The Biggest Problem of the Intentional Burning of Amazonian Rainforest

By now, there probably aren’t very many people that don’t know that hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforests in the Amazon basin are being burned at an alarming rate, to make way for agriculture. However, a lot of people really don’t understand what the biggest problem with this is.

Some people worry about it because the Amazonian rainforest produces a huge amount of oxygen during the process of photosynthesis. However, this is true of almost all plant life on the planet, particularly where it is abundant, such as the Arctic tundra forests and the unbelievably enormous amount of algae and other plants in the ocean. 

The total oxygen in the atmosphere is somewhere around 546 million cubic miles. That oxygen has a weight of about 3,584,889,636 tons or approximately 3.5 billion tons. That is a huge amount of oxygen. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere has been slowly dropping for the past 800,000 years, but it appears that this is a totally normal fluctuation and the rate of decrease hasn’t appreciatively changed in the past century since the time that the rainforest has been intentionally torched.

Oxygen is also highly corrosive and it can be deadly if the amount of oxygen actually increased by a few percents of the atmosphere. Thus, the issue isn’t with a loss of oxygen.

The Amazonian forests also lock up a great deal of carbon that could otherwise bond with oxygen to become carbon dioxide. However, this is also true of all life. What’s more, far more carbon is locked up in the ocean and in rocks than in plantlife. In fact, when carbon dioxide levels increase, plant life almost always flourishes, gradually lowering the CO2 levels in a marvelously designed self-regulating system. At present and using the most pessimistic figures, there are about  13,300,000 cubic miles of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and this number fluctuates enormously over millions of years. Levels are currently far lower than they’ve been in the past, which is to be expected since there is far less plant life on Earth than in the past and our world is no longer a vast, steamy swamp like it was when plant life was extremely dense. Thus, the issue isn’t with carbon or carbon dioxide.

So what is the biggest problem of the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest? It is estimated that between a third and a half of all land plants and animals found on the earth, or even more, live exclusively in Amazonia and nowhere else. Many of these haven’t even been cataloged or classified. The burning of the Amazon rainforest is destroying countless species of plants and animals. There is little doubt that many have already become extinct and many more are headed for extinction because of the practice. 

To my way of thinking, this is easily the biggest problem that is being caused by the continued destruction and burning of the Amazon rainforest.