I remember being asked in elementary school to help "buy a piece of the Amazon to stop it from being cut down". I mentioned this years later to some Brazilian friends, and they found it amazing, saying first that it almost certainly wasn't a specific plot of land, and second that enforcement of property rights and anti-poaching laws in spread-out rural areas has been spotty, and also hindered by violence and corruption.
So I guess it's a thorny question, if someone in Brazil accepts such a subsidy, how that ultimately translates into physically stopping people from making illicit uses of Amazon lands.
Edit: In theory, stopping an illicit farm (which takes time to grow and has to be tended and harvested) would be easier than stopping someone with a pickup truck and chainsaw from just grabbing a bunch of trees for lumber. On the other hand, the U.S. has spent tons of money trying to eradicate poor people's coca farms in the Andes and it doesn't seem to have had the level of success the government hoped for (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_eradication).
Meanwhile, some people are apparently still maintaining wildcat marijuana farms on U.S. Federal lands. Wheat farms aren't as profitable as coca or marijuana, but even suppressing certain kinds of farms in remote enough areas seems like it can be non-trivial!
A better analogy with the drug war would be to copy a country that manages meth by managing addiction.
Offer better alternative and employment to the farmers and loggers. Obviously this isn’t easy.
Most people with chainsaws are trying to feed their family. They may be “bad actors” at one scale, but they are “good actors” to the people whose opinion matters to them.
It is this kind of language, and indeed this kind of problem, that makes resolving it so complicated.
Also, bad actor is usually used in cybersecurity contexts. It could be a scammer or your CTO testing you - shouldn't really matter.
“Bad actor” is a common phrase that frames a subject as acting maliciously. It’s not a term of art, and this framing is compatible with its use in security.
Farmers with chainsaws are not automatically bad actors because their actions are mostly not malicious. They are often acting legally, or are encouraged to act illegally under a regime of intentionally loose enforcement (“everyone does it”). It is a political problem where the term “bad actor” is relative to the political position of the observer.
That’s why terms like “bad actor” are unhelpful. It frames all the subjects as malicious, when in many cases their actions are perfectly reasonable and often perfectly legal.
Some farmers with chain saws are bad actors, but not all of them. We need to help all of them.
then go buy some rain forest, and pay at least as much property tax on it as someone converting it to farmland would.
It's the second moronic take I came across from you in this comment chain, you're parroting Bolsonaro's demagogy, it feels like you haven't thought yourself about the consequences of "burn that entire jungle down". I don't believe you are that stupid so please, give it a deeper thought than this knee-jerk angry reactionary take. It sounds extremely moronic.
Defense industry? Semiconductor fabs? Pretty much anything? You name it dude. I'm just sick of my country being the world's barn. Producing soy and shit. I wish Brazil had balls to do what China did.
> you're parroting Bolsonaro's demagogy
Please. I don't care at all about Bolsonaro. He's irrelevant. I had this opinion before he even took office.
It's not that I "haven't thought of the consequences", it's that I really don't give a shit. I literally couldn't care less that there's going to be a price -- I'd pay it gladly, if it brought prosperity and power to my nation.
That's the whole issue: you aren't the one who is going to pay for it.
I'm originally from the same nation as you, that's exactly why I'm calling you moronic. Semiconductor fabs don't depend on the Amazon being burnt down. Defence industry does not depend on the Amazon being burnt down. These depend on political stability, well-educate population, State investment in R&D for the future, economical policies that foster national industries through the whole chain, fiscal policies (and stability of those) that don't overburden small R&D companies. Custo-Brasil encompasses all of that: political instability, fiscal policies that are burdensome to abide to, a poorly educated population, bureaucratic inefficiencies, so on and so forth.
That's what need to change in Brazil, not fucking burning the Amazon down, that won't bring any prosperity as the elites would be unchanged, they would still pillage and loot you and the rest of the population, as it's been done since the 1500s.
You're calling me a moron because you took my post literally. Truth is I don't even disagree with the rest of your points. The sentiment I tried to convey was "the amazon doesn't matter, we have bigger problems to worry about". That's the most polite way I found to express what I feel when I see people worrying about a jungle in a country that's unable to provide basic sanitation to all its citizens. Especially those living in said jungle, and there are many.
At least it's a relatively noble cause. I'm a lot less polite when it comes to intellectual property.
This one of the most champagne socialist positions I had a privilege to witness. Thank you for this.
For example, the forest is bigger in France now that is was 1000 years ago : http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/geoconfluences/images/arti...
Destroying forest is a short term low-productivity cash grab. It will not make any country rich.
What? Literally any economical activity you can think of would be a better use for that massive amount of land. If you told me I could have a billion dollar fab built in my country but the only place I could build it was in the middle of the amazon, it wouldn't take me even one second to decide.
Did you know there's oil reserves in the amazon? People in the government keep making noises about that. Every once in a while I see news about some environmental drama concerning the extraction of petroleum in that region. I wish they'd just do it already.
- A billion dollar fab will be 0.00001% of the forest.
- Oil can be extracted without destroying forest
I know because I literally live in a city where this happened. Steel industry. When my parents came here, it pretty much was a jungle. Now they call it the Steel Valley.
are you a business man? https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...
enjoy your life without pollution, drought etc, instead of money
Personally I don't give a damn about nations, I care about the planet as a whole, I live in France but nowhere like the average, more like a third-world person (I don't even have a fridge, not hot water, nor heating or AC, just to give you an idea), so your talk doesn't make sense to me
If I hate anything it's the weakness of our governors who are perfectly happy in their positions as globalist puppets. They are always seeking the next great power so they can align themselves with them. Once upon a time that was the United States. Now it looks like it's China. Wish they had the balls to aspire to be the next great power instead.