Not necessarily; fatalism never solves any problems. The article just highlights that historically the problem has been ignorance. We treat the Amazon as this vast ocean of un-mapped green where all sorts of people can hide; entire tribes of native Americans reside there that have had little or no contact with the modern world. We simply don't know what is going on there in very large detail.
Well, thanks to modern mapping, now we do. Formerly easy to hide and illegal activity like burning a bit of forest to get some farm land now stands out and we can track what happens or happened to bits of land. That's basically what the article is pointing out is actually happening. A few bits of information in there:
- Forest regeneration is slow but significant; up to 40% of forest thought to be lost over the past decades has in fact regrown. It's a slow process that takes up to 4 decades to fully restore bio diversity. But it's possible and happening at pretty significant scale.
- The whole process is basically driven by poor land management, ignorance, and incompetence. Farmers mismanage their soil, thus exhausting it and then burn more forest to solve their problem while abandoning their old land, which then starts regenerating if left alone.
- Mapping provides authorities better insight where this is happening or has happened and allows them to step up attempts to crack down on this to both protect regrowing forest and put a stop to new attempts to burn forests. Simply scaling up that effort could go a long way to fixing the problem. Farming by its very nature is very local. If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.
Fatalism solves problems of resource misallocation. You're better off putting in the effort to solve problems you can solve than putting in the effort to solve problems you can't solve. Assuming there's a limited amount of effort, fatalism will help you.
> If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.
Mapping doesn't do shit if the politicians don't act - and Bolsonaro is hellbent on not acting in the interest of anyone but the rich people paying him off (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49815731).
If the rainforest is to be saved, Bolsonaro must be removed one way or the other - and I'm not sure that it will be possible at all to remove that guy at the voting booth anymore. Personally I'd welcome some sort of intervention by one of the three-letter agencies - this time it could be actually for a good cause.
> Personally I'd welcome some sort of intervention by one of the three-letter agencies - this time it could be actually for a good cause.
Have you ever read a book by Hannah Arendt called Eichmann in Jerusalem? The whole point of the book is the sheer banality of evil -- that the bulk of evil is not the sensationalist stuff that makes up movies, but its boring, bureaucratic machinations and tacit complicity of civilians under the regime.
So all I can say about your idea is it is at best naive and at worst cynical. First of all, it's naive because it supposes that military intervention ever works when that flies in the face of history showing that nation-building (especially of the American sort) never works unless it's the kind that comes about indigenously -- if it was so easy to fix problems, why has American military intervention post WWII been an almost complete failure?
Second of all, it's cynical because it's easy to support such ideas when you're not the citizen who has to suffer through the consequences if things get worse. What would be your response if your idea simply doesn't work? "Better luck next time?"
> That would be a fine way to make things exponentially worse.
Things are FUBAR already. It can't get that much worse: entire countries are effectively run by drug empires, others are falling apart due to uncontrolled, rampant violence (often enough caused by criminals the US deported in the first place), and Bolsonaro is selling out the future of humanity.
I agree that the anti-communist interventions of the past were a catastrophe - but looking away now and leaving the poor and nature to pay the price for past misdeeds is not an option.
The US needs to legalize drugs to drain the cartels of their funding source, support the local legitimate governments that are fighting against cartel and gang violence - and ensure that the Amazon rain forest is not burned down any more.
They can get much, much worse. Unimaginably worse. There's no comparison between Venezuela and Brazil, for example. But even between Bolivia and Brazil or Peru and Brazil there's a steep difference in development and living standards. Foreign intervention would destabilize the country and potentially lead to war, human suffering, and devastation.
> entire countries are effectively run by drug empires
This is not true.
> Bolsonaro is selling out the future of humanity
I'm not even sure what you mean here, but it sounds inaccurate and an exaggeration at the very least.
Brazil is going through a bad patch, for sure. But it's still the biggest, most dynamic economy in South America, a stable democracy with relatively high HDI, and a nation of proud people with vibrant history and culture. The idea of foreign intervention sends shivers down my spine - it would absolutely, with 100% certainty make things worse, and would be potentially catastrophic for the country. I find it really amazing that someone can casually suggest this. Hasn't South America suffered enough?
Well, thanks to modern mapping, now we do. Formerly easy to hide and illegal activity like burning a bit of forest to get some farm land now stands out and we can track what happens or happened to bits of land. That's basically what the article is pointing out is actually happening. A few bits of information in there:
- Forest regeneration is slow but significant; up to 40% of forest thought to be lost over the past decades has in fact regrown. It's a slow process that takes up to 4 decades to fully restore bio diversity. But it's possible and happening at pretty significant scale.
- The whole process is basically driven by poor land management, ignorance, and incompetence. Farmers mismanage their soil, thus exhausting it and then burn more forest to solve their problem while abandoning their old land, which then starts regenerating if left alone.
- Mapping provides authorities better insight where this is happening or has happened and allows them to step up attempts to crack down on this to both protect regrowing forest and put a stop to new attempts to burn forests. Simply scaling up that effort could go a long way to fixing the problem. Farming by its very nature is very local. If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.