
‘The Amazon Is Completely Lawless’: The Rainforest After Bolsonaro’s First Year - vo2maxer
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html
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bblpeter
It’s angry making. But I wouldn’t blame those farmers. They’re trying to make
a living, and farming is probably the only realistic choice. We would all do
the same if faced with that situation. What’s more important to you, climate
change or feeding your children?

The blame goes all the way back to the consumers, which are probably people
like us living in First World countries. We are reaping the benefits of
deforestation (lots of cheap beef) but now we are seeing the downsides.

Living our First World lifestyles and simultaneously criticizing deforestation
are contradictory.

I believe we ain’t seen nothin yet. Just imagine if the other 6.5 billion
people live like us. Who can blame them for wanting to? I’m talking frequent
worldwide travel, plenty of meat, having our own cars (doesn’t matter if
electric or not), living in nice single family homes like we all want to (even
if not all of us can), having 2-3 kids and giving them the same lifestyle.
There would not be a single tree left.

I think this destruction is difficult to stop because while we all admit to
the damage, nobody is yet willing to make the sacrifice.

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loopz
You can forgo the beef.

I did 18 years ago.

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9HZZRfNlpR
Why is Brazil getting all the negativity? Bolivia has as big fires as Brazil
despite being tiny. If you want to protect the Amazon you need to lobby your
politicians to start some sort of tax for that in order to compensate Brazil
its development plans. The western world has logged off theirs long time ago.

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Nasrudith
That is blatantly wrong - they have more forrest than they did centuries ago.

Second they are right to expect better of the 9th largest nominal GDP nation.

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9HZZRfNlpR
What part of my statement was blatantly wrong?

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Nasrudith
That the west logged off all of their forests long ago - also implying that it
was a precondition to their status.

Except that instead of forests instead of being cumulatively wiped away has
grown as marginal agricultural land has been left utterly unused. That becomes
blatantly wrong like saying Europe's population is lower now than it was in
the past because of two world wars and the Spanish Flu. While the terrible
things did happen the end status did not.

In all of the forestry cases they realized the major problems that would ensue
if they ran out and shifted to sustainable models with replanting instead of
virgin land. In Germany's case they started shockingly early in the 1500s
after encountering wood shortages.

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Risthel
"Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and
entrepreneurship." \- Wikipedia.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic.

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vo2maxer
Please, reread the Off-Topic carefully but before that, read the On-Topic
paragraph:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

