It was supposed to be a good-news story out of the damaged Amazon rainforest: a project that replanted hundreds of thousands of trees in an illegally deforested nature reserve in Brazil.
I know someone from the deep amazon brasilian states and there is a complete disregard in the person when trying to have a civil discussion about conservation. And it is very easy to infer that it is not an isolated case but a standard way of life and thought.
Because there is so much land and so much wilderness, paired with so much distance from developed areas and a lack of a truly organized central government, people feel in the right to take what they want, when they want it, with no fear for reprimand.
This is a person that just picked a piece of land on the end of an undeveloped area, where a dirt road was open, cut down some of the vegetation to outline an area and then just set fire to it to clear the land for building. No concern for safety, building codes, building permits, sewage and eletrical infrastructure, nothing. Because, and I quote, “if you leave it be, in one year everything grows back”.
And when it comes to animals, anything is fair game. Monkeys, leopards jaguars (take in mind large cats are generally not considered as food anywhere in the world), alligators, all kinds of wild fish and birds - including macaws and tucans - capibaras, tapirs, anything and everything is on the menu because, and I quote again, “the jungle is full of creatures”.
This is plain disregard towards the basic notion of being civilized.
It’s complicated. Not the need to save the Amazon, but the fact that we need to save it because the developed world is largely developed because they did things like clearing forests and otherwise damaging the ecosystem in the name of economic progress.
I don’t have the answers, but I have to imagine it would involve an international effort to compensate Brazil for their lost “productivity”, a program to properly share that wealth, additional aid/assistance to prevent further destruction of the Amazon, and legitimate international deterrents that provide exorbitantly heavy punitive actions against the criminal bosses who order these types of acts.
But that’s just my back of napkin spitball of how to approach it. I’m the furthest thing away from having any meaningful expertise, knowledge, or insight, into how the Amazon can actually be saved.
It’s standard behavior there.
I know someone from the deep amazon brasilian states and there is a complete disregard in the person when trying to have a civil discussion about conservation. And it is very easy to infer that it is not an isolated case but a standard way of life and thought.
Because there is so much land and so much wilderness, paired with so much distance from developed areas and a lack of a truly organized central government, people feel in the right to take what they want, when they want it, with no fear for reprimand.
This is a person that just picked a piece of land on the end of an undeveloped area, where a dirt road was open, cut down some of the vegetation to outline an area and then just set fire to it to clear the land for building. No concern for safety, building codes, building permits, sewage and eletrical infrastructure, nothing. Because, and I quote, “if you leave it be, in one year everything grows back”.
And when it comes to animals, anything is fair game. Monkeys,
leopardsjaguars (take in mind large cats are generally not considered as food anywhere in the world), alligators, all kinds of wild fish and birds - including macaws and tucans - capibaras, tapirs, anything and everything is on the menu because, and I quote again, “the jungle is full of creatures”.This is plain disregard towards the basic notion of being civilized.
It’s complicated. Not the need to save the Amazon, but the fact that we need to save it because the developed world is largely developed because they did things like clearing forests and otherwise damaging the ecosystem in the name of economic progress.
I don’t have the answers, but I have to imagine it would involve an international effort to compensate Brazil for their lost “productivity”, a program to properly share that wealth, additional aid/assistance to prevent further destruction of the Amazon, and legitimate international deterrents that provide exorbitantly heavy punitive actions against the criminal bosses who order these types of acts.
But that’s just my back of napkin spitball of how to approach it. I’m the furthest thing away from having any meaningful expertise, knowledge, or insight, into how the Amazon can actually be saved.
It doesn’t help that their government, specifically the presidents, is actively encouraging this kind of nonsense.
This isn’t something from today, the last year or ten years ago: this is
generationalcultural.