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Comment by redprince | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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