The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It's Gone

[KelleyKramer]

The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It’s Gone

The fires blazing in Brazil are part of a larger deforestation crisis, accelerated by President Jair Bolsonaro.




The Amazon is burning. There have been more than 74,000 fires across Brazil this year, and nearly 40,000 fires across the Amazon, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. That’s the fastest rate of burning since record-keeping began, in 2013. Toxic smoke from the fires is so intense that darkness now falls hours before the sun sets in São Paulo, Brazil’s financial capital and the largest city in the Western Hemisphere.

...

So the Amazonian fires—which have been blazing for weeks and notoriously received less coverage than Notre Dame’s burning roof— seem like a potent symbol of humanity’s indifference to environmental disorder, including climate change.


But climate change is not the primary cause of the wildfires. Unlike, say, most California blazes—which are sparked by accident and then intensified by climate change—the Amazonian fires are not wildfires at all. These fires did not start by lightning strike or power line: They were ignited. And while they largely affect land already cleared for ranching and farming, they can and do spread into old-growth forest.


More on the link-

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-fires-are-political/596776/

[no_hypocrisy]

1. By corollary, look at the Sahara Desert in Africa

It wasn't always a vast desert. It used to be lush and green. Then came climate change.

Fires in the Amazon will expedite climate change here.

https://www.livescience.com/28493-when-sahara-desert-formed.html