Urbanization Has Left the Amazon Burning 93
pigrabbitbear writes "Farming, logging, and strip mining has long altered much of the Amazon rainforest, with slash-and-burn land-clearing techniques turning large portions of the forest into patchworks of pastures, second-growth forest, and degraded land. Now, rural people are increasingly moving to booming Amazonian cities; paradoxically, the land they're leaving behind is being ravaged by wildfires. A new paper published in PNAS shows that in the Peruvian Amazon, land use changes and depopulation have let large wildfires fly through converted land. It puts a damper on those optimistic that the urbanization of the Amazon may allow parts of the forest to recover, by centralizing populated areas and leaving old converted land to be slowly gobbled up by the encroaching forest."
There's a simple solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Stop people having so many damn kids. Less people = less food required = less land needed. But even now women having endless kids are seen as heroes by even educated people. Until humanity realises that it can't keep on reproducing exponentially then these problems will never be solved.
And don't any even attempt to use the worn out argument about how agricultural production has kept up with population growth. Sure it has - as long as you ignore the almost total destruction of the natural enviroment where it occurs. Pesticides, fertilizer runoff, stripped forests , farting cows, soil loss etc etc
Re:Most folks don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a paradox most people don't understand very well. My country, Portugal, is a very good example.
Massive migrations from the countryside started in the 60s because of widespread poverty in rural areas. Our agriculture was not productive enough to feed everybody and the dictatorship never bothered to develop it. Land was either abandoned or misused for monoculture of eucalyptus and pines for the production of paper. As most people now live in cramped cities on the coast, the rural areas away from the sea have extremely low population densities. Paradoxically, instead of this allowing the wild life to recover, it leads to massive wildfires, soil erosion and desertification. The original woods were cut down centuries ago and will not grow again without human intervention.
Of course, everybody talks about desertification, but no action is actually taken. It would involve very big State intervention, and land owners don't want that, even when they don't give a flying fuck about the land they own. I know people that inherited pieces of land, they won't go there ever, they won't use it for agriculture, they won't associate with their neighbours to make the costs of maintenance lower, they won't allow the State to take over their land. They just have it planted with pines or eucalyptus and sit on their hands for years waiting to reap the benefits. But they don't do any maintenance. When a fire consumes all the trees, they just say "Oh, bad luck. Who gives a fuck?".
When all my country becomes a barren desert, maybe those in power will bother.
Re:There's a simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop people having so many damn kids.
Unfortunately that just isn't practically feasible. You need between 4 and 9 people working and paying between 10% and 20% of their production in taxes or something similar so as to enough goods and services for the retired. Why is that? Well, if the amount one pays up is 10% of his produced goods/services, that means she gets to keep about 90% of his produced goods/services on which to live (exchanging them with other people by way of money, but money is only an abstract number people use to exchange actually livable-on goods and services, which is why I'm saying "goods/services" all the time). So, assuming that person will need to keep receiving the same amount of goods/services after retirement, she'll need someone to come and provide her those same "90% of a produced goods/services", meaning 9 working people each giving up 10% of their own produced goods/services.
Before social security the way you had to do it was straightforward: get 10 kids and they'll provide you the needed goods/services once you cannot work anymore. Nowadays, with social security, this simple, direct relationship, is hidden from the common folk, who just don't notice it. But the need for 4 to 9 people working for each retiree remains, which on a low 1-children-per-couple society means there's a permanent need of 3 to 8 "other someones" for each retiree, which gets filled by immigrants and/or native (and usually poor) huge-families. That's a hack solution though. Once the other people-supplying countries rise on their living standards and their people start having less children, it stops working. And then basically bad solutions remain, with a single good one:
a) "paying" less and less (i.e., providing less actual goods/services) to retirees, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
b) rising real taxes (not the nominal ones that affect only abstract "money" numbers, but actual taxes on actually produced goods/services) more and more to keep paying them what they need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
c) move tons of people from their current, not-actually-directly-useful goods/services production, back into doing stuff that people really need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
d) engage on old style "loot and plunder" wars so as to acquire more actual goods (not services in this case) than you can produce, so as to give your people a higher standard of living than they would be able to develop;
e) go back to having lots of babies per couple, thus depleting natural resource even faster;
f) rise the age of retirement so as to keep the proportion stable, what only works if most people take care to actually die at some reasonable age that doesn't stress the balance, otherwise this will become a hack solution too;
And so on and so forth.
There's a possible good solution, which is to invest HEAVILY in robotics, and by proxy EVEN MORE heavily in sustainable energy sources to power them, so that we can at some point replace the currently required exponent growth of goods/services-producing people with tons upon tons of goods/services-producing robots.
That's the only one that will actually allow for a globally-sustainable low birth rate. Everything else will get us into a bad ending.
Re:Most folks don't understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
The solution is actually very easy: heavy taxation on improductive lands, while of course considering reforestation efforts as a productive activity.
Re:Most folks don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody understands. The people who matter just don't care. I guess they would rather eat than save the planet for your kids.
Agreed. It's hypocritical for us to sit here in our 21st century post-industrialist nations and chastise those nations who want to develop themselves out of poverty, when our nations are themselves the product of the worst ecological disasters in recent geological history. For example, there is every reason to believe that the Great Eastern Forest of North America, that area expanding from the Atlantic to the Mississippi river and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, was just as ecologically diverse as the Amazon up until the 15th century. Arthur Barlowe wrote, upon his exploration of the North Carolina coast, "so full of grapes as the very beating and surge of the sea overflowed them...in all the world, the like abundance is not to be found."
Slash and burn was regularly used to clear off the land for agriculture and build modern cities, Washington, Atlanta, Manhattan, were built this way. Washington in particular was also built by compacting swamplands, a practice that is illegal today. The entire Southern United States was clear-cut by 1850, an ecological nightmare that was rectified many years later by the planting of longleaf pines, an invasive species that was preferred for its short maturity cycle (20 years). This clear-cutting of the land lead to an economic disaster that may have exacerbated the American Civil War (that, along with slavery, the tool used to clear-cut the forests in the first place). It was only the temperate humid climate that prevented dust bowls from happening, although this did not spare the Great Plains region some 80 years later.
We can be "high and mighty" as we sit in the comfort of our heated homes, protected by our modern technology in a society that got rich from exploiting the environment and the poor, but it would be hypocritical. Who are we to judge what other nations do in their development?
Re:Most folks don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be nice, but it's quite the opposite that happens. With the stupidity of European Common Agriculture Policy, If you have enough land you can live off subsidies without actually producing anything.
The same issue happens with housing. We have enough high-quality houses for everybody, but many are empty. In our capital Lisbon alone, there are 50.000 empty houses because wealthy people use them as investments and don't want to bother to rent them. They just let them sit there empty, hoping their price increases to make a profit. Meanwhile, millions of new apartments have been built in completely chaotic suburbs around the city. Fortunately the current crisis killed the construction fever, but the empty houses are still empty.
Every time anyone proposes the same fix you proposed he is violently attacked as a "delusional communist". While private property is kept as an absolute value over the common good, there will be no way to fix this. The politicians won't do anything because they're in the pockets of rich proprietors and real-estate speculators. Rentist parasites leaching on the rest of society, in the name of Free Market, Freedom of Enterprise and the Sanctity of Private Property. Ironic, isn't it?
Re:Most folks don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
The reality is, in both capitalist and communist countries, when important resources are being squandered and wasted by their owners, and where the existing system of commerce cannot resolve the situation, it falls to the government to nationalise and reallocate those resources. People--in particular resource owners--don't like to admit to it, but that's how the world has to work if we are to avoid the "desertification" of entire economies.