‘The Amazon Is Completely Lawless’: The Rainforest After Bolsonaro’s First Year | Hacker News Reader

‘The Amazon Is Completely Lawless’: The Rainforest After Bolsonaro’s First Year

nytimes.com

41 pointsvo2maxer12 comments

It’s angry making. But I wouldn’t blame those farmers. They’re trying to make a living, and farming is probably the only realistic choice. We would all do the same if faced with that situation. What’s more important to you, climate change or feeding your children?

The blame goes all the way back to the consumers, which are probably people like us living in First World countries. We are reaping the benefits of deforestation (lots of cheap beef) but now we are seeing the downsides.

Living our First World lifestyles and simultaneously criticizing deforestation are contradictory.

I believe we ain’t seen nothin yet. Just imagine if the other 6.5 billion people live like us. Who can blame them for wanting to? I’m talking frequent worldwide travel, plenty of meat, having our own cars (doesn’t matter if electric or not), living in nice single family homes like we all want to (even if not all of us can), having 2-3 kids and giving them the same lifestyle. There would not be a single tree left.

I think this destruction is difficult to stop because while we all admit to the damage, nobody is yet willing to make the sacrifice.

You can forgo the beef.

I did 18 years ago.

Why is Brazil getting all the negativity? Bolivia has as big fires as Brazil despite being tiny. If you want to protect the Amazon you need to lobby your politicians to start some sort of tax for that in order to compensate Brazil its development plans. The western world has logged off theirs long time ago.

> Why is Brazil getting all the negativity?

Brazil's current president is a right-wing Trump-like politician, the type of which mainstream media loves to hate.

Is the article factual and if not, can you quote some credible sources to dispute it? Is it merely a Bolsonaro hit piece or is it one among many worrisome factors contributing to climate change? I don’t think Maduro gets less hate in the mainstream media.

Why is Brazil getting all the negativity?

They aren't getting all the attention: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/opinion/bolivia-amazon-fi...

That is blatantly wrong - they have more forrest than they did centuries ago.

Second they are right to expect better of the 9th largest nominal GDP nation.

What part of my statement was blatantly wrong?

That the west logged off all of their forests long ago - also implying that it was a precondition to their status.

Except that instead of forests instead of being cumulatively wiped away has grown as marginal agricultural land has been left utterly unused. That becomes blatantly wrong like saying Europe's population is lower now than it was in the past because of two world wars and the Spanish Flu. While the terrible things did happen the end status did not.

In all of the forestry cases they realized the major problems that would ensue if they ran out and shifted to sustainable models with replanting instead of virgin land. In Germany's case they started shockingly early in the 1500s after encountering wood shortages.

"Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship." - Wikipedia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Please, reread the Off-Topic carefully but before that, read the On-Topic paragraph:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com