If your pants are on fire and you piss in them, you don't say "look how wet your pants are getting".
Well, thanks to modern mapping, now we do. Formerly easy to hide and illegal activity like burning a bit of forest to get some farm land now stands out and we can track what happens or happened to bits of land. That's basically what the article is pointing out is actually happening. A few bits of information in there:
- Forest regeneration is slow but significant; up to 40% of forest thought to be lost over the past decades has in fact regrown. It's a slow process that takes up to 4 decades to fully restore bio diversity. But it's possible and happening at pretty significant scale.
- The whole process is basically driven by poor land management, ignorance, and incompetence. Farmers mismanage their soil, thus exhausting it and then burn more forest to solve their problem while abandoning their old land, which then starts regenerating if left alone.
- Mapping provides authorities better insight where this is happening or has happened and allows them to step up attempts to crack down on this to both protect regrowing forest and put a stop to new attempts to burn forests. Simply scaling up that effort could go a long way to fixing the problem. Farming by its very nature is very local. If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.
Fatalism solves problems of resource misallocation. You're better off putting in the effort to solve problems you can solve than putting in the effort to solve problems you can't solve. Assuming there's a limited amount of effort, fatalism will help you.
Mapping doesn't do shit if the politicians don't act - and Bolsonaro is hellbent on not acting in the interest of anyone but the rich people paying him off (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49815731).
If the rainforest is to be saved, Bolsonaro must be removed one way or the other - and I'm not sure that it will be possible at all to remove that guy at the voting booth anymore. Personally I'd welcome some sort of intervention by one of the three-letter agencies - this time it could be actually for a good cause.
Have you ever read a book by Hannah Arendt called Eichmann in Jerusalem? The whole point of the book is the sheer banality of evil -- that the bulk of evil is not the sensationalist stuff that makes up movies, but its boring, bureaucratic machinations and tacit complicity of civilians under the regime.
So all I can say about your idea is it is at best naive and at worst cynical. First of all, it's naive because it supposes that military intervention ever works when that flies in the face of history showing that nation-building (especially of the American sort) never works unless it's the kind that comes about indigenously -- if it was so easy to fix problems, why has American military intervention post WWII been an almost complete failure?
Second of all, it's cynical because it's easy to support such ideas when you're not the citizen who has to suffer through the consequences if things get worse. What would be your response if your idea simply doesn't work? "Better luck next time?"
This isn't a game.
Yes, because those three-letter agencies have a fantastic track record in South America. [/s]
That would be a fine way to make things exponentially worse.
Things are FUBAR already. It can't get that much worse: entire countries are effectively run by drug empires, others are falling apart due to uncontrolled, rampant violence (often enough caused by criminals the US deported in the first place), and Bolsonaro is selling out the future of humanity.
I agree that the anti-communist interventions of the past were a catastrophe - but looking away now and leaving the poor and nature to pay the price for past misdeeds is not an option.
The US needs to legalize drugs to drain the cartels of their funding source, support the local legitimate governments that are fighting against cartel and gang violence - and ensure that the Amazon rain forest is not burned down any more.
> entire countries are effectively run by drug empires
This is not true.
> Bolsonaro is selling out the future of humanity
I'm not even sure what you mean here, but it sounds inaccurate and an exaggeration at the very least.
Brazil is going through a bad patch, for sure. But it's still the biggest, most dynamic economy in South America, a stable democracy with relatively high HDI, and a nation of proud people with vibrant history and culture. The idea of foreign intervention sends shivers down my spine - it would absolutely, with 100% certainty make things worse, and would be potentially catastrophic for the country. I find it really amazing that someone can casually suggest this. Hasn't South America suffered enough?
The cites for the tipping point are two editorials written by the same team of two researches in Science Advances, these are editorials, not research articles.
They cite https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... that is a peer-reviewed research article in Geophysical Research Letters.
The research article claims that with a 40% deforestation the rain reduction will cause problems, but in the editorial they use hand waving to reduce that to 20%.
> According to their findings, 12% of total carbon emissions from Amazon deforestation have been offset by Brazil’s secondary forests, making natural regrowth an underestimated tool for mitigating global carbon emissions and regional ecosystem collapse.
12% of carbon offset is better than 0, but still catastrophically low. Just means the the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is just slightly slower than previously thought.
"In various modelling studies the risk of Amazon dieback gradually grows above2oC and becomes significant in the 3 to 5oC range, but will still take 100-200 years to fully play out..."
"The total Amazon carbon sink is estimated to be 150-200 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC), with a maximum forest dieback to savannah estimated to release 53-70 GtC and raise atmospheric CO2 by 25-33 ppm (which is enough to cause up to ~0.15oC of warming if none of the CO2 was re-sequestered)"
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2019/04/15/fact-check-do-t...
Some of that biodiversity isn’t load-bearing (that is, we can do fine without it), but some of it is and we will be paying for it’s loss essentially-forever.