Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest continues to decline | Hacker News Reader

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest continues to decline

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73 pointsPaulHoule100 comments

Note that a lot of deforestation still goes on - it's not that forested areas are being restored. This year, about 4950 square km, or 495,000 hectares of forest, will have been cleared.

And remember, that Amazonian rain forest can't just be restored by planting a bunch of trees. If restoration is at all possible, it requires carefully planned intervention of decreasing intensity over a prolonged period of time. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_restoration

for a bit more on this.

In that wiki i read that it is actually quite doable despite the warnings given prior to some experiments. Forrest is quickly back in about 10 years

Indeed, it is doable, but it's not trivially doable:

"Forest restoration is an inclusive process, which depends on collaboration among a wide range of stakeholders including local communities, government officials, non-government organizations, scientists and funding agencies."

Sounds more like getting various permissions and money, be actually doing the work.

We are still a long way from understanding how to do restoration properly. Mostly we make forest gardens that don't look anything like real forests. We have tons to learn, and that's not even counting the bits already known by people who aren't doing the work.

A lot of problems are easy to solve with money and permission! Building trains is similarly straightforward if we can secure the money and land use permits.

In regards to the Amazon, the stakeholders also include organized crime

Its doable but not in 10 years. From [1]

> They found that soil fertility takes less than 10 years to recover to old-growth forest values. Plant functioning takes less than 25 years, and species diversity takes 60 years. Above-ground biomass and species composition take over 120 years.

This is also discounting any of the unique biodiversity in the Amazon, of which there is a lot and may never come back.

[1]: https://news.clemson.edu/researchers-if-left-alone-tropical-...

I wonder if things like species diversity and above-ground biomass and species composition can be achieved faster due to being an annex of a thriving forest. I imagine once plants and soil are established that species will move in from the bordering area fairly quickly.

A cheaper, lower diversity, forest. 1000 Yo trees can't grow in 10 years

I live in the marginal subtropics in an area with subtropical rainforest. There is a severly degraded historical landslip at the back of my house which we've been working on for 12 years or so.

After getting rid of the gross weeds, it only took a couple of years for a bunch of native rainforest species to start popping up, but it's going to be a very long time before what they call "ecosystem function" is approximately back to the way it was before. You can reduce this time in the tropics because the carbon cycle is so fast, but it's still going to take many years of restoration. Appropriate management can speed things up, but only so much - and the techniques used vary in effectiveness.

The Amazon rainforest was created millennia ago without human intervention; why would we need to intervene at all with its regrowth when we’re the reason it’s being cut down? It sounds more likely that we’d only fuck it up further rather than let it heal.

Because rainforest soil is very low in nutrients. Most of the nutrients are locked into the biosphere, which they carted off or set on fire.

Temperate forest soil has a lot more capacity for regeneration, but we're 3-4 rounds of clearcutting into most North American forests and we are hearing alarm bells about how there might not be another round if we don't change something.

> The Amazon rainforest was created millennia ago without human intervention

The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou...

If you compare to what extent the native population shaped the Amazon rainforest to the modern abundance in population, urbanization and explotation of the planet, I’d still consider the Amazon as pristine and untouched more or less…

Okay? It wasn’t, it was man made and cultivated over thousands of years. That isn’t “untouched”

> e Amazon rainforest was created millennia ago without human intervention

This is incorrect. The Amazon was cultivated by native communities

You have a great point, even with Bolsonaro out, the deforestation is happening in a "slower pace". We need a more assertive course of action, not only policing the areas and arresting the crime organization which profit from it. There are people who lives around Amazon that needs a better way of living, so they don't turn into the forest to commit crimes.

The Amazon rainforest was really lucky Bolsonaro was not re-elected to a second term, nor the attempted January 8 coup succeeded.

And that here in Colombia we elected the first left-wing president in more than 90 years.

I'm always curious how things vary from country to country. What are some hallmarks of the left in Colombia? What are some things they stand form/support that differs from the right?

Being a client state of Washington

Relationship with Venezuela

> nor the attempted January 8 coup succeeded

What effect would this have had?

Bolsonaro is pro-deforestation. It was literally one of his campaign promises.

It appears he intended to get a brazilian supreme court minister arrested, void the election he lost, declare martial law ("intervenção") and extend his first term indefinitely, backed by a military junta.

He was never gonna do any of that. Half the brazilian population practically begged him to do it and he didn't.

How do you know what would he do and what stopped him?

I don't know. I simply don't believe he would have or could have done it. He either lacked the military support for such a thing or he lacked the balls to do it.

It wasn't for a lack of popular support, I'll tell you that. I watched many of my countrymen get on their knees and beg for military intervention. Way too many of them. On brazilian independence day, I saw an insane number of people on the streets because of him. I thought brazilian nationalism was dead and buried until I saw that. It got to the point they tried to make it illegal to associate the holiday with Bolsonaro. All those people, they would have supported him. I'm sure of that.

He certainly wanted to, but didn't have enough support, especially from foreign nations.

He might actually end up in jail because of his plans to do a coup. We'll have to wait and see.

I agree that's the likely scenario.

I don't doubt he'll end up in jail but I don't think they'll arrest him for that. Of all the extremely dumb shit he's said and done, they rendered him ineligible for his perfectly valid criticism of the electronic voting system. I bet whatever they arrest him for will be an equally inconsequential non-crime. It's like the courts are trying to be ironic. They'll probably give him 22 years of jail too just because it's his party's number.

HN audience, I apologize for this spread of misinformation by the parent, here is some information about it:

> they rendered him ineligible for his perfectly valid criticism of the electronic voting system.

Again, this is a lie, or denying reality:

Bolsonaro systematically attacked the Brazilian voting system, which he has been elected for thirty years (before becoming President).

In 2021, he used the State Television to spread lies about the voting system and saying that If the printed vote was denied by our Congress he will never touch in such subject, another lie by him[0].

In July 2022, he stated that he won the elections in the first turn, saying he had concrete proof about it, which he has never shown. Moreover, in the same month he called ambassadors from 70 countries to spread more lies and question the validity of the Brazilian vote machines[0], which rendered him convicted for Electoral crime. Here is an except from the Electoral Supreme Court Minister Benedito Gonçalves's referendum[1], a rough Google Translate:

"I consider the request to convict the first person investigated, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, partially valid for the practice of abuse of political power and misuse of media in the 2022 elections, due to his direct and personal responsibility for the illicit conduct carried out for the benefit of his candidacy for re-election. I declare your ineligibility for 8 years following the 2022 election."

Reference again in Brazilian Portuguese:

0. https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/relembre-vezes-em-que-...

1. https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2023/06/27/relator-vot...

Don't apologize in the name of the brazilian people. You don't speak for all of us. You speak only for yourself, as do I. At least I'm humble enough not to decree what I say is the absolute truth.

I'm based on facts, have shown/linked many references that prove what I'm saying. You keep spreading lies and/or denying reality. An Infectious Disease Doctor called Luana Araújo in a Congress Commission once said[0]:

“We're discussing which edge of the flat Earth we're going to jump off.”

That's literally your approach to discussing all matters in this thread.

Reference:

0. https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2021/06/02/estamos-dis...

Not only did you post links that don't actually disprove or deny anything I said, sometimes you posted links that actually enhanced my arguments.

Your excerpt for example makes the persecution of Bolsonaro obvious to everyone on this site. "Abuse of political power"? What made up nonsense is this? That's ridiculous. It's just like the totally arbitrary fines and censorship they imposed on Google for the crime of posting a link on their own homepage. "Abuse of market position" they called it. It's painfully obvious that these judges wanted to destroy the guy. One judge even bragged about it in public. Unashamedly. Who's denying reality? Your posts border on gaslighting.

The link you just posted is yet another example. I was a very vocal critic of Bolsonaro's handling of the pandemic during his mandate. So I actually agree with what Dr. Luana Araújo said in that news article. That's why I think it's hilarious that of all the dumb things he said and did he went down for his perfectly valid criticism of the electronic voting machines.

At least in the pandemic, you seem to be reasonable. In many posts, you have shown no knowledge of Law concepts and how our constitution works. I hope in the future, before you say a “judge is being a dictator”, you study about the matter. IANAL, and yet I'm capable to see how you don't know about the typical and atypical functions of each power in our Democracy. I hope this link could expand your superficial knowledge about the matter.

https://www.jusbrasil.com.br/noticias/podem-os-juizes-legisl...

What constitution? The one the judges selectively apply? The one that explicitly says the political censorship they perpetrated is unconstitutional?

You're apparently incapable of seeing the fact that the judges have essentially given themselves power to legislate, investigate and judge. They've been doing it ever since one particular publication attacked them and they show no signs of stopping any time soon. It was painfully obvious during the election but it started much earlier than that.

https://www.conjur.com.br/2022-nov-27/inquerito-fake-news-st...

If you can't see this, it's pointless to continue this thread.

There was no "coup". There was a protest. Identical to numerous others in the past. Even the pictures look the same. I even saw one of the several brazilian socialist parties condemning the criminalization of the protesters for obvious reasons.

If only there had been a coup. They're all being punished for attempting one anyway. Might as well have tried, right?

Please refrain from spread misinformation, that was a coup, in the mind of Bolsonaro's followers the "protest" would trigger an action by the military to "take the power". This was spread by months after the elections, we even had a attempt of exploding a bomb in a gas tank truck for aviation.

Not a single protest in the history of the redemocratization (1988) had a protest that destroyed the buildings from the three powers.

So? They believed a lie. Doesn't turn what happened there on that day into a coup. When you want to take power, you don't do the utterly pointless stuff they did. You want to seize power, you don't show up to an empty supreme court to shit on its chairs. That's just stupid.

I think it's far more likely that it was a false flag operation from the start designed to justify the judiciary dictatorship we're currently living under. How else could we possibly go from a democracy to a state where a supreme court judge can openly and publicly showboat to an audience about defeating Bolsonaro alongside his fellow judge-kings? Can you imagine a US supreme court judge openly bragging about defeating Trump, stopping his campaign its tracks?

And don't accuse me of "spreading misinformation". Everything I post here, I post in good faith because it's exactly what I think. I simply do not agree with you. You're not on brazilian social media. Either reply to me with respect or don't reply to me at all.

You are spreading misinformation, read your own comment, here is an example:

"[...]designed to justify the judiciary dictatorship we're currently living under."

That's literally the fake news spread in far-right media, which seems you are consuming too much. Just because you don't agree with a decision done by the Supreme Court on Brazil (STF) doesn't mean it's a dictatorship.

If you feel I caused any damage to you by point facts in your commentaries, you have the right to sue me, and I will have all the instances of defense garantee by our constitution :)

I don't need media to see and understand what's happening. That the "far-right" apparently agrees with me on this point doesn't prove that it's fake either. The supreme court has been grabbing power for years now and last year during the elections they committed blatantly unconstitutional acts in defense of their candidate including censorship the likes of which haven't been seen in this country since the military dictatorship. You expect me to believe this is not a judiciary dictatorship when these unelected judges are essentially running the country? Just today news came out saying they more or less created a tax.

> I will have all the instances of defense garantee by our constitution :)

What a joke. There is no constitution in this country. There's only the judge-king's whims. Whatever he writes on his paper is law. If I were to sue you, I'd succeed only in getting myself persecuted. So I'll flag your posts and stop responding to you. Goodbye.

Once more you are spreading misinformation and denying the reality.

> There is no constitution in this country.

There is and was promulgated in 1988.[0]

> The supreme court has been grabbing power for years now and last year during the elections they committed blatantly unconstitutional acts in defense of their candidate including censorship the likes of which haven't been seen in this country since the military dictatorship.

The TSE, the court you are referring to alongside with social medias, removed around three hundreds posts containing fake news, that so small that yet 79% Brazilians had contact with fake news[1], how is that a dictatorship?

You are downplaying the dictatorship that happened in 1964 on Brazil. People were exiled/killed, ALL media were censored. I beg anyone who wants to know more about the coup of 64 read the wikipedia page is a good start on the subject, you will see how horrible and bloody it was. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_in_Bra...

These references are in Brazilian Portuguese language, I'm sorry for it.

[0] https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitui%C3%A7%C3%A3o_brasi...

[1] https://www.terra.com.br/byte/tse-nao-conseguiu-barrar-fake-...

> So? They believed a lie

Many a coup started with the people believing in lies.

In fact, that's usually what happened historically.

I don't doubt that people believed it. Belief alone doesn't make a coup attempt though. You have to actually try to seize power for it to be a coup attempt.

I believe it was actually an attempt to do this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%932016_protests_in_...

I think it's likely that the government took advantage of this context to create the perfect pretext for everything they're doing right now. There's a parliamentary investigation into the truth of these riots, latest news I have of that is that the security camera footage of that day has been mysteriously lost. I bet the CIA still has copies though. The footage was requested early this year, government stalled as much as it could but then Lula made some anti-Ukraine comments and soon after images of his people being friendly with the protesters mysteriously made its way to the CNN. I wouldn't be surprised if US agencies like the CIA were responsible for that.

Oh my god, you love to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The images that could prove either your “theory” or that Bolsonaro tried to, with Delgatti hacker know for the operation “Spoofing”, in some ways crack the voting machines are lost because of a technical decision done in Bolsonaro's government[0]. Bolsonaro's government is also known for using a law of National Security which a President can decree secrecy for one hundred years for his allies and info that could prove he lies to his followers[1].

Transparency is one of the values described in Brazil's Constitution[2], that the parent still deny btw.

Reference in Brazilian Portuguese, I'm sorry again HN audience:

0. https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/governo-nao-tem-imagen...

1. https://www.poder360.com.br/governo/relembre-casos-em-que-o-...

2. https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Constituicao/Constitui...

I'm not interested in discussing this with you. Take a hint.

I was supposed to be in a debate in a class on geoengineering about whether we should pay Brazil to protect the Amazon (my partner) or attach BECCS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...

equipment to their bioethanol factories.

(me, for that class I was the obligatory cornucopian engineer because it's in the freaking engineering school and somebody had to do it)

My partner had spent a lot of time in the Amazon on research projects where they would measure the amount of carbon being captured by trees over time by taking careful measurements with calipers, core samples, etc. He took me to a lecture by an invited professor who showed us videos of how clouds moved over the Amazon. Unlike most places where rain mainly falls and makes it to the ocean, water evaporates and condenses multiple times over the Amazon and creates clouds that carry moisture in various directions including helping mountains in California to develop a snowpack.

There's particular a concern that that the boundary between the Amazon on the southwest side could migrate to the north because of a feedback between land use and climate and that's a reason to be concerned about the land use in that area, not just trees getting cut down.

The night before our debate one of my partner's friends tried to intervene in a fight in a bar and got stabbed and my partner wound up going up to Syracuse in an ambulance with his friend so I had to present both sides of the case.

Paying them would be a great idea IMO. Telling them not to monetize a natural resource because it's better for the world, after we've long logged our own forests.. Well I can see how they object to that.

I don't think Bolsonaro was a reliable person to deal with but this could be done now.

Maybe it's due to plastics replacing wood. Interesting we haven't found/invented another kind of material to manufacture objects, maybe metal/crystal foam will replace it one day, some metal's microparticles should be more environmentaly safe than microplastic which carries additives that are toxic and can be burned.

Isn't the cleared land used for growing food and not wood for making things?

Both?

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

Beef, soy and palm oil are responsible for 60% of tropical deforestation

Beef - 2.71 million hectares / year

Soy - 480,000 ha / year (77% for animal feed, just 7% for humans)

Palm Oil - 270,000 ha / year

Wood - 380,000 ha / year (but probably more)

So effectively beef is the key driver of tropical deforestation.

Yep. Enjoy your Big Mac.

Just a question out of curiosity, but have you seen figures on the spread of beef usage in specific foods? e.g., what percentage is in ground beef and fast food form, what percentage is in whole cuts heading to homes and restaurants, other applications, etc.

Not for a while. I do know the big chains and particularly McDonald's have searched far and wide for beef sources. They also compound the pathogen problem by mixing meat from many animals before grinding it to make hamburger. Whereas your butcher shop would be lucky to get 3 cows into a single burger, a big mac may have 1000. One. Thousand.

I stopped eating beef for a long time after the vCJD scare. But it was a good excuse to reduce my carbon footprint. Chicken and pork have a much smaller footprint. Now I try to avoid cheap cuts and especially cheap ground beef.

Wow, I assumed Palm Oil plantations were the biggest culprit from recent news reports.

I think most palm oil production is in SE Asia.

Indonesia and Malaysia together product 84% of the world's output. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/10/02/which-...

PS to all: Don't buy products with palm oil, it kills orangutans.

I dont like Orangutans

Right turn, Clyde.

Not the orangutans :(

Pretty much all commercial cookies contain palm oil. Including Girl Scouts, which acted a few years ago like they were learning new information and would act on it, and have done nothing.

Although their concerns about Palm Oil weren't (or at least are no longer) about orangutans, they were about child labor.

Teach the orangutans to harvest palm fruit.

On a more serious note, there is usually nothing for orangs to eat. If they aren’t killed by the construction crew, they migrate to find food.

There is one guy who built a polyculture date palm farm. Date palms, some brambly tree to keep megafauna out, and I forget the rest of the plant species. Except it was habitable by orangs, and semi protected.

Willie Smits: How to restore a rainforest ?

https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_how_to_restore_a_rain...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vfuCPFb8wk

I think so yes. I did not learn about him from TED but I found it later.

The moment where he tells the audience to stop clapping for him might be the most respect I’ve gained for anyone in two seconds flat.

So 3,079,600 ha per annum for Animal Ag vs 760,400 ha for everything else.

That's roughly 75:25

WWF claims that the soy farmers buy land from the ranchers. The cattle ranches burn new forest to replace the farmland they sold.

Bloody hands all around.

People have invented many kinds of materials as alternatives to plastics tho. It's just not economical. It's not about technology

Its not economical for quick profits/next generation pays the price. Maybe we should take in consideration the ‘long term, that way better things would become a lot more economical, especially when reuse becomes common sense again. We did better in the past in this regard.

> Its not economical for quick profits/next generation pays the price. Maybe we should take in consideration the ‘long term

Maybe, but 50+ years later and we're still following the money. I don't expect humans to collectively change behavior for longer than either of our lifetimes.

Then what is needed is somekind of social or economic innovations, not tech. All the techs for sustainable green living are there already

This is going to be controversial and I don’t want the Amazon to continue deforestation but it’s not quite fair that both Native Americans and the USA as well as the rest of the world deforested a lot of land already in pursuit of development yet countries in South America can’t do that now because they’re too late to the party.

That said, I believe we’ve actually halted deforestation in the US so that’s good.

Largely affected by steel production being outsourced to China

https://worldsteel.org/steel-topics/statistics/world-steel-i...

I think we might have run out of trees.

> 90% of the old-growth forests that existed in the contiguous United States in the 1600s have been cleared.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest#Logging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

Locations of remaining tracts

  35% in South America
  28% in North America
  19% in northern Asia
  8% in Africa
  7% in South Asia Pacific
  Less than 3% in Europe

We have absolutely not run out of trees. 31% of land is still covered by trees, 66% of what it was before agricultural development. It’s more accurate to say we have run out of a need for deforestation.

The definitions in the Wikipedia article also state other figures. For one thing, in another part of it, they state that "Barely one-third (34 percent) of the world's forests are primary forests." After centuries of industrialization and explosive population growth in the human species, that percentage is surprisingly decent.

Secondly for your U.S. figure, bear in mind that their baseline for the age of the cleared forests is almost 400 years. Even among trees, many don't live that long. You could easily have a truly ancient forest by any measure, that hasn't seen invasive human presence in centuries, filled with extremely old trees, but consider it what, secondary forest just because it's from the early 1700's instead of the 1600s?

Pursuing fairness at all costs seems dumb to me

Deforesting land is unnecessary at this point. The main use of large tracts of rural land is agriculture, but the world has enough agricultural land to feed everyone already.

This would be a significant concern if agriculture was still a large proportion of the world economy, but it's ~4%. They can do something in the other 96%.

From what I hear, most of the rich world is now re-foresting.

The Spartans got to throw their babies into a chasm.

I find it unfair that I’m not allowed to commit infanticide just because I’m late to the party.

You aren't deforesting the Amazon for you. You're deforesting it for us.

First world paying emerging economies money for their non-renewable resources at what seems like reasonable rates only because they haven't the resources to use them for themselves yet, and by the time enough money accumulates to do so, they've shipped off a regrettable proportion of that resource to other countries. Tale as old as colonization.

it's more accurate to say that we've out sourced it.

It shouldn’t be declining it needs to stop completely. Now.

The US couldn't even compensate the native people whose land they completely destroyed with nuclear testing in the pacific. But it wants LATAM to compensate them by giving up their sovereignty over their own land "because it affects everyone".

Or the people that they displaced to build Diego Garcia.

Oh wait that's not the US, that was the British. The base is only 'leased' they say. Guess you can outsource your atrocities now and stay clean of blame?

That's not how the world works. Most things aren't all or nothing. Usually there are tradeoffs and competing interests.

Enforced using economic sanctions and if required, military.

We can't mess around with the climate crisis any more.

Sanctions will drive Brazil even deeper into the arms of China.

Are you willing to die for this jungle?

We’ll likely die without it so I guess so?

You won't die without it.

It "needs" to do absolutely nothing. The amazon is ours and we can exploit it if we want. If it was up to me, I'd burn that entire jungle down if it brought even a tiny bit of prosperity to Brazil. Who are you to judge?

Even our current left-wing president is pushing for oil prospecting in the region. I support him in that.

probably a better thing to do would be to get the rest of the world to pay you to not do it.

They'd have to pay a lot. And continuously. Earlier this year, the EU's approach was to try to introduce sanction terms into the international agreements. Even our current president took offense to that.

I really don't find it surprising that he's friends with China. They're the ones who buy up all our soy anyway. They'd probably enjoy it a lot if we destroyed the Amazon to make more soy for them to buy.

Maybe you're unaware of the situation in Haiti, but burning your entire jungle down brings nothing but flooding and despair. The other country on the same island has none of these problems.

I'd do a lot of things if they were free. Nothing is.

Which is why I said I would do it "if" it brought us prosperity. I didn't say I'd do it lightly. The point I tried to express was my willingness to sacrifice it. If I could push a button to replace the entire area of the Amazon with high tech industry, I would do it without thinking twice.

Western countries have been telling us what to do with this jungle for many decades now. Even as a kid I used to hear of US presidents talking about how the Amazon "belongs to the world". I find that to be extremely offensive and disrespectful towards our sovereignty.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

We've pushed the atmosphere to conditions under which the Amazon will simply die without "deforestation".

Explain.

Drought exposes the jungle to the risk of more frequent wildfires. Repeated wildfires can abruptly shift the dominant habit from jungle to savanna. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/amazon-tipping-trouble-c...

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