's historical anxiety about settling the Amazon so as to ensure it could preserve its borders/claims
- The ways in which the government is able to undermine its own enforcement arms (e.g., paying agencies to issue fines, then just never collecting on them)
- How easy it is for ranchers and loggers to get around official restrictions / conservation measures if they feel like it (again much easier when the government isn't taking enforcement seriously from the top down)
- The issue of land titling and how it factors in (which from my reading seems super complex and varied by region/province)
- How selective logging is often the beachhead that leads to larger deforestation efforts (and how degradation from selective logging and mining etc is causing its own class of massive problems)
I also like the line of graffiti that the reporter found: "When the law ignores reality, reality takes revenge on the law." I feel like that cuts to the heart of it from a local POV.
Hmm - not sure why anyone mentioned carbon sequestration or oxygen production, neither of them are a significant issue related to the tropical rain forests. Instead it is major loss of biodiversity,
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/23/5775
Are there good models that can be emulated? — tropical forests that are being preserved and expanded?
I agree herb the author that even in America I’m not aware of a lot of good forest preservation or the reconstitution of forests.