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I spent the last 10 days in a hut on the edge of the Amazon and am in a hotel in Lima, waiting for my flight out of Peru. Seeing this story, I thought I'd add o
by travisjungroth 5y ago
I spent the last 10 days in a hut on the edge of the Amazon and am in a hotel in Lima, waiting for my flight out of Peru. Seeing this story, I thought I'd add one brief first hand account.
The jungle was noticeably cut down since I had last been there 7 months ago. What had been just a hiking trail to our camp had been widened to the size of a road by all the tree clearing. The trees are pretty thin and not the best wood. I hear they're mostly used for making charcoal.
Next to where I was staying is land owned by a wealthy foreigner in Lima. She bought it to maintain it as jungle. But "ownership" is a funny thing. People moved onto her land and set up a community. It's what locals call an invasión. They had the backing of a politician, so the cops did nothing. The rumor was she was beating them in court and some people were going to jail. At the same time, a bulldozer was coming in widening the trail to the invasión into a road.
The land there is more like settling the frontier than buying a parcel in a suburb. People don't respect a barbed wire fence, no trespassing sign and a piece of paper. They will generally respect you living on the land. Residents visibly establish their ownership. Even the smallest town will have a giant sign welcoming you. Houses sitting on just two acres will have a sign and name (usually fundo something) and maybe even their claimed property borders on it. You need to reside in your home, or someone else might be when you get back.
I'm sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You're living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you're not supposed to. Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can't do the same? I get why you'd buy a machete and walk off into the jungle, then buy a chainsaw once you can afford it.
At the same time, I'd rather they didn't do that. I used to feel guilt about visiting the jungle. The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere. Maybe the best thing to do if you love nature is live downtown in a city and send money to a preservation charity. But I also see the value of people who are stewards of the land. You have to cut down an acre to build the community, but that lets you protect many more. So I plan to keep visiting and keep supporting.
- brabel 5y agoWithout the rule of law, you only own what you can defend yourself.
- RGamma 5y ago> I'm sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You're living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you're not supposed to. Might this be solved with direct financial subsidies of the locals and/or other investment? What is the COL and population count there?
- PsylentKnight 5y agoCool Earth more or less does that. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/#2-what-do-they-do https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/#2-what-do...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago> Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can't do the same? Yeah, you pretty much summed it up. If you're some huge land owner but you're not actually using the land for anything useful, people will notice and they will occupy it. In my country there are lots of these rich land owners. People whose lands stretch beyond the horizon. In many cases they don't even use it for anything. It's like unused memory that never gets garbage collected, a memory leak. Agrarian reform could redistribute this land but the powerful do not want to lose their domains. So people will just move into the land and start living there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers%27_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers%27_Movement
- MikusR 5y agoWhy are you wasting Earths resources by flying? And for a 10 day vacation at that.
- melling 5y agoDo people still think the solution is for everyone to reduce their individual carbon emissions? “If we all just conserve enough…” Flying, for example, emits 2% of global emissions. That’s 100,000 flights a day, every day. We’ve just spent over 2 decades generating at least 40% of our electricity with coal. The carbon footprint of that was incredible. While we’ve been waiting for solar and wind to replace it…
- plater 5y agoBut for people who do fly, flying represents 50% or more of their footprint.
- melling 5y agoTry thinking about solving the big problem rather than 7 billion little problems. You are worrying about subtracting 0.000000000001 from the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Telling people not to fly isn’t a solution [update] Anyway, I see my comment isn’t understood again. Enjoy another decade of incredible emissions. I’m sure sooner or later people will finally get it. Those windmills are still coming!!!
- meragrin_ 5y agoWhat is the solution for the big problem?
- sveme 5y agoEverything has to happen simultaneously. Carbon emission reduction on a personal, community, city, state, country, supranational entity, global level. We simply cannot continue to wait for other, more emission-intensive actors, to act first.
- xwdv 5y agoSome people were talking about owning lots of land in case society breaks down, but owning large swathes of land you cannot actively defend is pointless for these reasons. You depend on government to enforce rules of law to keep people off vast amounts of land. And it gets exponentially harder to defend land the more of it you have. This applies really to any resource though. Even your home could be taken away if the threat of punishment from a higher authority didn’t exist.
- ethbr0 5y agoGood point. Unpaid externalities of security: large landowners' needs for land security are higher (than resident parcels), but they certainly don't pay more taxes per acre (indeed, sometimes less). But at the same time, efficiencies of scale in many land-intensive industries cannot be realized without large areas being combined for a single purpose. Hard circle to square.
- Glavnokoman 5y agoactually it becomes easier since the frontier length growth linearly and the surface proportionally to the square of some characteristic size of your plot. The other thing is that you can't do it yourself starting from some point, so you must hire somebody or establish a community protecting the land while living on some portion of it.
- InfiniteRand 5y agoI think the model of paying locals to preserve the land makes sense because of these concerns, of course you need to guarantee that some politician doesn't just pocket it all.
- bromuro 5y agoNo. We cannot fix things with money. Stop giving money.
- 271828182846 5y agoTotally makes sense. Maintaining the Amazon forest versus captializing off it financially by destroying it is an actual service to the world. Virtually a product! The product is a service turning CO2 into O2.
- pantalaimon 5y agoAmazon should just buy the Amazon.
- odopodo 5y agoExcept the bulk of deforestation is not caused by locals needing space to live, but by big entrepreneurs investing in wood trafficking, soy plantations and livestock production. Things like this: https://twitter.com/Diogotapuio/status/1395723721369919488 https://twitter.com/Diogotapuio/status/1395723721369919488
- marcosdumay 5y agoIf anybody really knows how much deforestation is of what kind, they are not sharing it very publicly. Much less the economic power of the people doing it, so one can claim they are "big entrepreneurs". Anyway, that thing on the link you posted is not a forest, and really not the Amazon.
- supercheetah 5y agoI don't think that was the point of the OP though. It was more that even with people trying to protect the forest through legal means of property ownership, there's an apathetic, and sometimes antagonistic government that won't enforce that, and will even go so far as to help those entrepreneurs against owners trying to protect the forest.
- travisjungroth 5y agoAfter setting up a space to live, the invasion kept cutting down more jungle to sell the wood and turn it into farmland. This is when they lost their support. I'm not a journalist, though. I saw the clearings and town myself. The rest is stories I heard by the fire.
- bromuro 5y agoIt varies from the region. In Peru deforestation is happening also at smaller, familiar scale.
- bromuro 5y agoThey put a road, start building the techo propio and extend chakras… and the forest is gone, hectare after hectares. With a new road , people get a promise for a job for some years - so they are happy - yet they won’t be any richer: it is just a way to survive a bit longer. Roads are sort of a scam, financed by government, chinese constructors and chemical companies. I live in the upper Amazon in Peru and I believe the problem shouldn’t be justified by poverty - which is a consequence - but by wrong / missing education. Private companies and governments push a narrative to exploit the land, promising quick money at the expenses of the forests and the future of the local communities. People are easy to deceive here, they really don’t know, they are busy with bigger daily problems (as violence and bullying). Anecdote - My neighbor followed this idea with his chacra: he deforested 5 hectares and put all cacao. With the pesticides they had to put, the plants weakened soon and a plague affected the crop so bad, that after five years he lost all the plants. Now the land has been abandoned, and my friend is poorer than before. Chemical companies finally developed a new pesticide against that bug, and started selling again to everyone at cheap prices. Sadly he has not the money to pay some “peones” to help restoring the cacao plants. On the other side, when there’s a forst to clear everyone from the village goes to slash and burn, destroy, kill and catch any living thing in between. Sometimes I think this violent attitude against the forest started during with the colonial times, were the imposed religion thought the people that nature is meant to be submitted and exploited by the mankind.
- butMuhCulture 5y agoYou need to read some Paulo Freire. Sometimes I think the violent attitude towards the planet… you picked the wrong scale. I’d rather the technologically rich and educated take a sober look at their educated destruction of the planet rather than think they have THE philosophy to teach indigenous peoples. This is just getting absurd. Rich countries concern themselves with the fiscal cost versus the real cost. But let’s ignore that discourse to ponder the poor education of the natives, making them oblivious savages. I don’t really know about “civilized society” these days. Seems just as entitled to living in an epistemology that’s completely decoupled from reality, and believing it’s their universal duty to boast globally how unhinged they are. Sounds pretty colonial still. Missionary like. Literally less violent to each other today, but just as driven to bring on the end times through mindless consumption. Witness me; like and subscribe!
- throwaway803453 5y ago"The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere". I had hoped that consumption of wood for construction is one of the best things we can do assuming the tree is mature and no longer growing and a new tree is planted in its place. Unfortunately there is data that shows old trees are better carbon consumers than young trees which is surprising. I expected the carbon required for physical growth would be much higher than needed what is needed for its basal(?) metabolic rate once it is mature. But I missed the fact that most older trees are still growing. https://www.pacificforest.org/ee-old-trees-store-more-carbon-more-quickly-than-younger-trees/ https://www.pacificforest.org/ee-old-trees-store-more-carbon...
- hcurtiss 5y agoPacificforest.org is not exactly a neutral source, and that's a pretty confusing article (are they talking about sequestering in plant material, or respiration?). In terms of annual growth (which is a decent proxy for the amount sequestered from the atmosphere), trees peak (the culmination of the periodic annual increment), and then every year sequester less than the year before. See page 3 here [1]. There's a reason they mention 90 years as that's approximately the culmination of mean annual increment (the highest average growth over a rotation) for PNW douglas fir forests, which is what Pacific Forest Trust principally focuses on. A very old forest reaches statis and stops sequestering carbon all together, and as we see in the intermountain west, they can become very large sources of emissions as you lose forests to stochastic events like fire.
- atatatat 5y agoAnd that they're much larger, and their "filters" are more mature than young trees.