{"id":197232,"date":"2021-10-11T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=197232"},"modified":"2021-10-10T04:30:53","modified_gmt":"2021-10-10T03:30:53","slug":"the-amazon-rainforest-is-losing-200000-acres-a-day-soon-it-will-be-too-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/10\/the-amazon-rainforest-is-losing-200000-acres-a-day-soon-it-will-be-too-late\/","title":{"rendered":"The Amazon Rainforest Is Losing 200,000 Acres a Day–Soon It Will Be Too Late"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Since 1988, humans have destroyed an area of rainforest roughly the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2018The Amazon \u2013 historically a great carbon absorber \u2013 now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis.\u2019 Photograph: Carl de Souza\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

7 Oct 2021 – <\/em>Shortly before his 44th birthday, in December 1988, the Brazilian rubber tapper and environmental activist Chico Mendes predicted he would not live until Christmas. \u201cAt first,\u201d he said, \u201cI thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest<\/a>. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendes had received death threats for years. The threats escalated when an aggressive rancher laid claim to a nearby forest reserve, where he intended to burn and level trees to create pasture for cattle. The rancher hired gunmen to prowl around Mendes\u2019s neighborhood. Mendes publicly opposed the rancher, and continued to advocate for the human rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin, saying Brazil<\/a> must save the most biodiverse forest in the world. Destroy it, he said, and we, the human race, will end up destroying ourselves.<\/p>\n

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More: Fast track to disaster? Brazil\u2019s Grain Train plan raises fears for Amazon<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Three days before Christmas, 1988, Mendes was shot dead by the rancher\u2019s son.<\/p>\n

It stunned the world.<\/p>\n

The National Council of Rubber Tappers, reeling from the assassination, made a plea that the Amazon be preserved \u201cfor the whole Brazilian nation as part of its identity and self-esteem\u201d. The council added: \u201cThis Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest \u2013 bringing together Indians, rubber tappers, and riverbank communities \u2013 embraces all efforts to protect and preserve this immense but fragile life-system that involves our forests, rivers, lakes and springs, the source of our wealth and the basis of our cultures and traditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Mendes\u2019s murder, nearly 1 million sq km of the Amazon, an area roughly the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, have been destroyed, primarily in Brazil, but also in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guyana. That equates to an average of some 200,000 acres every day, or 40 football fields per minute. In Brazil alone, home to the greatest expanse of forest, the rate of loss has increased by more than 30%. The Amazon \u2013 historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen \u2013 now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis.<\/p>\n

Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they\u2019re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro<\/a> became president of Brazil.<\/p>\n

In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded by pastureland will lose species in a process biogeographers call \u201cecosystem decay.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, the Amazon is dying. Entire genetic libraries and symphonies of species \u2013 trees, birds, reptiles, insects and more, eons in the making, fine-tuned by natural selection \u2013 are being wiped out to make room for methane-belching cows.<\/p>\n

\u201cBolsonaro is a powerful supporter of agribusiness,\u201d the Washington Post reported<\/a> before he won the presidency, \u201cand is likely to favor profits over preservation. [He] has chafed at foreign pressure to safeguard the Amazon rain forest and he served notice to international nonprofit groups such as the World Wildlife Fund that he will not tolerate their agendas in Brazil. He has also come out strongly against lands reserved for indigenous tribes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing in Mongabay, a science website, Thais Borges and Sue Branford reported<\/a> in May 2019 that a \u201cnew manifesto by eight of Brazil\u2019s past environment ministers \u2026 warn[s] that Bolsonaro\u2019s draconian environmental policies, including the weakening of environmental licensing, plus sweeping illegal deforestation amnesties, could cause great economic harm to Brazil\u201d.<\/p>\n

Robert Walker, a quantitative geographer at the University of Florida\u2019s Center for Latin American studies, has said<\/a> that unless something unprecedented happens, he predicts that the greatest rain forest on earth will be wiped out by 2064.<\/p>\n

If so, it will have taken local opportunists \u2013 armed with chainsaws, bulldozers, and chants of \u201cland, land, land\u201d \u2013 little more than a century to destroy a rain forest 10 million years old and composed of some 390bn trees. Perhaps then, in the hot, brutal and not-too-distant future, when historians chronicle humanity\u2019s destruction of its own home planet, the killing of the Amazon will rank at or near the top. And all the reasons why it had to be done \u2013 so pressing at the time \u2013 will seem trite until, stripped away, two fundamental causes remain: ignorance and greed.<\/p>\n