The United States once had one of the largest forests on Earth. The Eastern Forest covered almost everywhere east of the Mississippi. 2,560,000 km2 of forest. Now it is largely gone. Replaced with farmland and sprawl. So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century.
The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is going to have to pay. You can't tell a country you can't progress like the USA it is hypocritical.
> So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century.
As someone born in Brazil, I don't see why it's hard. Please criticise away. My country should be learning from the mistakes of others, not repeating them in order to favour some higher political caste.
The point is that every rich country first became rich, then started worrying about the environment.
It is hypocritical from rich countries to ask Brazil to stop deforestation if that means halting its economic development. If the rich countries really believe that preserving the environment is more important than the economy, then they need to either (a) pay underdeveloped countries to preserve their forests or (b) sacrifice their own economy and spend their own resources to re-grow their forest land. Ideally both.
The thing is, "paying Brazil to not raze the Amazon" has already been tried and failed. The government sees it as a way to fleece rich environmentalists and has no interest in abandoning their meal ticket.
Even if the government was aligned on keeping the Amazon as it was, they have their own enforcement struggles. Once an illegal developer has razed a plot of land, there's not really much the government can do to stop them. The damage has already been done. Even worse, by the time the government is even aware of a particular section of illegally cleared land, it's already been sold off, developed, and has people living in it. The only option now is to either:
1. Grandfather in the illegal land
2. Forcibly evict and ruin the lives of people who bought into the illegal purchase so that the scarred land can remain fallow for decades
Overwhelmingly Brazilian courts have chosen #1 over #2. Enforcement is too far behind land development to make any sort of "pay to save" scheme work.
And my point is that Brazil won't get rich by doing what it is currently doing. The primary sector won't enrich the general population or make the country more developed. Only some people favoured by the current government. That's what's currently happening, not some cuckoo theory.
Brazil is rich though, and largely because of those things. The fact that such richness is so unjustly distributed across the population is an orthogonal problem.
Yep. But one way of distributing this across the population is by favouring other sectors rather than strangling them to favour the primary.
The number of people working in the agricultural sector has only shrunk and will keep shrinking due to mechanisation/automation. The general population won't see the benefits of the primary sector growing, unless we have a Soviet-style wealth redistribution.
My point was not that the current model is a good one, but rather that its problem is not one of generating wealth but rather one of distributing it, which you just demonstrated as well.
I guarantee you, I was not defending the current focus on developing /latifúndios/ at the expense of everything else.
A lot of people assume I'm being a radical and saying Brazil should stop exporting meat/soy/etc. I'm not.
What I'm saying is that Brazil needs is a plan that's not simply "keep fucking the country even though it's not really working".
I'm not a fan of people from richer countries saying "Brazil should keep doing what it seems to want to do", because this is also way too favourable to them.
I'm not a fan of richer (or poorer!) countries saying much of anything about what other countries should or should not do. :) Everyone is biased. Everyone is hypocritical to some degree. We should find common ground, not impose or be imposed on.
I think it's kinda easy to find common ground, but everyone should be allowed a voice. With the "shut up, let Brazil destroy forests, we did it too", the only people that seem to be getting a voice are politically-correct privileged people from rich countries (who want to keep taking advantage of Brazil), criminals in Brazil destroying the forest and the corrupt current Brazilian government.
There's a lot of people working in that automation. That earn much more and make the country more efficient, more production means more jobs down the road.
Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.
> There's a lot of people working in that automation.
Sorry for the pun, but Brazil isn't really reaping the benefits of agricultural automation to compensate for the issues being an exclusively primary-sector exporter causes. Automation scales very well. Also notice that I'm not saying Brazil shouldn't keep doing what it is doing, I'm saying that other more developed-country-ish sectors should be expanded too.
> Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.
If that's the case, then saying "Brazil needs to import primary sector stuff before they grow fo' real like us" is even worse :) They want Brazil to suffer before it has a chance to become a developed country.
The only people who "don't want more developed countries" are the people that want Brazil to keep being a primary sector exporter that suffers from Resource curse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse).
I'm from Brazil but I have lived abroad for a while. And what I said before doesn't negate the fact that Brazil has a healthy agritech industry. This industry still doesn't make up for the problems caused by the current policies. And one thing doesn't really negate the other. We don't have to kill the primary sector for others to develop.
Brasil has >70% people working in the service sector. The percentage of people working in agriculture has actually shrunk since the Lula years. Mechanization and automation will guarantee it keeps shrinking.
The current economic measures are favouring only the primary sector to the detriment of others.
I'm not even calling for ceasing imports of agricultural stuff, all I'm saying is that the current madness is already making the people poorer.
It is precisely because so many people working in the service sector that the country does not get rich. Doesn't build any wealth, doesn't get to export anything.
And also, it is not the amount of people working that determines how to enrich the country. It is the overall output. Brazil has nothing but the agro sector at the moment. To build a stronger industry, they need to come up with the resources from somewhere. And agro is as good as any of the alternatives.
Yes, and? My point is precisely that those people aren't going to start working in agriculture. The number of people working in agriculture is only shrinking, and there's several labour problems with agricultural work in Brazil that won't cause farm/livestock workers to see the money.
I'm not suggesting people move to the services sector.
> The number of people working in agriculture is only shrinking
The number of people working doesn't matter. What matters is that the country gets through agriculture the resources needed to invest in the other sectors.
In theory that makes a lot of sense. Truly. In reality, believing that and going froward with this plan was an immense setback to the country and the population.
Europe/US/etc letting Brazil keep doing what it's doing is mostly helping Europe/US/etc at the expense of Brazilians and the environment.
I am not arguing in favor of the US or Europe, and I am also not arguing that Brazil should keep putting down trees just to sell more soybeans for the US and China.
What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.
So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...
> What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.
Oh, I agree with all that. That's an important post.
> So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...
I guess my whole point is that foreigners saying "we did it before to grow, Brazil should do it too" is nonsensical, hypocritical and very self-serving, precisely because of your second paragraph. At the same time, I'm ok with foreigners telling Brazil to stop cutting trees because it opens the door to us at least replying with something like the second paragraph.
Brazil is a rich country though. It's considered 2nd world due to violence, income/wealth inequality and sanitation problems, which are mainly political and not due to lack of money
Brazil is a top 10 economy only because of its population size. Per capita, it sits smack in the middle of the table and is behind "poor" countries from Eastern Europe and the Caribean.
Due to its inequality, I'd venture that a chart compared median income levels would put us below most African countries. Brazil can be an amazing place to live if you are already wealthy (and if you are willing to live surrounded by private security and completely removed from the reality of the population at large), but no one in their right mind would risk trading their lives with that of the median Brazilian.
The countries pointing fingers at Brazil all did the same to become more developed and to make their population richer, they just want to stop Brazil from doing the same so they can keep the prices of commodities they sell higher.
They cheated but now don't want you to do the same in order to keep other countries in check, I mean, Europe is burning more and more coal, they are just a bunch of hypocrites.
Fun fact: That "newspaper*" that published the article is from Argentina, which is destroying the "Chaco" region as we speak and burning large areas of wetlands to increase the area for growing cattle, a market in which it's competing with Brazil.
Even thought the article is from another source, the BA Times belong to a company aligned with the Argentinian government which supports Lula in Brazil.
> The countries pointing fingers at Brazil all did the same to become more developed and to make their population richer, they just want to stop Brazil from doing the same so they can keep the prices of commodities they sell higher.
My point is that what made US/EU rich isn't what Brazil is doing. And even if it were, what makes a country rich pre-1900 won't exactly work in 2022. Brazilians could buy machinery from other countries. They don't have to go trough some mini industrial revolution again.
> They cheated but now don't want you to do the same in order to keep other countries in check, I mean, Europe is burning more and more coal, they are just a bunch of hypocrites.
It's even worse in my opinion, because people here actually do seem to think that "the west" has it under control nowadays, which is one of the dumbest things I learned recently.
There are so many factors which were omitted in order to create that misinformation, but there is only one thing you can trust the industry to do: suppress any information which could negatively impact them, even if it could very well become an existential threat ...
Yeah, that's a very hard sell, when your country is in such a shameful state, your economy is hanging by a thread that's agriculture, and without it your currency would be so messed up you'd be unlikely to be able to pay for the device you're typing that on. When you pledge for your own country that's suffering from hunger to reduce agriculture, you're part of the problem.
Import oriented agriculture/livestock is not really serving the local economy or making the country grow. Like other poster said, "Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation".
People used to eat meat in Brazil every day, now even some middle class people had to reduce due to prices. The same goes for gas. That's because the economy changed heavily to favour primary sector exports at the detriment of every other activity.
Agriculture and Livestock were benefited at the detriment of every other sector.
EDIT: I wouldn't be able to even dream about buying the device I'm currently using if I were still working as a software engineer in Brazil, dude! I had to immigrate, as have about >60% of the co-workers I had in the last 10-ish years. The economical bullshit you're currently defending was shit even for people in well paying positions. However I was lucky, as my parents were immigrants themselves and I have foreign citizenship due to that. Some people weren't as lucky!
If you don't understand how the vast majority of goods made in your country helps your economy, you terribly need to read some economic theory. I suggest Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Brazil didn't suddenly deinvest other sectors out of a whim, they became less relevant thanks to economic pressure. To assume otherwise is accusing the entire country of incredible stupidity, which is laughable when you demonstrate so much lack of knowledge.
Oh nice, more condescension. I'll let it pass. Here's a real reply:
This might work in aggregate, but doesn't really help the average Brazilian, nor makes the country become developed. If the economic measures are only favouring the primary sector, the "vast majority of goods made in [my] country" is only making money for an extremely small part of the population. Plus, these measures are causing shrinkage of other sectors that actually would help the population richness grow.
What is happening only favours people in the primary sector (which isn't really employing that much people despite continuous growth) and richer countries buying cheaply for us.
Hypocrites who want Brazil to keep being a giant farm/ranch of the world selling cheap stuff are a problem as big as the country's government. Go away with your colonialism.
Alright, so now it seems I want Zimbabwe-style Socialism in Brazil, whatever that means. It seems you're too busy putting words in my mouth to care about what I wrote, so goodbye I guess.
EDIT: Rightfully flagged/dead and I didn't even had to flag it myself. Nice. There should be no room for this type of discourse on HN.
Note this is probably a false dilemma. According to Brazilian federal police, the recent deforestation surge is caused by illegal logging, not agriculture or cattle raising. Source in Portuguese: https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/pf-grilagem-e-madeira-...
Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.
Fine, that's even better then: it continuous decreased from around 2004-2014, when the country was really really growing fast and fine af, to the point it was able to totally ignore the 2008 financial crisis. Amazeballs.
By the way the president from the first of those years is running in the next election. There's still hope.
The majority of deforestation took place prior to 1910, says Wikipedia. We didn't know nearly as much back then about the problems it would cause. So I'm not sure it's hard to criticize this when seeing it in 2022.
The USA could easily decide they would like to restore 50% of the forest by reclaiming farmland and exurbs and planting back trees. In 50 years it could be a large wild forest. Perhaps not old growth like before. So what is stopping this? It would cost a huge amount of money and drive food costs up dramatically. So even though it was not really as appreciated then to keep forests, it still is empty talk because nobody will pay to reverse those decisions as benefits are being reaped from it. So yes the USA is still not in a position to criticize without doing anything themselves or paying to preserve the Brazilian forests.
Brazil will face the same consequences as everyone else.
They can be mad that other countries got rich in the past, or they can put their big boy pants on and preserve something that is just as critical to them (probably more so critical to them) as everyone else in the world.
Killing the Amazon is a crime. Nothing done in the US or anywhere else changes that, regardless of whether that was a crime, too.
It is also not hypocritical unless you personally cut down a tree, or unless you believe in the collective responsibility of nations. I don't think 'the Brazialians' are responsible for killing the Amazon -- it's probably a minority of people and we shouldn't care which nation they belong too. This is a serious global problem, and it accidentally happens in some country. Neither collective blame nor collective shame will help. This problem must be criticised.
Well, crimes should not go unpunished, and if we can, revert the wrongdoing.
What are US or Europe citizens, NGOs and governments doing to restate their forests to, at least, their pre-industrial magnitude? Recover your environments before lecturing and chastising us third world humans.
It all depends on when it happened. We evolved as a species and what was perceived as normal way less than 100 years ago would be considered outrageous by today's standards. As an example, if you take 10 highly successful Hollywood movies from the 1950s, chances are that in 7 of them a woman is forced into kissing the male lead; do it today and your career is over. And we're talking about people, not trees.
Back then we didn't know what damage we were bringing to the environment, now we do, so I think it's perfectly logical to call Bolsonaro a corrupt criminal while closing an eye on similar events from over a century ago.
The modern situation is different though. All those trees were used to bootstrap the current level of technological progress that Brazil doesn't need to do.
Ideally wealthier countries would purchase/subsidize these areas so they don't need to be logged
Yes. Use eminent domain to crawl back the suburbia. Pay people what is the value of newly forested land. Then provide them some living place few square meters is proven to be enough by examples in East Asia.
Because grass, one of the the world's most well tended and sprawling crops, doesn't help feeding people near as much compared to the other 99% of the land that isn't "housing".
Because every bit helps and everyone should be ready to make some minor sacrifices for the planet. After all they are asking others to die from hunger.
Why do governments not start an international reforestation / ecological fund and pay some of their GDP into it so that it would make economic sense for Brazil, Australia and others to preserve their forests, kelp, reefs etc. These carbon credit half measures are pitiful.
Western governments pay part of their GDP for NATO, but defending against ecological collapse might be higher priority.
Governments tax citizens by force all the time. If it’s going to be used for anything, it should FIRST AND FOREMOST be used to coordinate large scale activity to mitigate negative externalities. And there’s no bigger one than the ecosystem collapse we are starting to see around us.
(Printing more money btw will only accerate consumption. There is very little thought to sustainability in most human economic systems.)
> Why do governments not start an international reforestation / ecological fund and pay some of their GDP into it
they are busy pouring their gdp into competing with one another...unfortunately,our current economic system is based on endless growth and competition instead of equity and cooperation; i doubt anything will happen until its too late...
Exactly. Competition instead of collaboration means that organizations can’t meaningfully get together and solve large externalities before it’s too late. Same with wars.
We need to get our governments to work together and get things done, as they did with the Toronto Protocol but over and over. The United Nations can work to implement software-like release cycles of more and more mechanisms that facilitate cooperation between countries, even as they bicker.
Sadly, I do not think such solutions will be implemented top-down, and the bottom-up ones may take too long. But we can try !!!
With my idealists hat on: that would be great. Plus, it would suddenly make economic sense to build desalination plants and pump water into deserts and plant trees there.
With my realist hat on: that money will disappear as quickly as dodgy ngo can write empty “project proposals”. Trees will be planted, press fotos made, and trees will die. 70 years of “development aid”.
The eastern US forests cover 1.55 million km^2. So, no, it is not "largely gone". Granted, a considerable fraction of this is regenerated after being clear cut.
The Eastern Forest has fragmented a lot since it first started being settled, but don't exaggerate for dramatic effect. Vast tracts of it remain or have regrown and many of the eastern US states are thickly, heavily forested in ways that would make, say for example a European gaze in wonder at actually seeing them. Even many urban Americans simply have no idea just how many and huge the remaining or regrown eastern forest sections of the U.S are. They don't see them and their limited sight of woodland largely consists of scattered fragments around their cities, where obviously, the least forest would be visible. Also worth noting, they continue to grow back each year. You can largely thank industrialized, centralizad agriculture and urbanization for that.
You absolutely can and we have been doing so since, probably the 1970s. I think this hypocriticalness should continue. The world is FULL of hypocrtical shit and it doesn't stop of from trying to do what is right.
You are looking at this issue one-dimensionally. It is very easy to criticise given that we now know what the impacts of deforestation are a lot better than we did a century or three ago.
It doesn't and I am not advocating cutting down all the forests. But it is very easy to have had already done it, reaped the benefits of being an agricultural/economic powerhouse and then tell a developing country that was not good. Is the USA now reversing that mistake by turning farmland and sprawling suburbs back to forest? No. It could be done. It is just that will cost something to do. It is easier to tell someone else to not cut down their forest. That does not cost anything.
Timber and beef are not the significant chunks of the world's economy that they once were. There are alternatives now for consumers and for economic planners.
Alternatives that don't lead to future death of entire ecosystems and the impoverishment of large sections of the world's population.
I live close and know people who livelihoods depends on that forest. Believe it or not, it's not the farmers or loggers fault. Their livelihoods depends on that forest. Farmers depend on the rain cycle. Loggers depend on the forest staying healthy, so new trees grow so they can keep their business going. Illegal logging does happen but it isn't their fault exclusively either.
The root cause is illegal occupation and settlement of land. People invade other people's land, often federal land, they cut down all of the trees, they burn it down, so they can clear it to set up makeshift camps. They then split and sell the land. Once there are people living on it, it's pretty much a lost cause due to how loosely enforced private ownership of land is, specially federal land. Also, it's a lucrative business, and involves corruption in all levels. People affected by it, like loggers who lose their property and livelihoods can hardly do anything, since the invaders will often get violent and the State wont do anything.
I really want to see some sources to those claims.
Illegal farmers and loggers have no interest in preserving the forest. They can just completely destroy some area, then move around to another one and start it all over again. Even farmers don't want to spend too much time in the same place if they can help it, the soil in the Amazon isn't that good for farming after a few harvests.
That was one action mentioned, but I think you're being over-literal here - I said tactical parity, not mirroring every action.
Essentially I am saying that people abandoned by the state should consider taking the defense of land back into their own hands when they experience violence, as was summarized here:
People affected by it, like loggers who lose their property and livelihoods can hardly do anything, since the invaders will often get violent and the State wont do anything.
Wood extraction in the Amazon is a crime. It's aggravated crime if done in indigenous lands. It's aggravated even more if done for illegal mining activities. The state police (civil and military) from the various Brazilian states that compose the Amazon forest has the legal obligation to investigate and arrest criminals within the region. The problem is the region is just too big. But let's assume that somehow all those criminals lose their ability to profit on the product of their crimes altogether, within a 5 to 10 years time span, all the vegetation would be naturally restored. The Amazon forest is unstoppable.
I live in the state of São Paulo, far from the Amazon forest, and the vegetation here requires a lot of work to be tamed. If you leave an empty allotment 2 or 3 months without any care, you will get knee height grass and all sorts of "exotic" plants coming out of the ground. The Amazon is orders of magnitude more aggressive than this one.
So once you stop the illegal activity, the forest will come back. The problem is not the forest, but the people -- indigenous or not -- affected by the illegal activities. Recently we saw headlines about the murder of two people in the region, an activist and a journalist. So many others have died when they crossed paths with criminals. This is a humanitarian problem before an ecological problem.
The problem is that the current government doesn't WANT to investigate and arrest criminals. They cut funding, merged environmental protection and indigenous affairs into the agricultural ministry. This is well documented.
The forest is on the edge of becoming a net carbon producer for the first time. This doesn't simply reverse when it regrows from some saplings. Its capacity to create clouds to replenish water is already heavily compromised. When that stops this simply doesn't reverse. When you burn sections without first clearing it of its animal populations they perish, destroying the ecosystems that often needs animals to help germinate new trees. The mercury used for illegal gold mining doesn't just go out of the river and back into the bottle. Billions of animals die from these actions and the results will be irreversible.
To call the Amazon unstoppable, to say that the humans that are dying is the real problem, smacks of the ignorance that has led us to this point.
> The forest is on the edge of becoming a net carbon producer for the first time.
Forests in general are stable - _carbon neutral_, unless disturbed. Oceans are where most of the Earth oxygen is converted from CO₂.
The real reason why Brazil needs to save the Amazon, for South America, is water supply - rain forest induced water evaporation is main source of water for the Río de la Plata basin - where several of the biggest and developed cities in the South America are.
But if those cities dry up then what? Economic loss? Not everything is reducible to a price tag.
The species in Amazonian ecosystems have as much of a right to exist as any other, including humans. Brazil should save it because it's the right thing to do.
> But let's assume that somehow all those criminals lose their ability to profit on the product of their crimes altogether, within a 5 to 10 years time span, all the vegetation would be naturally restored. The Amazon forest is unstoppable.
Recent research points out that the Amazon (and in fact most Earth's supposedly wild) rainforest is a elaborate example of centuries of forest bio-engineering, and it doesn't simply recover if abandoned; decaying into desert instead. Further bio-engineering would be required to repair it to it's "original" state.
If we really care about what happens in Brazil we should offer economically viable solutions rather than pointing fingers and accusing them of doing something that we did in the past for a long time.
As someone born in Brazil, I'm tired of this condescending bullshit.
There are several economically viable solutions, but Brazilian government should be interested in pursuing them, rather than only pursuing things that only benefits the current friends of the government (such as deforestation).
US/EU/etc forcing Brazil to get its shit together would be BETTER for the population. We don't need the deforestation to progress. Quite the opposite.
If Brazil were to wage a war on another country, would it be fine just because Europe/US also did it in the past?
This is also "sins of the father" style reasoning. The fact that other people did a thing in the past doesn't mean I agree or support it. I have ancestors who fought with the confederacy; does this mean I shouldn't be opposed to human trafficking in 2022? I think that would be an unreasonable jump to make.
This is a very weak argument for something that is so damaging as letting the forest be destroyed for what is virtually zero economical gain to the population.
Brazil being a major exporter of only primary sector goods isn't doing the population of the country any favours.
> If people from other countries really want Brazilian economy to get off the ground, they should want Brazil to export processed and manufactured goods, or other sectors.
> Treating Brazil like a big farm is doing neither Brazil nor the environment any favours.
> The "We should't criticise Brazil" is not only hypocritical, it's also counter-intuitive.
It's not about halting a major part of its economy. It's about not fucking up the rest of the economy only to accommodate a sector that isn't doing that much good for the greater part of the population.
China/EU/US actually love the cheap meat. The "let's not criticise" is as self-serving as it gets.
Why should we also not point fingers? Deforestation fell dramatically under Lula while inequality fell and the economy grew quickly.
What "we" did in the past means environmental protection should be subsidised by the west, but our history doesn't let Brazil's government off the hook.
Both deforestation and inequality fall when the economy does better and rise in times of economic crisis.
The economic improvement "under" Lula was mostly due to international factors (the boon in the price of commodities) which is why it collapsed under Dilma (Lula's protegé).
Instead of using the economic surplus that fell into his lap to invest in infrastructure and industrialization, Lula used it to fund the largest corruption scheme in our history.
Lula's personal culpability has never been established to the degree you suggest.
Just compare him to Temer, Bolsonaro and the entire Bolsonaro clan, which bought off Moro, is weakening protections for the rainforest (benefiting his associates), and is systematically dismantling anti-corruption institutions.
> Instead of using the economic surplus that fell into his lap to invest in infrastructure and industrialization, Lula used it to fund the largest corruption scheme in our history.
Lula and Dilma spearheaded the biggest infrastructure investment in Brazilian history, both in absolute and relative terms. There was corruption, but the claim that it was the largest corruption scheme is laughable, a talking point of dumbass bolsonaristas.
This of course applies to all environmental issues, both foreign and domestic. There would be a lot more partnership and a lot less animosity if we universally adhered to your notion. We might actually get something done!
There is a good talk by an economist who basically said he was all exited to learn about optimal solution to those problems and then he went to a meeting where farmer were basically fighting people who wanted to reintroduce wolf. And he realized nobody cared how the optimal solution.
Since then he works on trying to come up with solution that doesn't lead to the two groups trying to lynch each other.
Very true -- even among those who put on a facade of altruism. Those who are extreme about it have often had other motivations, and it ultimately boiled down to selfishness (either for material resource or personal safety, or for social rewards for appearing a certain way). It truly is sad!
Agree. Imagine outsiders telling you that half your country is untouchable. I wonder if some future carbon credit system could pay them for the carbon sequestration that the Brazilian Amazon provides.
>As a Brazilian, I would be completely ok with that. We can handle people telling us those things.
Would you? Because this would absolutely escalate from words to actions. I could foresee this leading to quotas that if they're not met carry economic sanctions with them. That doesn't improve Brazil, does it?
Sovereignty means that nobody outside of Brazil gets a say without offering something major in return.
> Sovereignty means that nobody outside of Brazil gets a say without offering something major in return.
First world countries used to give us money for keeping the forest but the current government (prior to 2019, "the annual donations to the Amazon Fund have amounted to nearly $1.3 billion" [1]). We could get back to that.
However I also happen to believe that, at best, the deforestation part is not important for Brazil's economy at all.
Several others have mentioned [2][3] (and I agree with them) that the deforestation part is actually damaging to the economy and to the livelihood of law-following Brazilians, and is borne out of illegal activity.
The current government could just start following the (Brazilian) law and the issue would disappear. Ah, but police is expensive, you say. Well, they could have used the 1.3 billion from EU/US. Maybe a new government will be able to get that back, one can only hope.
>As a Brazilian, I would be completely ok with that.
Well, that's your view, and you have the right to have it. But, it's likely that the majority doesn't agree.
Besides, if you ask me, outsiders that tell a country to not cut down their forests for economic/monetary purposes should pay for that privilege. That's not to talk of the arrogance of outsiders telling someone what to do.
Brazil is a "grown up" country. We can handle criticism. We don't need people being condescending to us about what others can or can't say to us. Let us brazilians defend ourselves, please?
Another reason I'm fine with criticism is because the people saying "let Brazil deforest, we also did it" are the ones being favoured by Brazil fucking up the country. Europeans/Americans/Chinese are enjoying cheap Brazilian primary sector imports to the detriment of the rest of the Brazilian population.
I also completely disagree that in 2022 Brazil will turn into a developed country by being a colony.
The current government is heavily favouring the export of primary and finite resources.
If people from other countries really want Brazilian economy to get off the ground, they should want Brazil to export processed and manufactured goods, or other sectors.
Treating Brazil like a big farm is doing neither Brazil nor the environment any favours.
The "We should't criticise Brazil, let them do what we also did before" is not only hypocritical, it's also counter-intuitive and very self-serving!
Our early industrialization contributed massively to global warming. It allowed us to become extremely wealthy, but also we incurred a "carbon debt" to the rest of the planet, since our atmosphere is a shared resource.
Now that others are trying to industrialize, we should repay that "carbon debt" to offset the cost of allowing them to industrialize cleanly, since we had the benefit early on of not having to worry about our impact on the environment. The gains that we made early on were at everyone's expense.
There is definitely a debt, but primary industries aren't what they were when Europe and North America were deforesting. To use that an a justification now is a weak argument when there are alternatives that would add more value to the economy.
There are only four economically viable solutions:
1) Boycott or put drastic tariffs on Brazilian meat and soy, aka the products that are made out of the areas which were former rainforest. The problem: China won't give a fuck about Western sanction and Bolsonaro and his goons will happily sell to them (aided by the fact that China still has issues with pig fever in their domestic meat production).
2) Pay off Bolsonaro and his goons. That stops the destruction, but provides a fascist dictatorship with even more money.
3) Hope for Lula to win in the elections in October. The problem: Bolsonaro may manipulate the election to stay in power, either in front (by having Lula arrested or preventing him from campaigning, public debates etc.) or afterwards (outright vote manipulation). Or he might legitimately win despite his current lag in the polls, which makes the situation even worse than it already is.
4) Have the CIA do what they have a lot of experience in: get rid of Bolsonaro and his goons, either by abducting him and hold him to trial in the US similar to drug barons or by permanently eliminating him. That would be the cleanest way and send a signal to other criminal destroyers of nature, but without a whole lot of effort the resulting power vacuum may destabilize the region even more than it already is.
I really don't think the CIA should be the global judge, jury and executioner. I don't think the US assassinating the leader of one of the world's largest countries to "send a signal" is conductive to world peace.
We do need a world police to enforce at least some basic rules like to not genocide minorities (like China does) or to permanently kill off an ecosystem that is important for the whole planet's climate for short-term profits.
I don't like the idea either, but given the corruption and deadlock of the UN, I prefer the role being taken up by the US instead of Russia or China.
Well, western countries also have some role in such destruction if we look deeply. Brazil cut amazon for animal farming and wealthy people & countries are the ones who import beef. Countries like China, the US, and the EU are major importers of Beef. Maybe these news articles also blame them?
Brazil isn't a developed country and many people live under the belt of poverty. So, what are they supposed to do? In addition, corruption has made their life miserable. This is such a hard problem to solve.
This is economy vs. environment dichotomy is just lazy. "So, what are they supposed to do?" Not destroy a forest which belongs to every Brazilian to further enrich elite ranchers, agribusinesses and mining firms. This is the corruption you are talking about.
It's not a hard problem - we know good governance is the solution, as it has been in the past. The incompetence and corruption of the current government are costing Brazil far more than the opportunity cost of not exploiting the forest. Doing so is such an inefficient solution, providing temporary gains for a few while leading to enormous hidden costs for literally everyone in the future.
So sure, there should be import tariffs or bans on Brazilian beef, even sanctions on loggers, miners and ranchers etc. but the next significant step is to get this government out.
1. Who are we (US, Canada, China - heavily developed nations) to criticize?
2. Bolsonaro is bad mkay
I think the root of the problem in both situations is people in power both in the government and out of it who do not seek sustainability and often are susceptible to corruption or influence. In both situations, the profits did not go to your average human.
It's not unheard of that in Africa many groups/tribes form together to fight back against poachers. Is there anything like this happening in the Amazon rainforest?
And if no, then why not? Do people think a politician with his fancy suit is going to step his foot into the swamp to try and meet halfway?
These assholes are literally destroying the world and the human race is none the wiser....
I sometimes wonder what would happen if rather than trying to evolve on a technological level, humanity evolved to protect and harmonize this world.
Holy shit it's not even funny the level of ignorance that permeates topics of destroying the Earth.
We had deaths reported just this week, by Sonia Guajajara who represents one of the most prominent indigenous people's association and is running in the next elections.
The thing is, in the end, its often poacher/miners shooting at unarmed people, often in the middle of the jungle, far away from the effective jurisdiction of whoever else would care. And the very insitutions that could oversee and act to prevent violence have been sistematically dismantled by the current fascist-in-chief, either by removing key people or by being financially strangled.
But hey, at least now you won't lose your license for speeding and buying ammo is easier than ever.
> It's not unheard of that in Africa many groups/tribes form together to fight back against poachers. Is there anything like this happening in the Amazon rainforest?
There is. People just get killed and everything is swept under the rug.
Maybe, and this is a big maybe, we should think about whether some countries have a disproportionately large access to, or responsibility for, resources relevant to all of humanity.
Specifically, I would like to question if Brazil can or even should be trusted to handle the Amazon forest in a responsible manner. Over the past decades, objectively, it has shown that the country, or maybe primarily its government, doesn't: The forest is continuously decimated, ever faster, with full and open support by the government itself.
Considering that the Amazon is of broader concern than just Brazil's jurisdiction alone, would it -- and I'd include other, similar areas around the globe here too -- make sense to move administration to a more responsible body, the UN for example (not specifically the UN, but you get the idea)?
This may sound offensive to you for all kinds of reasons, especially if you're Brazilian, and I sincerely apologise for that. But please consider that maybe the challenges ahead of humanity as a whole require new solutions, new ways to think about who "owns" land?
And how many millions of people are you willing to kill for this? Because you're essentially suggesting that the rest of the world should invade and occupy the sovereign territory of a nation with 200 million people.
There is a snowball's chance in hell that anybody would willingly agree to this. Any kind of scheme you can come up with is guaranteed to cause more issues that will harm Brazilians.
Other people telling you how to live your life is a recipe for disaster. One that we've seen over and over again.
No, it's different. I'm not suggesting "the west" taking control of the Amazon, but humanity as a whole. The other option is hoping for the best or trusting a corrupt government to do the right thing for the rest of the globe. It hasn't worked well yet.
What incorruptible body could take control of the amazon on behalf of humanity? How would we chose its leaders? Who decides what is protected and what isn’t?
No body is incorruptible. But less corrupt would certainly be a step forward, no?
I would suggest something like a global conservation fund responsible for guarding critical "infrastructure" of our planet. At some point, we will need to take action to prevent earth from becoming inhospitable, and this requires steering. Merely admitting defeat to greedy human nature doesn't seem to lead anywhere.
What troops do we send if Brazilians cut down trees after we tell them it’s protected? Do we have to back coups to put in place a government that respects the global conservation fund if one rejects it?
You’re just describing imperialism one step removed.
Saying we need structural change, but not more top down control, isn’t throwing my hands up and admitting defeat to greedy human nature.
What that sounds a lot like to my ears is “white man’s burden”. I.e. we the developed world have a responsibility to control and parent the developing world because they can’t do it themselves.
I’m no expert in what’s happening on the ground in the amazon, but the story used to be clearing amazon to raise cattle to sell to mcdonalds. Idk if that’s still the case, but i’d be willing to bet that the thing driving deforestation is resource extraction for global markets.
It’s temping to try to police brazil’s extraction, but the far less paternalistic and colonial thing to do would be to police our own demand for what they’re cutting down the rainforest to provide.
> What that sounds a lot like to my ears is “white man’s burden”. I.e. we the developed world have a responsibility to control and parent the developing world because they can’t do it themselves.
The difference here being that it's not about taking control of the developing world, but saving resources humanity as a whole requires to keep earth habitable for us - this affects everyone, poor or rich. It's just that Brazil, right now, has a very unfortunate combination of a corrupt government, very valuable resources, and responsibility for the integrity of the forest.
> It’s temping to try to police brazil’s extraction, but the far less paternalistic and colonial thing to do would be to police our own demand for what they’re cutting down the rainforest to provide.
That isn't mutually exclusive. At the very least, there should be sanctions put into place until Brazil starts actually trying to prevent extraction, not actively supporting it. But I could still see a global organization responsible for keeping core areas intact.
> It's just that Brazil, right now, has a very unfortunate combination of a corrupt government, very valuable resources, and responsibility for the integrity of the forest.
That’s not an accident. Not misfortune. That’s a result of western colonialism. I’m no expert in brazil, but its history includes colonial governments, CIA backed coups, and IMF influence.
It doesn’t have a bad gov because whoops we elected a bad guy in 2019. It has a bad gov because throughout its entire history western govs and corporations have been exercising influence to be allowed to pilfer its resources.
Well yes the blame game matters because it’s literally still happening! Ignoring the causes is like figuring out what bandages to put on a patient who is still being actively and repeatedly stabbed.
> Maybe, and this is a big maybe, we should think about whether some countries have a disproportionately large access to, or responsibility for, resources relevant to all of humanity.
The problem is that this logic extends to most very large countries in the world.
Are you gonna also appropriate Russia, Canada, China and United States of America land? Who is gonna police all of that? Does the rest of humanity have the collective firepower to stop, say, "just China" and "just the United States of America" from ruining the environment? I don't think this is feasible.
It is not the responsibility if the Brazilian people to give up their sovereignty in order to save the world, particularly after other nations have burned their way to the top of the development scale. You seem to be oblivious to reality.
Recent US elections made the people almost freak out because of the suspected Russia influence. In every developing country, not only Brazil, this is the norm and not the exception.
Bolsonaro's election received heavy support from the international (and national) finance sector. They projected a higher gain under his government. And most of these people are from developed countries.
People from rich country may not be really aware that the commodities come from somwere. The recent Russian war sure made this more clear. Developing countries are locked in that role.
If a country like Brazil, Russia or China reduces significantly its exports, everyone living costs rise. This is obviously true for high technology goods, but while you can survive with no smartphone, you can't with no food and energy.
I'm talking about this most obvious stuff to make this point: rich countries exports their poverty. USA still has a firm hand on the entire continent, and will not let it go, Brazil included.
As someone from Brazil, I really hope BRICS+ continues to grow. While the G7 can easily suffocate small dissidents, a entire block can not be. Sanctions against Russia stared to make European governments fall, what happens if you sanction half the world population?
I'm reserving judgment in the Russia's war in this post, becase most of these implications don't depends on who is right.
As consumers of Wooden furniture and so much new housing construction happening around the work, we all are to be blamed too. We need to invent alternate to wooden furniture.
The majority of the Brazilian rainforest isn't even being razed for furniture wood. It's simply burned down to provide for one season of feeding cows for meat or to plant soy to feed the cows.
No. In fact, evidence suggests most of the rainforest was in fact laid by humans. It's artificially mostly made of trees with edible produce like açaí and brazil nut.
Yes, forever. And no it wasn't. The rainforest has existed for tens of millions of years (and has species much) older than humans have inhabited South America. And while they shaped it, there is NO way suggests we could just regrow it, even if we could organise the manpower and political will.
When the forest loses the capacity to create clouds, it is game over. It will never be the same again, and that's just one of many of non-linear effects at work.
So if it isn't plastic made from fossil fuels, what do you suggest?
Apparently the global human mass excluding humans themselves who comprise 0.01% of the global biomass but including our constructions in concrete, asphalt, aggregates, bricks, plastic & glass exceeded the global biomass back in 2020. The same report claims that this anthropogenic mass doubles every 20 years. I wonder what the thermal capacity of all this is let alone other manifest concerns.
I'm Brazilian and I have a blast watching Property Brothers. "Oh, and I placed brazilian hardwood for the whole living room floor" - that is fancy in Canada, but here I would be arrested if I did that.
Guess that I should lower my head even more for not being self-hating enough.
Those saying this is an "unavoidable" catastrophe and inevitable
consequence of economics are being selective about history.
We've taken strong conservation and violent prevention measures before
against ecological practices of sovereign nation states that are
detrimental to our lives.
Perhaps the only 'successful' part of the US "war on drugs" was coca
eradication [1], including the use of biological warfare (pests),
herbicides and crop burning. We probably would have napalmed the
Afghan poppy fields, but in the end the Taliban did it for us.
The ivory trade is almost extinguished, let's be honest, not because
we stemmed demand but because we were prepared to shoot the poachers.
It's no secret the SAS operated "free-fire" in those parts of Africa,
also training locals on "man hunting".
People blame Brazil but I've met people outside Brazil who are like "Oh! Bonds!" "What kinds of bonds?" "High returns!" "Can't be government bonds then. Company bonds?" "Milk companies in Brazil!" Oh, cutting down the Amazon. Two parents I knew, this was like 18 years ago. It's been an emergency since the 1980's, a continual emergency. It's still an emergency.
And I think they got fucked anyway, both of them. They thought it was a good investment because it was such a shitty thing to do to something so beautiful, thought the secret to luxury was cowardice (and it is), but guess what the promise of shitty person heaven where all the shitty people are so shitty to everything except you because you're so special so much in common with them, say the same things, have the same ideas, know the same people, have the same passwords what a coincidence, bump into each other in the strangest places, twins, so that means...uh...nah you know what, it's a better lesson learned the hard way. Getting fucked is critical to learning how not to get fucked. Walkthroughs are uh...well police departments have websites, there's books on the subject. And you can't con an honest John. Well there's a limit to that, you also have to be informed, you need both. And entertain moral dilemmas, moral experiments, or like play-act with friends, that will help out a lot. And good alternatives.
Course the hard part is finding an alternative to that if you are conned. One way is to choose your second best choice. Not your first choice. Second choice. So then if the second choice starts getting shitty, stops whispering when you come around the bend, hey oh shit, guess the second choice school, say we're talking about Harvard 1 Yale 2, so Yale, really was second rank! I thought the 2 meant it was just as good, just another numeral from 1 to 10, like different days of the month! Wow, shit, wouldn't want to have to transfer to Harvard, that would suck, that was my first choice! Say I couldn't make it at Yale, damn!
I can barely follow this myself. Gotta shorten down those long sentences. It comes from Spanish, I also speak perfect Spanish, there the sentences are much longer and have different "ondulaciones de frase".
Interesting comments below. Just some food for thought.
Fertilized, less land is required to grow equivalent quantities of crops.
Petroleum products, especially natural gas is a raw material as well as fuel for nitrogen fertilizer production.
Higher petroleum prices mean higher fertilizer prices. Higher fertilizer prices mean higher food prices.
Scarcity increases prices. Worldwide food production is down for many reasons: weather, war, disease, lack of workers, inflation, and cost to fertilize. Expect prices to rise, significantly more than they have.
Or, PV will continue to crash in price, electrolytic hydrogen will get cheaper than SMR hydrogen, and fertilizer will remain cheap. The big concern with fertilizer is not so much energy use, btw, it's N2O emission.
So, lets fund the planting of 20+ trees per second to help counter-balance it.
Someone can plant around 200 trees per day with basic tools (lower end - some can do upward of 1000) but lets go with the lower number.
24 hours per day X 60 minutes X 60 seconds X 20 trees per second = 1,728,000 trees per day = 8640 people required
This certainly seems feasible - we just need the economics to justify it.
If those living in high income countries don't support poorer countries to keep their forests healthy complaining about them being chopped is hypocritical.
I live in Italy, the Po Valley I live in was a marshland with lots of centenarian trees. Since Roman times marshes have been drought and most of the forests were chopped to make room for agriculture (and to build Venice, which sits on millions and millions of trees).
I recently went to Portugal, where most forests have been chopped and substituted with huge eucalyptus or cork oak monocultures.
The same goes for France, Germany, etc.
We destroyed our environment so we could have progress. Now we understand that the environment is precious and must be taken care of, so it's up to us to pay other countries to preserve their environment. This money will eventually be used to buy "progress" and end on our pockets once again so it's not even a bad deal economically speaking, it just takes the will (which is lacking almost anywhere).
I'm from one of the so called poor countries and let me tell you, we aren't that poor. We just have much much higher levels of corruption and static generational wealth. Add to that extremely selfish and poor planning from politicians at the top.
Static generational wealth, corruption, selfishness and poor planning are incredibly common in high income countries too.
My father is Brazilian and I lived there for almost ten years, from mid 90s to mid 00s, and indeed Brazil as a country is not that poor: if you could split the GDP equally amongst the population. Since this is not the case in reality there are millions and millions well below the poverty line and this is what makes a country a poor country, a country where a lot of people are poor.
When you have a lot of poor people many things go out of control, and also taking advantage of poor people is a piece of cake for those at the top of the money pyramid.
Deforestation in Brazil will not stop unless farmers and locals that live around the Amazon (or other green areas such as the Pantanal or the now almost destroyed Mata Atlântica) get paid to not touch it, help it regrow and pursue different agricultural styles or different crops. The Brazilian government doesn't have the money to do that even if corruption went to zero and private entities will not act since in most cases they are the ones fomenting deforestation.
The only hope for South American forests to thrive is foreign intervention: local governments won't act, local corporations won't act and most of the local population is simply too poor to care.
What are you suggesting here? That western countries should assassinate an elected world leader? Or that western countries should influence the next democratic elections?
If you don't see an issue here, then imagine if you were talking about the USA. Should other countries "get rid of" the US president if they don't like his policies?
China is not going to curb its demand for Brazilian products on this basis. The EU hypothetically could, but try to sell price increases to the public.
They're just doing what other continents did hundreds or thousands of years ago. If you want to save the forests, make them economically more valuable than converting them into other uses.
If there's 100M iphones in the world that retail for around $1000 each, that's $100B dollars. We could have invested that money into building some kind of park that welcomes visitors. No, instead we chose as a society to take pretty photos for instagram for fake internet points.
Perhaps you misunderstood. They have non-economic value, that is more valuable than their economic value alone. Economic investment may not yield an economic return.
If we really cared about climate we would ban everything wasteful. Like useless internet services and companies. Do we need social media or media in general to survive?
my main man, Brazil feeds a lot of people outside its borders. I am not fan of Brazilian agriculture and its intense practices. If you live in USA, Brazil is a competitor albeit a dinged one, but if you go on sanctioning countries that provide food and fertilizer around the world, people are going to die and nations are going to collapse in matter of months not years.
Brazil not existing doesn't imply the land wouldn't be used. And to settled populations such as we are, striping forest to plant crops comes as natural as breathing. The Amazon forest would be stripped as long as it's economically viable to do so, regardless of who governs it.
Let's wait for a little bit longer till we exploit ours fully. We can then U-turn and start /exporting/ the /conserve and protect/ mentality aggressively /s
I'm not sure I agree with this point. What if this news article is the spark that inspires someone to hack together a solution for awareness of the issue? Or maybe create an alternative for some of the imports that the Amazon is being cut down to create? This issue may be happening in Brazil, but it affects everyone (as the forest is a major carbon sink) and can definitely be affected by others, given time.
What is morally and ethically worse - eating an animal fed and raised domestically, or eating soy-laiden "plant-based" foods that were grown on recently-raized rainforest several thousand miles away?
Most soybeans are used as animal fed. Also, the feeding animal 10KG to get 1KG looks rather wasteful? Lastly, you missed the methane pollution, water usage, ethics etc..
I'm fully aware of that, which is why I said "domestically FED and raised".
>Also, the feeding animal 10KG to get 1KG looks rather wasteful?
Depends heavily on what animal product you are producing. Obviously we won't be eating beef all the time. It also depends on what kind of farmland you have available, and what uses those crops have.
Where I am (Wales, UK), the combination of the farmer' lobby and the "Welsh culture and heritage" lobby has meant that largely unprofitable sheep farming has been subsidised, and what should be productive wooded hillside makes lamb that no-one wants. I'm not saying that raising animals is always the best use of land.
Pretty clearly you would have to radically re-think how much animal produce you would get to eat. Also - countries like The Netherlands have a strong tradition of backyard chickens to suppliment a household's diet.
The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is going to have to pay. You can't tell a country you can't progress like the USA it is hypocritical.