"So many have died to defend what you see here."
November 12, 2015 4:09 PM Subscribe
Mod note: A subthread deleted. Chocolate Pickle, if you can't be bothered to read the article, please just skip the commenting, too. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 5:00 PM on November 12, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 5:00 PM on November 12, 2015 [6 favorites]
Pravit, I think it's illustrated in all those endless barren fields. I think that the article's taking the intrinsic value of the rainforest as common knowledge, and just using the air conditioner analogy as a stepping off point for the how of halting and turning back deforestation.
posted by ambrosen at 5:38 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by ambrosen at 5:38 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't know if the air conditioner analogy works for me, but the later slides explain that it circulates water back into the air where it can turn into clouds and rain, right?
That was a really neat presentation on my mobile, too.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:38 PM on November 12, 2015
That was a really neat presentation on my mobile, too.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:38 PM on November 12, 2015
That said, the comparison to the deforestation of the U.S. did rather make me wonder if we should be putting work into the reforestation of other parts of the world, in solidarity with the work that Brazil will have to do. Reforesting the world to levels from before the invention of farming would be, err, challenging, to say the least.
posted by ambrosen at 5:42 PM on November 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by ambrosen at 5:42 PM on November 12, 2015 [5 favorites]
That was a great read. It is sad that economic interests are working against reforestation on multiple levels, but encouraging that it is being given priority on the national stage.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:35 PM on November 12, 2015
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:35 PM on November 12, 2015
Pretty sure the only places getting reforested are those which have been terribly irradiated due to nuclear accidents and evacuated by industry.
posted by um at 7:44 PM on November 12, 2015
posted by um at 7:44 PM on November 12, 2015
Pretty sure the only places getting reforested are those which have been terribly irradiated due to nuclear accidents and evacuated by industry.
Well, there's vastly more tree cover in the American northeast now than, say, 200 years ago, due to the fact that we no longer need wood for fuel at the same scale and small-scale agriculture is a vastly smaller part of the economy. Both of these changes are obviously not positive environmentally, but there are other forces driving reforestation besides brownfields and meltdowns.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:08 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]
Well, there's vastly more tree cover in the American northeast now than, say, 200 years ago, due to the fact that we no longer need wood for fuel at the same scale and small-scale agriculture is a vastly smaller part of the economy. Both of these changes are obviously not positive environmentally, but there are other forces driving reforestation besides brownfields and meltdowns.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:08 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]
Curiously, just tonight I saw this documentary on sustainable development in the Amazon. So there are definitely people who are trying to address the problem.
posted by zompist at 9:23 PM on November 12, 2015
posted by zompist at 9:23 PM on November 12, 2015
I don't know if the air conditioner analogy works for me,
My layperson's understanding (via my ENGO scientist friends + David Attenborough) is that trees are literally air conditioners. As in, they reduce the local temperature by using cycles of water evaporation and condensation manipulated through internal water pressures within the tree and its leaves. (I don't *exactly* understand what they do with the waste heat but they probably use it for something.)
Relatedly, I really highly recommend the Africa series from David Attenborough for some dramatic footage of localized cooling caused by a valley full of trees. I don't remember what episode, but there are only 6 and they are all amazing. Also, according to that series the Amazon only exists because it's enriched by jet-stream-blown dust from the Sahara, which as a former lush forest/seabed has lots of minerals. Nature is amazing!
posted by 100kb at 9:43 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]
My layperson's understanding (via my ENGO scientist friends + David Attenborough) is that trees are literally air conditioners. As in, they reduce the local temperature by using cycles of water evaporation and condensation manipulated through internal water pressures within the tree and its leaves. (I don't *exactly* understand what they do with the waste heat but they probably use it for something.)
Relatedly, I really highly recommend the Africa series from David Attenborough for some dramatic footage of localized cooling caused by a valley full of trees. I don't remember what episode, but there are only 6 and they are all amazing. Also, according to that series the Amazon only exists because it's enriched by jet-stream-blown dust from the Sahara, which as a former lush forest/seabed has lots of minerals. Nature is amazing!
posted by 100kb at 9:43 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]
What are the plans to support people like Mattara whose lives are "you burn or you starve"? How will they get food if their patch is reforested? Who'll pay their fines?
posted by divabat at 12:46 AM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by divabat at 12:46 AM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]
I wanted to like the presentation, because it looked good, worked well and was obviously the result of a lot of effort - but it loaded slowly (on my phone) and I read much quicker than I was getting the texts and I basically expected the pictures the stop and then text for me to read... Ok
As to the article, I left it wondering the same thing as divabat, people aren't doing this for fun, their doing it to stay alive. So who's going to step in?
I had a day dream last week about re-foresting the Sahara. That if you were canny about it and did it in strips and around the edges first and and and ...
It's just a big bummer, really, how we've gotten ourselves into this corner have to now get out and yet there's all this resistance. It makes it hard to keep a positive outlook.
posted by From Bklyn at 8:28 AM on November 13, 2015
As to the article, I left it wondering the same thing as divabat, people aren't doing this for fun, their doing it to stay alive. So who's going to step in?
I had a day dream last week about re-foresting the Sahara. That if you were canny about it and did it in strips and around the edges first and and and ...
It's just a big bummer, really, how we've gotten ourselves into this corner have to now get out and yet there's all this resistance. It makes it hard to keep a positive outlook.
posted by From Bklyn at 8:28 AM on November 13, 2015
Rondonia: The fallacy inherent in boosting "3rd World" countries to our level--sharing the American Dream--seems to be coming to pass. What would the economic solution look like if cattle ranching weren't a lucrative business?
The tree sappers have a point--let's not destroy the forest--but they can claim only a certain small slice of legitimacy.
I believe no American solution will be in the offing anytime soon, unless the average level of intelligence drops to zero. The issues being addressed are indeed global, but only a small percentage of our global population has a finger in this particular pie, and so, no voice in shaping them. That seems wrong somehow. But we are not yet aware of being a global community. It's still us against them for everybody. In real life, we in America have not yet been elected to the position of World Overseer, even though our fictional foreign policy stance seems to assume that responsibility.
My much labored point, above, is: don't do like we did. It's not surprising that we may be viewed as hypocrites.
Don't throw away your ceiling fans.
posted by mule98J at 8:51 AM on November 13, 2015
The tree sappers have a point--let's not destroy the forest--but they can claim only a certain small slice of legitimacy.
I believe no American solution will be in the offing anytime soon, unless the average level of intelligence drops to zero. The issues being addressed are indeed global, but only a small percentage of our global population has a finger in this particular pie, and so, no voice in shaping them. That seems wrong somehow. But we are not yet aware of being a global community. It's still us against them for everybody. In real life, we in America have not yet been elected to the position of World Overseer, even though our fictional foreign policy stance seems to assume that responsibility.
My much labored point, above, is: don't do like we did. It's not surprising that we may be viewed as hypocrites.
Don't throw away your ceiling fans.
posted by mule98J at 8:51 AM on November 13, 2015
I don't think you'll find any scientists actively working in rain forests evilly wringing their hands and cackling with glee about the fact that much of the devastation of rain forests and the wildlife within them is being carried out by people who are otherwise marginalized, impoverished, and often poorly treated by the state. In fact, a lot of us are working to point out the money trails that often lead back to either large European and North American corporations (see, for example, the Virunga documentary, and all the work on palm oil in Indonesia and the Amazon).
And, a lot of us are working hard to make life better for the communities relying on rain forests for their livelihood. Friends who work in Kibale National Park, Uganda have just completed the initial work on a health clinic which will be a long-term benefit to the community, both in terms of having ready access to health care and providing employment. I subsidize a school for the women in the villages around where I work, and in return for helping pay the teacher's salary, we've worked to come up with a curriculum about ecosystem services provided by forests, interesting things about monkeys, and the relationship between zoonotic disease and bushmeat consumption. There are literally hundreds of examples of these sorts of projects, which attempt to link conservation and development or provide for the welfare of people who lose access to protected areas as places to get charcoal, food, wood, etc. Some of these conservation and development projects are problematic because they make an already enticing area ("empty" land to farm on!) even more enticing and artificially attract people to an ecologically vulnerable area, but it's often making the best of a challenging set of tradeoffs.
One significant problem is that the people moving into protected areas are often migrants coming to take advantage of land which is "empty" (true: no farms as of yet. But that's because it's protected). This is the case in the Peruvian Amazon, where a lot of the people illegally mining and deforesting and farming are economic migrants from the Andes, not Amazonians. This is the case in parts of Cote d'Ivoire where I work, where Ivorians from other parts of the country with no longterm connection to forests and wildlife protected by the tradition of sacred groves or totemic relationships with particular animals feel no compunction about turning sacred forests into cocoa plantations, with devastating consequences for primate populations (link to the damn paper; pop-sci article).
None of these problems have simple solutions, but - nobody is suggesting that they do, and we do need to solve them and maintain at least a degree of forest cover in Amazonia and the Congo basin and Indonesia and West Africa and the Boreal forests of North America. Maintaining what semblance of a predictable climate we have left - and agricultural livelihoods, and food - relies on them.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:11 AM on November 13, 2015 [4 favorites]
And, a lot of us are working hard to make life better for the communities relying on rain forests for their livelihood. Friends who work in Kibale National Park, Uganda have just completed the initial work on a health clinic which will be a long-term benefit to the community, both in terms of having ready access to health care and providing employment. I subsidize a school for the women in the villages around where I work, and in return for helping pay the teacher's salary, we've worked to come up with a curriculum about ecosystem services provided by forests, interesting things about monkeys, and the relationship between zoonotic disease and bushmeat consumption. There are literally hundreds of examples of these sorts of projects, which attempt to link conservation and development or provide for the welfare of people who lose access to protected areas as places to get charcoal, food, wood, etc. Some of these conservation and development projects are problematic because they make an already enticing area ("empty" land to farm on!) even more enticing and artificially attract people to an ecologically vulnerable area, but it's often making the best of a challenging set of tradeoffs.
One significant problem is that the people moving into protected areas are often migrants coming to take advantage of land which is "empty" (true: no farms as of yet. But that's because it's protected). This is the case in the Peruvian Amazon, where a lot of the people illegally mining and deforesting and farming are economic migrants from the Andes, not Amazonians. This is the case in parts of Cote d'Ivoire where I work, where Ivorians from other parts of the country with no longterm connection to forests and wildlife protected by the tradition of sacred groves or totemic relationships with particular animals feel no compunction about turning sacred forests into cocoa plantations, with devastating consequences for primate populations (link to the damn paper; pop-sci article).
None of these problems have simple solutions, but - nobody is suggesting that they do, and we do need to solve them and maintain at least a degree of forest cover in Amazonia and the Congo basin and Indonesia and West Africa and the Boreal forests of North America. Maintaining what semblance of a predictable climate we have left - and agricultural livelihoods, and food - relies on them.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:11 AM on November 13, 2015 [4 favorites]
ChuraChura: I don't think it's a matter of scientists cackling as it is people not necessarily being aware of the effects of their work. Savior Syndrome is a hell of a thing, and there are plenty of documented examples of activist and social change movements that meant well but actually harmed a lot. Will it be the same case here?
posted by divabat at 11:31 AM on November 13, 2015
posted by divabat at 11:31 AM on November 13, 2015
I don't think it's fair to say that people working to both conserve rainforests and keep from further disenfranchising an already marginalized group of people are suffering from savior syndrome. There are obviously a number of better and worse ways to manage diminishing rainforests and provide for the people who are being actively harmed through these processes (conservation refugees are a real thing), but conservation workers are, I think, doing the best with the situation, funding, and interest they have. And giving up on rainforests is pretty much an untenable situation.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:59 AM on November 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by ChuraChura at 11:59 AM on November 13, 2015 [3 favorites]
« Older "How I Fell in Love with Ghanaian Food… and How to... | Old habits ...die hard. Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by pravit at 4:59 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]