Rex Trulove
Many people understand that the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest is a bad thing. However, many people may also wonder why it isn’t simply replanted.
This would be a reasonable question to ask. After all, it works tremendously well in the United States. There are even laws that dictate that when timber is harvested, it must be replanted. Even areas that are burned by forest fires are replanted. The result is that there are now more trees in the US than there were during the colonial period. Our forests have actually increased, rather than decreasing, despite the amount of timber that has been and continues to be harvested.
It is natural that people would wonder why the same thing couldn’t be done in Brazil. However, this won’t work and there is a good reason for it. In fact, it has been tried and failed.
The issue is one of soil fertility and depth.
In the vast forests of the US, leaf-litter falls continuously. This can form a layer many feet thick and as this material composts, it yields many feet of rich soil in a continuous, ongoing cycle.
In the Amazon basin, though, something different happens. There are a bewildering array of different plants, all struggling to gain any advantage over neighboring plants. Food and sunlight is at a premium, so when a leaf falls, it is quickly and ravenously consumed for its nutrients before it can decay and build up the soil. The result is that the fertile soil is only a few inches deep, at best, and it isn’t particularly rich. Most of the nutrients have already been used.
We do have the knowledge, technology, and ability to “fix” this problem, but to do so would be incredibly expensive. Brazil is a poor country and they can’t afford it. In fact, if they had more wealth as a country, they wouldn’t find it necessary to clear the land for agriculture, in order to feed their growing population. Some people in the US and elsewhere have begun to attempt rainforest restoration, but largely because of the cost, far more rainforest is being destroyed than is being restored. This isn’t likely to change, either, because few countries are willing to sink money into Brazil to stop the practice of rainforest destruction or to buoy Brazil’s economy.
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Do you think that governments around the world should spend money to restore the Amazonian rainforest?
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Yes
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No
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It should be up to Brazil to find a way
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There isn’t an issue/it doesn’t effect me
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It is really sad to see such a huge forest in fire and the people couldn’t do anything.
Yes, it is. They burn the forests because they are so poor and need the food, but that doesn’t help them in the long term since the soil is rapidly depleted and no longer usable. I suppose they can’t be blamed, but they are looking only in the very short term. Still, the poorest people in the US live far better than the average citizen of Brazil.
This can only be seen as a tragedy, given the importance of the rainforest to the whole of the world – not least because of the oxygen produced by the trees. This is not the only place where rainforest destruction is rife – this is also happening in central Africa and Indonesia.
The richer countries can do a lot to stop this happening, mainly by cutting back on our demand for the products that the destruction is aiming to supply for export – notably beef and palm oil.
Demand for imports of beef has already dropped to nearly nothing in the US. Almost no beef is imported here, though a small amount does come from Canada. Virtually none comes from Brazil. The US is also a huge exporter of beef, primarily to Mexico, Korea, and Canada, but that means that they don’t need to import from Brazil, either. China and India produce far more beef than the US does, so they could flood the European market to virtually shut down import demand for Brazillian beef if they chose to do so. Of course, then Brazil’s economy would take yet another major hit.
One sad issue with poor countries, though, is that their population tends to increase wildly. Unfortunately, there isn’t a great deal that can be done about that. The US has a birthrate to deathrate that is just barely above 0, with most of our population increase being from immigration. That isn’t true of Brazil, though. A fast-growing population means an ever-growing number of mouths to feed, continually.