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guest_
· 4 years ago
· FIRST
Depends on what you mean. Much of Europe and North America were vast forests, wetlands, etc. we built roads and farms and factories over them. Does anyone have the “right” to tear down nature for their own use? Well... there’s a philosophical argument and a practical argument. We can’t really say those who live in the Amazon can’t do what we already did can we? Major cities and economic areas, peoples homes were built on deforested land. Massive deforestation. What gives us the right and not them?
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guest_
· 4 years ago
In the practical sense- how are we going to tell Amazonian farmers they can’t make money or increase their countries GDP’s because we already destroyed our forests to get rich so now we need theirs more than ever? Give up The Eastern seaboard. Give up New England and New York and the south and let nature have it back then. For ever acre they destroy to make money why don’t we give an acre of ours back to nature? Personally I don’t think anyone has by rights a pass to destroy nature- how or why do you get to “own” a forest you didn’t make- that already has plants and animals and usually people that were living there? But- we can’t rightly tell other people they can’t do exactly what we have done to make a quality of life- especially when the primary motivator of Amazon deforestation is to supply the foods and materials we want.
famousone
· 4 years ago
Far as I'm tracking environmentalist made it unprofitable to log (and to subsequently replant) so in order to have some source of income the locals are burning their land to use the ashes to help prepare the land for agriculture.
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guest_
· 4 years ago
That the gist of it. Slash and burn operations in the Amazon tend to be to provide agriculture to feed the appetites of an increasingly meat conscious developed world that demands cheap, fresh, abundant produce all seasons and all types- and the Amazon climate is suited to many such cash crops. Increased demand for plant matter for industry such as bio plastics and fuels also drives this- because we consume so much as far as plastics and other materials that come from non renewable sources- when we replace those ingredients with plant based ones we still need to satisfy demand for raw materials in the many billions of tons- except it often takes MORE plant matter to create the same amount of a product as the material it is replacing.
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guest_
· 4 years ago
Hemp plastics require more tons of hemp than oil, to power a car on ethanol requires more tons of corn than crude oil for the same amount of fuel- and a car will not go as far on a tank of ethanol because ethanol has less energy in each quantity than gasoline. What’s more- as many performance tuners can tell you- you also tend to have to use fuel systems that use more fuel per second than petroleum based fuels.
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guest_
· 4 years ago
So farmers cut down the Amazon to feed us and so we can have Strawberries or whatever else year round, so we can have fruits that can’t grow in our climate or even hemispheres. Then after the land has been fertilized and farmed with high nitride fertilizers that leech into the water table and polluted rivers and oceans and cause bacterial blooms- they grow shrub grass and graze cattle. Then people say “eat less meat so they don’t graze cattle” and demand... more plants. So you can’t grow plants on that dead soil... time to burn some more forest to supply the plants people want- and sell the meat internationally for cheap if the westerners won’t buy it.
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guest_
· 4 years ago
That’s not to say those things don’t have a place of benefits- it’s just hardly as “good and evil” as it is often painted- and more importantly- it is OUR choices that create the problem- we can’t- especially as capitalists- even as communists- blame these people for supplying what society needs or demands; even more so when we built an empire on ecological destruction.
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guest_
· 4 years ago
Or: TL:DR- whatever they are doing to it or why isn’t all that important to the principal. There is a dark humor in the lack of self awareness at the idea that people who live in a place- who are citizens of a country- don’t have the right to decide what to do inside their country- but we have the right to tell them from across the globe what to do with the land they live on. That from a place of relative and comparative luxury we could tell a guy making on average less in a month than a minimum wage worker makes a week- or even a day- “you can’t try to make money because we need your forests so we can breath while driving our giant cars on the giant roads we cut down our forests to build.” Or “hey- we demand soy... but we also demand you stop cutting down forests to produce it for us! Well... which is it?
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Edited 4 years ago
