Stop irreversible damage to the Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Stop irreversible damage to the Amazon

junglekeepers.org

152 pointsmusha68k53 comments

Donated! Direct land acquisition by nonprofits is the future of conservation. I did the math once, and with the annual budget of The Nature Conservancy, you could purchase 20% of Nebraska in a perfectly reasonable amount of time.

I am very proud to have been involved in the Nature Conservancy's effort to restore wetlands in Oregon. I completely agree that land acquisition is a great path forward, as long as the longevity of that acquisition can be secured.

https://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/10/prweb565374.htm

Donating money for someone to buy land is a big no for me. Privatisation of land to some benefactor doesn't seem to be the best strategy for preservation. How do you know ownership will not be transferred in the future?

Also, why is it we never see a "reverse damage done for centuries to european and north american forests" NGO? Why do you always think of the Amazon? Leave peruvians, bolivians, brasilians, etc alone. And stop using coal to generate electricity, thank you very much.

> Also, why is it we never see a "reverse damage done for centuries to european and north american forests" NGO?

You'll never see if you never look!

https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/

Also https://planetwild.com/, which is very early but has been focused on Europe so far.

And Mossy Earth: https://www.mossy.earth/

I'm a big fan of their YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth for well produced videos on their various restoration projects across Europe. Very inspiring for things I'd love to start where I live.

We need to reform zoning to reduce suburban and exurban sprawl and there is no shortage of disturbed land that needs to be rehabilitated.

There is really no future proof strategy.

>Also, why is it we never see a "reverse damage done for centuries to european and north american forests" NGO?

north american forest defense orgs are prosecuted as domestic terrorists. there are a couple "tree planting" startups but mostly they seem to be timber company greenwashing

There is a lot of reforestation happening in Europe. In France for instance the low time for forest was in the 17th century and since then the forest surface has doubled and is steadily increasing.

You could also note that now Japan has more forests than Brazil in percentage of the territory while having a much higher population density, and that Brazil used to have double as much forest than Japan around 100 years ago.

This is cute, but I'm skeptical of it working in practice.

Most mining and logging operations in Amazon rainforest is illegal anyway. I don't think they will care that the land is owned unless you can protect it somehow (including use of force. The rule of law hardly applies in those regions).

I just heard about this charity the other day listening to a fascinating episode of the Lex Fridman podcast with Paul Rosolie who seems very involved or possibly the founder.

Fwiw he came across as very genuine (given some comments on here were skeptical of the charity)

Paul describing the process:

  56:2656:28 They cut the forest, burn the forest.
  56:2856:30 And then they run water through the sand.
  56:3056:33 And the sand particles have bits of gold in it, not chunks.
  56:3356:37 But just little almost microscopic flecks of gold.
  56:3756:40 And then they use the mercury to bind that.
  56:4056:41 And then they burn off the mercury.
  56:4156:43 And that vapor goes up into the clouds.
  56:4356:46 So just like everything else, it's all connected down there
  56:4656:47 and then rains down into the rivers.
  56:4756:50 And so the people in the region are having birth defects

Destruction visible from above: https://www.google.com/maps/@-12.8121497,-70.1009866,76878m/...

They should mine bitcoin instead.

>20 coffees to save the Amazon

Which 20 coffees? 20 Starbucks coffees? 20 no-name donut shop coffees? 20 instant-scoop grocery store coffees? If coffees are to become a bona fide currency, we're going to need more precise denominations here.

Or hopefully we can just stop with the coffee-pricing analogies because it's getting ridiculous and your would-be customers think you sound ridiculous. It's outdated sales-talk.

Towards the bottom they say $100 = 20 coffees, so they're are pricing a coffee as $5 per cup.

The first Google hit for "Junglekeepers Charity Rating" brings up this link claiming they are a scam:

https://www.complaintsboard.com/junglekeepers-scam-charity-c...

and in the same page there is user comment that says:

This non-profit is not a scam. They have done some well documented work to protect the Las Piedras Region, they are running a ranger program covering 55,000+ acres of rainforest working with the local communities and have partner with established philanthropies. See for instance the involvement of Age Of Union: https://www.ageofunion.com/feature/film-the-heart-of-a-missi... or some of the features about the work on ABC: https://youtu.be/8FAbqkaI9HY

Criticism is useful, but perhaps researching thoroughly before make wild claims like these can help. I invite people to do their own research.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

your move

That link 404s. Also, it's pretty suspicious that the website has no information about the nonprofit entity or its officers. Is it a 501(c)3? I can't tell. So I can't look it up on Charity Navigator or anything. It's very sketchy.

Came up on Charity Navigator for me, searching by name. No rating, but it says they are a 501(c)(3).

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/881863507

I didn't say I agreed with what was in the link. Your move?

That review reads like it was written by someone with a major axe to grind. I don't know if these guys are legit, but I'm not going to trust only this one haters opinion on it.

I disagree. You’re getting caught in the semantics; the notion of 20 $5 coffees makes sense and is an easy and relatable way to reframe $100.

I don't know, coffee here costs 1€ everywhere

$100 is pretty relatable as well though

I make coffee at home, from freshly roasted, freshly ground, high quality stuff. It comes out to around 5-10 cents a cup.

$100, so, $5/coffee.

That'd be extremely expensive for a normal coffee, even at 2023 prices and assuming some rip-off place like Starbucks or quite-fancy cafes that actually put some of the high price into getting excellent beans. It's unthinkably high for home-made coffee. You can get extremely nice beans and not hit $2/coffee.

$5 is close to the cost of a hot caffeinated milkshake, though.

Starbucks sell 4 Billion of them, so they aren't impractical to set the benchmark price.

I assume a lot of those 4B are sugary dessert drinks containing coffee, not what is colloquially referred to as a “coffee”. At least I hope.

Considering the massive scale of deforestation going on in the Amazonas, this feels like trying to put out a forest fire by spitting into it.

"In the Legal Amazon, deforestation reached 356 km² in March 2023, according to DETER data." https://www.wwf.org.br/?85360/Deforestation-alerts-remain-hi...

365 km² are 87,970 acres. And that's just Brazil. The goal of the junglekeepers is to save 300,000 acres. They are at it for more than 10 years now.

Seems to me like you could do a lot to frustrate loggers with 300k acres of land, especially if you are strategic in the purchases and do things like buying a giant ring of land (or more realistically a strip that has natural boundaries like rivers and mountains on the other sides) and then disallowing the construction of roads through it.

Who is guarding the land? Does it have cameras on it that you can use to see how the land looks? Feels like a waste of money if the authorities can’t protect the land.

Probably commercial satellite imagery. The protections would have to be legal, IE suing the logging companies for trespassing on your land and "vandalizing" it.

It would be way too dangerous to do something like claiming that the company was dumping all of that perfectly good logging equipment on your land and helpfully "cleaning it up" by loading them on trailers and driving off.

a lot of the Amazon is under semi-permanent cloud cover.. you need something else to "see" .. various groups have been 'monitoring' the ever-increasing logging for more than 20 years already..

SAR is a thing, works perfectly well through clouds, and is pretty easy to use to detect deforestation.

The government will just use eminent domain to take the land needed for roads. You can be annoying to loggers, but you can't stop them that way.

Lots of places, they wouldn't even need eminent domain. Not sure what the situation's like in Brazil, but even in the US with its unusually-strong notions of what "owning land" means, trying to do cute shit like that is often not allowed, for obvious reasons. Easements are A Thing. You might get away with it if no-one with resources opposes you, but if they do, you're likely to lose in court.

Yeah, you'll probably lose in the end, but at the same time you make logging more expensive and difficult. This is a pretty standard playbook for environmental activists, for better or worse.

I have never heard of a case where such a scheme, blocking road access with a narrow strip of property, lasted longer than 48 hours in the U.S.

Can you link to any examples?

Marvin Heemeyer, the Killdozer guy, felt that he had been wronged in a case exactly like this, with the landowner cutting off access to his property.

I should have excluded pre-existing neighbour-on-neighbour disputes.

One of the goals is to work with loggers to provide an alternative path to prosperity.

Perhaps they could learn a new skill such as coding. I hear Python is popular

Python in the Jungle got a whole new meaning today

From what I’ve read about logging in the Amazon this wouldn’t do much. Basically no one would care about your deed unless you have boots on the ground there.

Just stop eating meat or reduce where possible and stop or reduce animal product consumption would help much more. Money is not the solution, but the problem IMHO.

https://youtu.be/gPfriiHBBek

Lex Fridman interview with the founder.

Imho the real thing we need to do is raze so many European towns and cities and return them to nature. That continent continues to deforest and it is carbon costly to inhabit. It is time for Germany to depopulate.

They've simply been grandfathered in, but the climate costs of their past actions have accumulated a debt that can only be paid by dissolving the country.

> That continent continues to deforest

"In 2020, the EU had an estimated 159 million hectares of forests. Their area has increased by almost 10% since 1990 (145 million hectares)"

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

That is clever choice of start and end https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2438-y.epdf

With nothing to say of the fact that having pillaged our planet for hundreds of years, they make some pitiful concessions.

It is like if a man stole a million dollars from you and then gave you a dollar a day for twenty years and claimed you've been the beneficiary.

End European cities so that Earth may flourish again.

Starting with your house, right?

Haha, that's exactly the question the South Americans are asking of Europeans who have denuded the land they are in and now demand others don't.

Take the beam out of your eye.

Both houses in the same planet maybe?

Everything is connected perhaps?

Clouds don't turn away at the frontier.

This implies we value trees and wildlife more than humans.

you're only 30 years too late, that must be some kind of record

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