How much would buying all the Brazilian rain forest cost the world, or even renting it from Brazil? We would need it to be slightly more than cattle farming to work... but I’d happily pay towards this.
Most people grossly underestimate how wild and pretty much lawless inland rain-forest regions are in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. There are small pockets of settlements everywhere but except for Manaus there is very sparse infrastructure, Police will take days to get somewhere by boat, Healthcare deep in the forest is pretty much a death sentence if you happen to need urgent critical care. You have people that have never been registered with social security, etc.
My point is that having a piece of paper saying that a specific rosewood tree belongs to IKEA or <NGO> would mean nothing, by the time you try to enforce this, the tree would have been fellen, cut, and shipped on a boat to the highest bidder.
If you want actual change in the region you need to develop the local economy with jobs that allow these people to be productive in a way that is somehow more profitable than the existing illegal activities. But the practicalities of this are much harder to implement then simply blank buying forest land.
That could be true, but only holds for one tree (or a small number of trees). The problem starts when people build a business around trees. By the time their businesses are fully operational you can enforce laws. And this makes it unattractive to even start in this line of business.
Even assuming good faith from Brazilian law enforcement/military the remoteness and shear size of the rain forest makes it a huge challenge to enforce any rule of Law.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145988/tracking-ama...
> A (...) satellite-based system, DETER, went into operation in 2004 (...)
> “DETER completely changed the way rangers went about enforcement work,” said Rajão. Rather than doing random patrols and checking for permits, rangers would send squads of enforcement officers — with satellite images in hand — to investigate areas of recent, suspicious activity. That made it much easier to remove or apprehend equipment. The word spread among deforesters. The existence of DETER meant that environmental authorities would likely notice if large tracts of land were cleared, and fines and agents would follow soon enough.
- the most obvious was mentioned already: forest fires, when missiles explode in a forest you are trying to protect, things tend to burn and fire tends to spread i.e. there might be little forest left to save after you're doing killing everyone who has bad intentions.
- where do you even set these up that they arrive on time to actually hit moving targets?
- how do you ensure you don't kill innocents?
- how do you even _find_ nefarious actors, when forest canopy makes it very hard to find anything, not to mention the Amazon forest is mind-numbingly huge.
- AFAIK the military generally has an inventory of weapons they have to keep stockpiled, so the tax-payer will pay for extremely expensive weapons to be used and built again (great if you want to support military-industrial complex).
As stated elsewhere, the issue is deeper and not addressable by blowing people up. The people doing this have nothing to lose because they have little or no opportunities for making money, so they take any job they can find. Do you believe we should just murder people who make questionable decisions based on their survival? You and I are sitting comfortably behind a computer having this discussion and I would venture that neither are us are qualified to talk about what it's like to be that close to starving.
- poor starving people just trying to feed their families and in order to survive, will take any job and are being exploited to this end by <cartels/greedy corporations/etc>
or
- dirty scumbags killing innocent animals and cutting down swathes of protected forest just to make a quick buck
or any other narrative that sells clicks, not to say all media is corrupt/greedy, but it sure seems like most public reactions are based on media narratives.
That said, if you entirely removed morality from the equation, I suspect it would actually be an efficient use of resources, to 'surgically' target varying levels of unwanted enterprise to make a somewhat dissuasive point.
The only challenge I see is that the folks running the saws and the skidders aren't the ones profiting from the operation. So maybe you take some extra precautions to avoid killing the crew, but destroying the equipment seems like a perfectly acceptable use of resources.
You seem misguided, rainforest is not equivalent to high humidity or rain all year round, you absolutely have wildfires and it is not a 'pretty low' risk. [0]
Also most of these operations are lead by organized crime and explore poor people in their day-to-day operations. Killing desperate and poor people that work on these illegal operations seems like a very disproportionate colateral for anyone that cares about upholding rule of Law, or you know just general ethics.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Amazon_rainforest_wildfir...
References:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-biopiracy/brazil-t...
https://www.dw.com/en/wood-laundering-brings-illegal-amazon-...
Reference:
https://twitter.com/emmanuelmacron/status/116461700896252723...
There's a similar problem with your idea. You could buy a stretch of land in Brazil and bask in the glow of taking it off the market. But the problem you perceive with overuse of the Brazilian rainforest wouldn't be solved; that land was mostly not on the market anyway. How would you stop farmers from encroaching on your land? A "No Trespassing" sign won't do the job.
Buying land to prevent development will work better in the US, mostly because there's no one in the US who lives off the land. You can't stop small farmers from moving on to your unsupervised land. But you can easily stop giant logging or mining companies from doing it.
That really depends on how much they want the security. People defend territory all the time. It's very, very expensive to do that -- have a look at some city walls -- but it's cost-effective because they are using the territory.
But no, no matter how large the group, they cannot buy cost-effective security for their giant stretch of wilderness if their plan for it is "don't use it" and there are other people who do have a use for it. Compare American government efforts to stop people from using land to grow marijuana. Is the problem that the American government just isn't big enough?
You probably need a watch tower about every 1~2 km, or even less if you'd use a strip of minefield to protect against hordes.
People are generally doing that in areas where people are allowed. Also the government has a stupendously large amount of land that it didn't pay for and a low budget for keeping anyone out.
It's different if this is land you're purchasing in the modern age. If you're buying a million acres for over a hundred million dollars, then that's about 150 miles of border to patrol. If you hire 150 people for that, at above-median wages, that's 3 million a year. Add some overhead, some expense for equipment and buildings, it's affordable enough compared to the purchase price. If that's too expensive then go up to 10 million acres, which triples the land area per mile of border. Or 100 million acres.
> If that's too expensive then go up to 10 million acres, which triples the land area per mile of border. Or 100 million acres.
I don't really follow. The use case is that you want to prevent small farmers from encroaching on the jungle. This will only ever happen at the border between where the small farmers end and the jungle begins. If you buy land behind the border, that's nothing but a waste of your money (until the border is so thoroughly dejungled that your old hinterlands is the new border).
In turn, this means that all of the land you're interested in is border. You can't rely on the fact that a circle has a high ratio of area to perimeter to claim cost-efficiency, because you're structurally constrained to owning maximally cost-inefficient strip shapes.
But assuming your scenario is the right one:
Buying only the border land is a strict improvement in efficiency over my plan. Instead of paying X million for land and Y million for security to protect a huge swath of rainforest, you only have to pay X/50 for land and Y million for security. Who cares about what percent goes to what, you're saving tons of rainforest for even less money.
In the extreme you might realize you don't even need to buy any land, you're just paying for security to protect the rainforest. Instead of paying 100 billion to own and never visit, you pay 1 billion a year to protect land you don't own. Which... sounds fine to me!
100 dollars have been used for 500+ loans, the last 8 years or so. While you can pick the recipients yourselves, I've opted for automatic re-lending on the platform.
A bit more than 300$ went into Kiva donations (you can choose for every loan, to cover administrative costs). 20$ went to currency losses. 80$ went to default losses.
The default losses are 10% of what I put in, or 1.6% of the total amount lent. And I explicitly chose a few loans that were explicitly marked as high-default-risk, because of the social situation of the recipients or due to the political/economic situation in the region.
I cannot confirm that my money dried up in default losses. I still think it's quite a good model (but I haven't followed economic research about microloans in the last few years).
Edit: I grew up in the amazon region, parents worked in an NGO. Giving people gifts/donations is worthless to most, since something gifted feels like it has no value. If you build a water well for free, it will be broken in a few months to years. If you make the village pay a part of the costs on the other hand, and if they must help building it, they'll value it more and keep care of it. It's a cultural thing. I could imagine that loans work the same way: You don't get a donation, you'll get a loan that you have to work for. In that culture, it will be valued more. (Of course, that applies to the region I grew up in, I don't want to over-generalize.)
Shop around, not all organisations are equal. Also, there is probably similar programs in your area. A lot of good, well established wetland repurchase & conservation efforts in the US.