Map Shows Millions of Acres of Lost Amazon Rainforest | Hacker News Reader

Map Shows Millions of Acres of Lost Amazon Rainforest

nationalgeographic.com

172 pointsinfodocket48 comments

The only solution is a massive embargo on products that are causing deforestation (eg Ipe hardwood, soy, cattle) until there’s a system of tracking where these are coming from in whole supply chain with international verification.

The future of the amazon forest cannot depend on governments such as Bolsonaro’s that are clearly anti-science and anti-environment.

Unfortunately no government in the world has the courage and conviction to actually do this. They're way too deep in the pockets of corporate interests, who would stand to lose significant profits if these embargoes were implemented.

I've been advocating for responsible and sustainable supply chains for years, but no politician seems to want to follow through with it.

We need to pay them not to destroy it, and build them infrastructure, for free.

There were a multitude of opportunities for the nations of South America, in particular, to flourish, and we have stolen them, either with military action, or via economic pressures and corruption, because the United States can't keep it's rabid multi-national companies on a leash.

The only just solution is to pay the people of these nations and build infrastructure so that they can have economic prosperity as well. Otherwise, there is no better place for them to look than the jungles that we all depend on for survival.

People in South American countries have as much agency as people in the US. Among other things, they are capable of corruption and destruction on their own. The solution for preventing natural ecosystems loss in South America is to be primarily found in South America, not in the US. Or China for that matter.

If someone outside South America goes in to South America and creates problems via military force, the solution to that problem may indeed come from the outside force changing its behavior. We are all connected and forces outside of South America have definitely contributed to economic problems on the continent.

> People in South American countries have as much agency as people in the US.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it seems as though you're implying that the US bears no responsibility for the present state of those countries.

I'm not sure if you have knowledge of the history of South America and the horrors of regime change that directly resulted from American foreign policy. If you don't, I'd suggest reading more about it as it will clearly explain a lot of the present socioeconomic issues in that region of the world. I very much doubt anyone could imply anything of the like with full knowledge of what occurred there during the 70s and 80s.

I do agree with your final sentence though, that the solution should primarily be found in South America.

This would likely result in the opposite of the desired effect.

History has shown that the only reliable way to make a people more environmentally-conscious is to make enough of them wealthy enough to have the free time/energy/sentimentality to care.

Aren’t wealthy people more responsible for consumption of the beef that is being grown on clear cut forest land?

If you look inside the refrigerators of 100 wealthy people and 100 poor people, in which group would you expect see more packaging with the following phrases:

    "Organic",

    "Sustainably Raised",

    "Cage Free",

    "Dolphin Safe"?

But the poor people just wont have any meat in their refrigerators.

Wealthy people may make more superficial choices regarding environmental impact, but broadly speaking energy consumption is directly related to one's standard of living. The reality is that what one eats and what kind of car one drives is not especially important in terms of environmental impact. Even you don't drive a car at all, you're still consuming fossil fuels for transport every time you buy goods that were shipped to you (or goods whose components were shipped at any point from raw resource extraction to final assembly, so basically everything). Even if you don't eat meat, a huge number of facets in one's life is contingent on converting land to be used by humans in some way (e.g. paving roads, clearing power lines for utilities, etc.). Impact of these superficial choices is minimal.

The most environmentally friendly type of living is being a subsistence farmer or a hunter-gatherer in a part of the world that is not industrialized at all. Like Papua New Guinea. But of course few people would want to trade their first world lives to live like the average Papua. Our standards of living are directly correlated with energy consumption. Having a peaceful society with good healthcare, education, and employment means having a food production industry industrialized enough such that a small portion of society can maintain the industries necessary for survival while most of the rest of the population provides services to each other and there's still enough surplus to spend on welfare and other resources dedicated to those that can't contribute effectively. This cannot be done in subsistence societies - heck it can rarely be accomplished reliably even in industrialized societies, and it has only been achieved with a relative degree of stability in the wealthiest post-industrial societies.

Not eating meat isn't going to stop deforestation in the Amazon - this is a fundamental misunderstanding of why the Amazon is disappearing. The Amazon ins disappearing because South Americans have decided that the economic growth provided by deforestation is worth the environmental impact. Growing cattle is only part of what this land is used for, and while lower demand for beef may reduce the rate at which the land is used to grow cows it doesn't fulfill the desires that is driving deforestation. The deforestation will stop when the people that are in a position to decide whether to convert forest to farm or pasture feels the preservation of the forest outweighs the bounties provided by the latter. Robust alternatives to agriculture as a means for economic growth are what will affect deforestation, but bringing wealth to hundreds of millions of people in South America is a tougher problem to solve.

And if South Americans choose to prioritize economic growth over the environment are we in such a good position to judge them? When much of the first world was in South America's position in terms of industrialization and social development, we chose to cut down forests, exploit natural resources, and convert wilderness into agricultural land or for other uses. It's the easiest way to climb the ladder of development and become an industrialized society. It'd be better for the environment if other countries didn't follow our example, but it'd be hypocritical to judge them for making the same decisions our societies did when we stood in their shoes.

> This would likely result in the opposite of the desired effect.

> make enough of them wealthy enough

No, it is a very good idea. The champions on deforestation in Brazil are precisely the wealthiest plutocrats in the country, big farmers and the lumber industry. They are also the ones more susceptible to economic pressure.

Blairo Maggi, a former agriculture minister in Brazil, was nicknamed "the golden chainsaw" for the huge deforestation he promoted. Some agricultural embargoes by the European Union were enough to get him a change of heart, defend more forest conservation and turn him into a critic of the environmental policies of the Bozo (our new president).

I’m not sure how we will ever get humanity to agree on whatever solution is necessary. There is too much profit to be made in the short term, and the consequences won’t be felt by the people destroying the environment today.

Your comment is politically antagonistic. Keep your politics out and focus on the message [0]:

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It destroys intellectual curiosity, which the site exists for."

Bolsonaro has only been President of Brazil since January of this year, and yet you are saying the future cannot depend on people like him?

Not sure how he can cause such wide deforestation in only 4 months. The future of the Amazon surely doesn't depend on the people before him who made this mess!

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the articles such as this, I would always want to see a paragraph about basics of what is carbon dioxide, about its increase in atmosphere during last hundred years or so and of what many scientists suggest this increase will entail in changing global climate. And how deforestation at this scale greatly contributes to the release of co2 to the atmosphere.

Many among us will of course know all this and more, but for a large swaths of people, these fundamentals are lost in all the hand waving about climate change making it just a bit easier to not pay attention. Repetition. Repetition.

Until the locals have an alternative means of income, I don't foresee a solution to this problem.

It's all too easy for those in affluent countries to criticize the recklessness and irresponsibility of developing nations, but people such as cattle farmers (who are responsible for much of the land clearing that's going on) don't have the luxury of worrying about the world environment 50 years from now. As far as they are concerned, that's a far away and abstract threat vs the more immediate concern of how they are going to feed their families.

Maybe the advent of new technologies like Beyond Meat, or new advances in construction materials (that could disincentive the use of unsustainable types of lumber in a meaningful way) will be the kinds of things paving the way forward for rainforest preservation.

> Until the locals have an alternative means of income.

Which locals? As long as the global demand for cattle is growing, people will move into the Amazon and turn it into pasture. Between strong population growth [1 billion every 20 years] and global enrichment, global demand for commodities is all but guaranteed to grow.

Don't be fooled, this is 99% the work of big corporations, and not individual farmers or loggers (if such a thing still exists). Most of the workers will have moved to the area because of the jobs.

This may be true, unfortunately I couldn't find any hard statistics about who is doing the land clearing and cattle ranching. I'd be curious to read about it.

I found a line in a wikipedia article [1] that says "In 1995 nearly half, 48%, of the deforestation in Brazil was attributed to poorer farmers clearing lots under 125 acres (0.51 km2) in size" though that was 24 years ago so that figure has probably changed.

There is a pretty in-depth study on Amazon deforestation here [2] that says:

>In Amazonia as a whole, large (officially defined in Brazilian Amazonia as > 1000 ha) and medium-sized (101–1000 ha) actors have traditionally predominated in deforestation (Fearnside, 1993, 2008b); but the relative importance of small (≤ 100 ha) farmers has been increasing, as indicated by the decreasing average size of new clearings (Rosa, Souza, & Ewers, 2012)

They also seem to lack hard numbers on who is doing the deforesting:

>Two key questions affecting the relationship of population and deforestation are (a) who are the actors, such as ranchers versus small farmers, and (b) what population and land use is being replaced. If the situation is one of small farmers replacing “unoccupied” forest, then a greater population (of small farmers) translates into more deforestation. If it is ranchers who are replacing “unoccupied” forest, then the same relationship applies, although the number of people will be lower and the amount of deforestation per capita will be much greater. If the situation is one of ranchers replacing small farmers, then the human population will decrease and the rate of deforestation per capita will increase, resulting in a negative relationship between population change and deforestation rate.

They summarize with:

>It is not enough to prohibit deforestation and punish violations—alternatives must be offered for supporting the small farmers who sustain themselves by clearing forest, for both subsistence and commercial production.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Brazil#Cattle...

[2]https://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/view/10.1093/acref...

Reasons for this: "Ranching, mining, soy production". The world eating more meat is probably a huge driver for this demand. We will literally eat the planet to its death.

It's fine. We can just replant a single specie of a tree and pretend the world has more trees than ever! HN adores using this analogy when it comes to the stupidity of mankind.

I think the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) qualifies.

Those damn things grow 6' a year in adverse conditions. They also spread seeds like mad.

And produce toxins that suppress surround plant germination so they're perfect for the One-Tree-To-Save-Us-All plan.

Except Minnesota labeled them a noxious weed but we can charge them an air tax if they don't get on-board.

From the wiki article on the tree, I don’t think most people will appreciate it:

In many urban areas, it has acquired the derisive nicknames of "ghetto palm", "stink tree", and "tree of Hell".

I hope that this is sarcasm. Ailanthus is one of the most dangerous species of trees in the planet. There is not excuse, this is known since decades.

If the goal is to destroy nature in the stupidest way possible, Ailanthus is the weapon of choice.

Care to elaborate on the dangers?

Spreading like a plague, robbing other plants from light and nutrients, while simultaneously secreting toxins that suppress the spread of other plants, further ensuring that it stands as lone victor.

Nothing that will bring us direct harm (apart from it being smelly), but exterminating other types of plants might bring us plenty of indirect harm.

> Spreading like a plague, robbing other plants from light and nutrients, while simultaneously secreting toxins that suppress the spread of other plants, further ensuring that it stands as lone victor.

Oh, you're talking about trees. Thought you meant us.

> Care to elaborate on the dangers?

Can cause allergies

Is toxic for domestic animals

Their wood is useless, too soft and brittle to be usable. Being toxic, its sawdust is a biological hazard in carpentry.

Is bad for biodiversity. Virtually unerradicable when enters in a forest. Grows in dense thicks that compete and displace native plants. If chopped regrows much faster and multiplies aggresively.

Is toxic for other plants. Drips its own herbicide from the leaves, killing all other tree seedlings around.

Therefore is toxic for crops also.

Is a huge economic disaster. Damages foundations, streets, railways, sidewalks and water channels.

Is bad for cultural inheritance. A nightmare for conservation of hystorical buildings. Must be removed routinely from the roofs (unless you want 3m high trees growing trough the roof of your 800 years Cathedral in three years). One single female tree can produce around 100.000 seedlings each year that fly with the wind.

Has caused more than 5 millions of Euro of damages in just one of the Deustch landers, including 1,5 millions Euro just by allergies. And has been naively introducted in 30 countries.

Oh, and the male flower stinks.

If it spreads so quickly and efficiently, how come it hasn't overwhelmed most ecosystems yet?

In just 250 years has conquered most European countries, appears in all USA states, can be found in India, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.

Looks like a perfect example of world conquest to me.

Forgot to mention that the species can't be safely cut. Prolonged exposure to sap in humans produces dermatitis first, and then chills, fever, pain chest and myocarditis

Neither can be used as fuel in bonfires or fireplaces (wood releases toxic fumes when burnt)

It is a wonderful example of how nature cares for nothing other than the spread of an organism, destroying anything and anyone in its path if it would bring even the slightest convenience.

Ignoring our own extremely destructive habits for a moment, I believe we might be the only organism with interests in preserving other types of organisms.

(The destructiveness of nature also makes it terribly hilarious when people consider "natural" things—as opposed to man-made, synthetic things—to somehow equal "healthy", as nature is usually doing its very best to kill us.)

Mutualism exists in nature, and is especially represented in different species of ants.

I was not referring to a case of mutualism. Mutualism implies a bidirectional benefit of the relationship. I believe the ants you refer to trade defense services for honeydew from smaller bugs, for example.

Mutualism is still very interesting, but what I was referring to was a case of preserving another organism without a direct benefit. For example, wild dolphins protecting humans from sharks or similar.

I hope that this is sarcasm.

I thought threatening MN with an 'air tax' was a suitable replacement for the '/s'.

There is no basic agreement as to what causes climate change; bear with me...

- Climate scientists think it’s CO2e emissions

- Environmentalists think it’s deforestation

- Conservation biologists think it’s over population

- Neoclassical economists think its failure to internalise externalities into the price signal

- Marxist economists think it’s the pathology of capitalism

- Sociologists thinks it’s because people are poor/because people are rich depending on their mood

- Development economists think it’s because societies are not rich enough to invest in environment as a luxury good

- Bankers think it’s because environmental management does not produce investment opportunities

- Policy makers think it’s bad policy

- Game theorists think it’s prisoner’s dilemma

- Evolutionary psychologists think it’s our evolutionary mindset

- Technology dystopians think it’s bad technology

- Technological utopians tell us not to worry

- The Daily Mail thinks it’s immigrants

- Donald Trump thinks it’s fake news

- And Jordan Peterson thinks it’s cultural Marxism

In a sense they’re all right within a certain context (except the climate scientists who have the easiest diagnosis and Peterson who is definitely not right on climate change).

But increasingly climate change is one of those issues that we throw our welt anschaung and tunnel vision at.

To paraphrase: “we don’t see climate change as it is, we see it as we are”.

In other news, Brazil's minister of the environment, Ricardo Salles, recently criticized the Brazilian constitution for imposing too many obligations, and the previous left-wing governments for having slowed down the economic development of the country through bureaucratic and ideological means. He also said that his job was more about undoing that doing.

It looks like the current Brazilian government is not going to try to prevent deforestation, to the contrary.

(source in French: https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/05/02/au-bresil-..., original interview in Portuguese but I can't understand it unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzzIbojpIuE)

What’s the consensus on that assertion from The Matrix in which the human race is actually a virus on the planet, slowly consuming its resources and sucking the life out of it and AI is actually going to save the planet from the virus? Other species do seem to have no issue living sustainably within the environment. Humans on the other hand......

According to the same report of Global Forest Watch : https://gfw2-data.s3.amazonaws.com/country-pages/country_sta... Russia comes as close second for years 2001-2018 and a strong leader for last years.

There are many deserted regions around the world.

Desertification in those areas is increasing, especially North Africa, and Central Asia.

The focus of environmentalists on the Rainforest is not productive. Solutions need to be future-oriented, and not directed towards restricting economic growth.

In other words, it is of primary importance for enivornmental organizations to create a positive vision of a greened planet, with a systematic forestation program for Africa and Central Asia, to create a prosperous environment and give Africans and Asians a future.

This vision is central to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Marshall_Plan as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holistic_management_(agricultu...

Meanwhile, let Brazil have their wealth and prosperity with cutting a couple of their trees, they have too many anyway.

You do realize it's not just about the trees, right? You exterminate an uncountable amount of species of fauna and flora too alongside the way, including ones that could very well have been used for medicinal research.

Some comments are just tongue-in-cheek.

As long as environmentalists only complain about the bad things, instead of actually building from a positive vision, nothing will happen.

For example, why is Greenpeace et al. suppressing the knowledge from Allan Savory?

Because Allan Savory’s holistic grazing system is context dependent. And Allan Savory is also held in suspicion because of his elephant culling policy - later much regretted - from the 80s.

hmm ok, he says everyone ignores him and he gets no money from any NG0, and that his system could regreen the entire planet.

In the real world, when you have a good idea, you prove it out at a basic level and then try and show it works in other contexts. In the environmental sector you bitch and gripe about no-one listening to you!

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