Woodcoin Mourns The Amazon

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Amazon rainforest is on fire. We at Woodcoin understand the importance of all the forests and all their trees.

The Amazon is of particular importance as jungles go: much of it remains undeveloped and unexplored, and new species or even medical cures could one day be found if preservation, rather than destruction, were the rule.

Unfortunately, loggers in the region are driven only by profit, and LAT says:

[…] [W]hat the fires represent: a dramatic increase in illegal deforestation that could deprive the world of a critical buffer against climate change. More than a soccer field’s worth of Amazon forest is falling every minute, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE.

Responsible forestry initiatives have existed around the world for several decades, encouraging replanting of trees and in some cases banning clear-cutting altogether. Rogue loggers in Brazil pay no heed to the natural heritage or long-term value of the rainforest.

And Earth hangs in the balance.

If you’re a climate change denier – or a pseudoscientist, given the current body of work on the subject – then you may as well stop reading here.

However, if you understand that human behavior has already forever altered creation irrevocably, then you may suspect there is a tipping point from which humanity cannot return.

Scientists studying the ongoing situation in the Amazon would agree with you. If you understand how the air we breathe is created (plants and trees take in the bad stuff and give us the stuff we need), then you might be interested to learn the Amazon accounts for more than 15% of the entire planet’s natural filter.

If we lose it, and our population continues at the same pace, what do you think happens?

People interested in politics currently blame incoming right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro for the situation on the ground. The liberal LA Times would love you to believe that “progress” had been made over the past decade.

But the bottom line is that it’s never going to matter who is president. What we have is a problem with human nature and culture. Perhaps the only solution is to raise the next generation with respect for the environment, so they might not resort to cutting down ancient, important trees and destabilizing one of the last truly wild ecosystems in the world.

We at Woodcoin have been considering our options. We’d like to send a team to the Amazon to start planting trees at a rate of 2:1. This would likely be very expensive, but if the outcome is air our grandchildren can breathe, then what does it matter? What are your thoughts, netizen?