You probably already knew that, but they only use a fraction of that water. The rest is released into the air through the leaves flowers and stems in process called transpiration, something like 90 % of the water pulled from the ground end up in the air and because there are so many trees in the Amazon.
The process essentially creates a river. In the sky, which kind of mirrors the actual Amazon River itself, the flowing backwards deeper into the interior of South America, amazingly, the Amazon rainforest actually creates approximately half of its own rainfall by recycling moisture from the Atlantic Ocean five to six times the water just keeps Going up and down up and down up and down deeper and deeper into the western part of South America into the Andes without that sky River, the Amazon rainforest ecosystem will collapse.
I mean obviously trees like every living thing on this godforsaken planet need water to survive and trees in the interior. Part of the rainforest rely on the sky river for water. So if enough trees on the outskirts of Amazon are cut down, there will be less water transported deeper into the rainforest, killing even more trees, which led to even less water transported to the interior and so on and so on.
Until the collapse begins. Now you may wonder how the Amazon rainforest came to be in the first place if it requires such an intricately dependent system. Well, the short answer is that millions of years ago, during the Eocene epoch, the earth was about five to eight degrees, warmer, that it is today. In other words, it was really really hot. There was no ice at the higher latitudes and tropical rainforests, stretched from pole to pole.
Then, as the earth entered an ice age, the rainforests receded to the equator. Other ecosystems that couldn’t maintain its own climate system collapsed. The Amazon rainforest, on the other hand, could maintain its own climate system side. Note if your first instinct after hearing that is to go see the earth has been much warmer before climate change is not going to be bad. I mean there were rain forests on the poles, then kindly off yeah.
There has been much much warmer a long time ago, but back then the temperature rose over millions of years, which allowed nature to evolve and adapt to the new environment. What we’re doing today is closer to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs by changing the environment on a human time scale, leaving no room for life to adapt to the new environment. Also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we can own a tower climate to be stable, to grow food and maintain civilization and share.
So if Amazon’s climate system is disrupted, if that sky river system is gone, the whole ecosystem will collapse and, more importantly, won’t grow back. South America will gradually be drier and drier, which will lead to more forest fires, which will then accelerate the whole process all over. Again, the climate in the interior of South America will be closer to that of the Serengeti plains of East Africa, which lies on the same longitude as the rainforest.
It will be a dry savanna, closer to a desert even and here’s the depressing part. A scientist estimate the collapse will begin when around 20 to 25 percent of Amazon is deforested and once the collapse starts, it cannot be stopped, even if, before a station is completely halted. Now, would you like to guess how much of the rain forest has been deforested? Maybe one percent two percent ten fifteen well more, like nineteen point, seven percent in 2018 – I’m pretty sure the number has gone up by now.
You don’t have to be good at math to realize that 19.7 % is awfully close to twenty percent. So we are inching closer and closer to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest. If not stopped, the collapse will probably take decades to complete, but it will be catastrophic for not only South America but also the whole world see the Amazon rainforest affects the weather pattern in the whole continent of America, both north and south.
It transports water throughout the whole continent, so without it there be less rainfall in some regions, while other regions will experience more floodings, unstable weather patterns, who will disrupt food production on the whole continent and because the United States is one of the leading food producers in The world this disruption will ripple everywhere else and cause food shortages. Of course, this will also create food shortages in the Americas too, which is can ironic, considering Amazon deforestation is done for food production in the first place and in the worst case scenario, the whole amazon basin and a big chunk of South America turns into a dry Desert like Serengeti, which is not conducive for agriculture, thus it least, but there’s another way.
The Amazon rainforest affects the rest of the world. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is goddamn burning down right now you know climate change and well. The Amazon rainforest plays a central role in mitigating climate change, because it is one of the largest carbon sinks in the world, but if deforestation continues, that will change, as you probably know, trees you co2 to do, therefore, the synthesis later and co2 and water into sugars By using the energy from the Sun, which is kind of crazy, if you think about it, I mean a big-ass tree, he was nothing but gas and water before it is for me to gigantic measure of cellulose.
That’s that’s kind of crazy anyways, so trees turn co2 into more trees, but it’s a little bit more complicated than that, while trees to sequester co2, those same trees will eventually die normally when they die. They decay back into co2 either because they’re digested by microorganisms or because they’re burned by natural force fires, the amount of co2 absorbed by forests depends on how many new trees can grow.
So if, let’s say hypothetically, an advanced species of primate were to burn parts of it and don’t let the rainforests grow back, the forest actually turns into a co2 emitter. What’s worse, if the whole ecosystem collapse, all of those trees will turn back into co2. Making climate change much much worse, the trees don’t have to be burned either. The natural decay process will do the trick just fine, but more than that, turning rainforests into agricultural land degrades the soil.
This is important because one we need healthy soil to grow crops and to soil is also a carbon sink now not going to lie. I really don’t understand how soil actually absorbs co2, but it does, and if the soil is degraded, then it will instead release stored. Co2, on top of not absorbing newly released carbon dioxide and again, if, let’s say hypothetically, an advanced species of primate, were to cut down large swathes of the Amazon rainforest and turning them into farmland.
The whole bunch of co2 stored in the soil will be released. Hypothetically. This will make combating climate change a huge nightmare that it’s all I have a vertical right. Oh wait, uh, no yeah! It’s really happening. You’ve, probably seen the news right. They’re burning down the Amazon rainforest, so cows could meet. The rainforest is being slashed and burned to make way for soy, farms and cattle pastures, and actually these soy, boys and cowboys have been incentivized by the Brazilian government to clear the forests see.
Well, they could get fine if they were caught burning, a forested area to some weird-ass loopholes. They can actually sell back the same land to the government with high margin. Essentially, the government is subsidizing before station, which is why deforestation rate was really really high in the mid-2000s. But then, when the left, ish government held power, deforestation was essentially controlled.
I mean it was still going on, but not at the absurdly high rate like it was in the mid 2000s. They were able to set up an independent Environmental Protection Agency, one that was actually capable of controlling before station. But then you know what happened. Deforestation has grown back since that proto-fascist took over balsa narrow, cut funding for Brazil’s Environmental Protection Agency, closed down its bases and transferred control of the agency to the agribusiness sector.
Now they are being controlled by people whose interests are at odds with agency’s purpose, he’s dismantling the agency successfully, I’m a dad, like so many other right-wing leaders all over the world as a result, they’re having 77 to 80 percent increase in the number of forest fires Month by month, compared to last year, but more than just a single year increase in deforestation. The bigger problem is that without that, agency will seem to stop it.
The deforestation rate will go up again, like it was in the mid-2000s. So more and more of the forest will be burned and we’ll be inching closer and closer to the tipping point of the Amazon ecosystem collapse and even more up. In many cases, the forest fires threaten their livelihood of indigenous people already living there. Their land is being invaded by illegal loggers and miners, and the forests where they live is being burned to the ground to make way for pastures and farms, and this is not some unintentional consequence of an extractive economic system.
This is not just because indigenous people occupy areas with valuable land, minerals and wood. This is a settler colonial project designed to assimilate indigenous people into what bolson are perceived to be the quote: unquote: real Brazilian culture. We’ve seen this before all over the world before in places where Kony ilysm plays a driving force in the culture, for example, in Canada, indigenous children were kidnapped and their culture is denied.
I would imagine both Senora would do something similar where he would remove indigenous people from their ancestral land and assimilate them into what he perceived to be. The Quran quote real dominant Brazilian culture. This process has already started an opening up. Indigenous lambda capital is the beginning. Point he dismantled the agency tasked with demarcating indigenous land, essentially facilitating land grab by capital by taking their land and burning their homes.
The state forces indigenous people to move somewhere else where their connection to their own culture can be diminished, while also assimilating and turning them into labour capital can exploit. And this all of this for beef, the land was made into pastures and the soy was for cows. All of this to satisfy the demand of the market, we’re for feeding the future of human civilization, because rich assholes eat too much beef.
Oh that’s right! It’s not the poor who eats beef! It’s the middle class people in China, you, Russia and UAE. They eat Brazilian beef. I’ve seen leftists defending people eating beef, saying that poor people all serve Western countries have a right to eat beef. Well, guess what it’s? Not poor! People they’re eating beef. No beef is more expensive than other food items all over the world and poor people, no matter where they are, cannot afford to eat beef regularly.
Instead, they will be the victims of climate change, because everyone else is eating beef, even though poor people are the least responsible for it said leftists blame capitalism on the destruction of Amazon, which is a fair point and I’ll get to in a moment, but the modern Livestock industry cannot be sustainable under any system, capitalist or otherwise. The scale at which humans are producing beef is straight-up unsustainable.
There is no way we can have billions of people eat beef every day or hell even every other day, without destroying the environment. The modern life stock industry produces about 14 % of all co2 emissions at about 7 Giga tons of co2 per year in acid driving force behind land use, co2 emissions, deforestation and land degradation. If humanity were to survive. This cannot go on, but, of course, the root cause of the problem is indeed capitalism in a world where profit is, God processes that maximize it will always be prioritized over long term sustainability or hell even human rights.
Just look at the indigenous people of Amazon, the invisible hand of the market dictates that beef is highly valuable right now, so, even if supply doesn’t come from Brazil, it will just come from other places and before station will continue there and it’s not solely a beef Or a Brazil problem either just look at what has happened in Indonesia with palm oil, millions of acres of forest are being cleared to make way for palm plantations, and it’s the main reason why Indonesia, co2 emissions are ridiculously high matter of fact.
Indonesia, co2 emissions from land use are more than other sources, combined, ok, side. Note, after recording this whole article, I realized I forgot to explain what land-use emissions are so uh. Let me just put it here so lenio submissions are greenhouse gases. Emissions brought about by how humans have changed the land itself, both in terms of what’s growing on top of the land and the chemical and physical components of the land.
For example, turning a forested area into farmland usually involves cutting down or burning trees which emit co2, which counts as land-use emissions. But agriculture also changes how the land itself is ordered by creating irrigation system, for example, and the chemical makeup of the soil itself. By adding things like fertilizer, these things might degrade the soil which turn the soil into greenhouse gases, emitter, which also counts as lanius emissions, and because how important this really is.
Let me reiterate this again: this is not only a Brazilian or an Indonesian or a beef or a palm oil problem. Countries all over the world, especially the so called developing countries, are driven to destroy the environment by the globalized financial capital. Here’s an interesting fact: all deforestation globally. All of them occur within 5 kilometers of a road or waterway. It should be pretty obvious why, right before clearing a forest infrastructures need to be built to move equipment and personnel.
People can’t just teleport to the middle of the forest and start hopping trees. These infrastructures are usually funded using loans from the World Bank last year alone. It committed 3 billion dollars to the transport sector. Obviously, the road itself is not the point of the loan, but rather the road is built as a means to extract and exploit natural resources in an area after an area is cleared, then the extractive process can begin and raw materials can then be sold to the International market, but there’s a problem with this fall, I mean more than the destruction of the environment itself.
This whole process actually traps developing nations into more and more debt, see the return of investment from that natural resources. Extraction might and will usually be lower than expected. This is because, as more and more natural resources are extracted, their supply increases and drives down their prices. This is fan-fucking-tastic for developed countries, because now raw materials can be bought for really cheaply and they can turn that into more expensive value added goods.
Not so much for developing countries, though, who now can generate enough money to pay back the debts, because raw materials are getting cheaper and cheaper, oh, and by the way that value-added goods they’re sold back to developing countries extracting even more money from us and so to Pay back that debt developing countries need to keep expanding their rate of natural resources extraction, which requires more infrastructures, which requires more foreign investment, which means more debt, which means clearing more forests and on and on the cycle, continues and guess what we’re losing this battle against Deforestation in recent years, the rate of deforestation has only accelerated in almost all developing countries.
Without these forests, we have no chance of mitigating climate change. The labor side of things isn’t much better either rural workers are moving to the cities because their labor is not in the men anymore due to agricultural modernization and the increasing price of land which prevents poor rural people from setting up farms. This increase in labor supply drives down wages across the board, both in the cities and rural areas, increasing poverty literally everywhere, but it’s lining the pocket of rich capitalists with so so much cash, but there’s yet another side to this one, where a feedback loop drives.
The rate of destruction of nature see because people need to you know, eat. An increasing number of people in cities means an increasing demand for food. This translates the more forests being cleared for farming, but more people in the cities also increases sprawling. Farmlands are being developed in the suburban housing, so more land on the periphery is needed for farming, and thus more forests are cleared.
This drives people out of the rural areas and into the cities increasing their population. So now more food is needed so on and so on, and let me reiterate this for the third time this is happening everywhere, especially in developing countries. The narrative is that developing countries need to grow the economy at all costs, to increase the people’s standards of living, or something like that. This, as the new liberal narrative dictates, needs to be done by leveraging comparative advantage, which usually means extracting and exploiting the country’s natural resources as much as possible.
But, as I have said earlier, this is entraps developing countries into more and more debt. I and many other people, on the other hand, think increasing people’s standards of living can be done without environmentally destructive processes. I mean look at Cuba where centers of living are high, but with low environmental impact. Now it can be argued – and I think this is true – that their low environmental impact is to the u.
S. Blockade, but even then it’s even more impressive now that they can establish high standards of living while being cut off from the international market. I’ll probably talk more about this in a future article, so I’ll spare the details for now. So what can be done for the Amazon rainforest? Well notice that most of the time, the reason rainforests are being cut down is that there is an international demand for primary commodities, so stuff like meat, soy, palm oil, ores or other minerals.
Most of the commodities produce there aren’t being consumed locally, with most of them being exported to developed countries, and these producers are large corporations with many of them being transnational companies. So one way to fix all of this mess is to not let big companies move into new lands and redistribute the land they already owned. Back to the local people. The commodities produced should be consumed or utilized locally, which limits the demand on said commodities.
Then governments need to stop subsidizing. The big agribusinesses hell government should stop subsidizing the extractive sector of the economy in an effort to lower production, cost subsidies allow companies to ignore externalities, which often includes environmental destruction. Essentially, all of this means we need to shift our priorities on what commodities who produce, how to produce them and how to distribute them.
Another important thing is to uphold indigenous peoples rights to their land, not encroach over it and give them the power to self-govern. Community based forestry management has been successful in reducing deforestation in places like Nepal and Indonesia, so replicating that elsewhere will be important. Indigenous farming practices also tend to be more sustainable because they know exactly how to take care of the local ecosystem.
We should also implement these indigenous practices everywhere else, along with other sustainable farming practices like permaculture, on top of that, not being a gigantic dick to indigenous people who have suffered the most from colonialism. As you know, a good thing, they deserve a good life, just like everyone else, free from exploitation and subjugation. The good news is that indigenous people in Brazil are fighting back against balsan ro.
There have been many demonstrations by indigenous groups against the government’s plan to open up more land and attempts at assimilation if you’d like to help them fight the fascist. There are a few charities link in the description now. Having said all of that, this will keep happening under capitalism, because, even if the land is given back to the local and indigenous people, as long as capitalism exists, the market will exert its power and try to get the land back under its influence.
There will be some capitalists asshole, who take a look at land and say: hey, that’s unproductive, it’s not making their money and fixing. This will never be profitable matter of fact, fixing all of this will be the opposite of profitable. Capitalism requires endless growth and to do that, more and more natural resources need to be extracted from the ground, so the burning of the Amazon rainforest is one of the many manifestations of the problem with capitalism.
It truly boils down to the way we produce, distribute and consume goods which happens to be completely unsustainable. I mean out of nine planetary. Boundaries were already passed, two of them and those two biogeochemical flows and genetic diversity are strongly linked to our food production and we’re inching closer towards another two boundaries, climate change and land use. To quote the paper that invented the term transgressing one or more planetary boundaries.
May be deleterious, or even catastrophic, due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger nonlinear, abrupt environmental change within continental planetary scale systems and remember: we’ve crossed two of them and on track to cross another two. So we really don’t have much time, but we do still have some of it do whatever you need to do to make this better, or at least try go. Give money to charity go vote.
Tauron climate strikes write to your representatives, talk to other people about this. Organize your community radicalize youth, make youtube articles, make your voice heard start a revolution, something anything yeah. The wrong Amazon is being destroyed, but it doesn’t mean we can’t still make it right. Hey! Thank you for reading. If you like this article click that like button and subscribe, because that actually really helps me follow me on Twitter to feed my ego – and you know, hear my thoughts and stuff like that and sometimes are pretty good the most time they’re.
Not the next article is going to be about something I don’t know yet so
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