“To blaze the trail” – to do something no one else had done to set the path for others to follow.
A big part of the Amazon basin has been silently suffering over the past months. Some days ago, the city of Sao Paulo was completely darkened by smoke in the middle of the afternoon (some 3,300 km away from the fires!). The Amazon forest is facing one of the worst events it has gone through during the Anthropocene. North of the Amazon, the Maya Biosphere Rainforest, the second-largest tropical rainforest in the American continent, has had its devastating share of wildfires this year as well. California has seen its worst year of forest fires in 2018 and apparently, they still don’t rule out that in 2019 they could still come worse. Siberia is burning. Alaska is burning. Canary Islands is burning. Indonesia is burning.
As a conservationist, the feelings of grief and despair have become a daily thing, and the question of “what can we do about this?” just keeps tangling on a network of problems on which we as individuals play a bigger part than what you may think. It’s not easy to separate all the factors involved, but I’ve done my best attempt here. To know what to do, we might need to understand why these places are so important and what drives these fires in the first place.
You might remember learning about photosynthesis in school: plants take up carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and give us oxygen in return. That’s still true, and people seem to have forgotten about it. But plants do much more than just giving us oxygen (which is already pretty important). The wide range of ecosystem services we benefit from goes from having freshwater reserves and control of diseases to potential pharmaceutical resources, and, my favorite: food.
The air currents and climatic patterns around the world are not only a matter of Earth’s rotation and revolution. The vast interactions and chemical reactions occurring in each type of ecosystem play a huge role in regulating these patterns at a microclimatic level as well as at a global scale, particularly places like the Amazon.
Fertile soils, water recharge and purification, genetic resources, areas for recreation, fresh water, food, flood control, disaster mitigation, disease control…our wallets will soon notice the lack of these ecosystems.
(Cacao fruit. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala)
“But I heard fires are beneficial to forests” – Well, yes and no.
For a fire to begin we need combustible matter (fuel), heat and oxygen. We know that around 21% of our atmosphere is oxygen. Dead plants that have dried up provide the fuel. For natural forest fires the most common source of ignition are electrical storms.
Throughout time, these fires have been common in some regions of the world, where the local plants have evolved with fire in a way that they need it to thrive. Some of these ecosystems include some African savannas and some coniferous forests in North America.
Let’s bring them down to the rainforests in Latin America. Here they have not been common; the natural humidity and moisture content of rainforests make them somehow “fire-resistant”. It’s also uncommon that they expand the way they have recently…unless other external forces came to aid. The rainforests can go through some dry spells, particularly with the current climatic situation, but the way the fires have been spreading lately is a sign that something else, or someone, has been involved. After all, neither the Maya Rainforest nor the Amazon Rainforest have had such drastic dry spells this year.
To make matters even worse, controlling forest fires is not only dangerous but it’s not a follow-a-recipe kind of thing. “No two fires are the same”. Forest fires behavior is not easy to predict. Their behavior depends on the local topography, time of the day and winds. They even create their own low-pressure zones creating other wind currents that can even throw around embers that ignite other nearby matter. Their own heat accelerates drying up nearby plants (more fuel!). This translates into high economic investment needed to stop them from spreading, when investing in prevention would be better, safer and cheaper.
How do we explain the 64 000 (at least) km2 of forest lost in 2019 to man-made forest fires?
It’s hard to point one finger in these cases. Even though it all comes down to deforestation as the main cause, there are several drivers leading up to it. The forest fires in Guatemala this year were reported to be at least 95% man-made. The recent cases in the Amazon are no different. Although some might be accidental, most are intentional.
It is easy (as many have done already) to just blame the farmers. If you were on the very-low to low-income strata and your new president says it’s now legal, wouldn’t you do the same if you’re just trying to provide for your family? Besides, that’s not the only activity driving deforestation. The fires in the Maya rainforest are also related to drug trafficking (clearing forest areas for airplane runways and expansion of some drug cultivation and “cattle ranching” for money laundering). This is an even trickier one to solve.
Our corrupt governments are also motivated by the short-term economic benefits they (and only they) receive from extractive activities that fuel the decisions that people in power, like Bolsonaro, have taken.
As if destroying our natural heritage was not enough, all these drivers have also motivated the murder of park rangers and environmental activists that have made Latin America popular for it in the recent past.
So what’s the problem then?
Corrupt governments, organized crime, poverty, and apathy. It’s no secret. I know you knew it already. It’s hard to unlink these factors.
According to some news sources, Jair Bolsonaro denies his role on this and blames NGO’s just after he has allowed and promoted for farming and cattle ranching to expand disregarding where to; he has absolutely no regard for the Indigenous Nations and local communities; and there’s logging, mining, hydropower, and drilling projects of his interest fueling these decisions. And I’ll skip, for now, discussing his callow way of refering to the recent Norwegian and German decisions towards international aid for the Amazon.
Regionally, most of us (Latin American countries) have our corrupt insensible governments that we still haven’t figured out how to combat. Besides this, or because of this, the lack of access to education, lack of proper spatial planning and opportunities for sustainable development drive people into desperate short-term personal solutions since “the bigger picture” is a priviledged one that not everyone can afford. It’s all about practicing a bit of empathy to understand this.
Although you might think it’s “our (latinamericans) problem” and our governments, people from the Global North also play a big role in our conservation efforts. No, I’m not blaming you (or myself, as I’m currently living here), I’m just saying there’s a lot we can do from wherever we are and we DO have responsibility in this.
Taste of guilt
Almost 40% of carbon emissions caused by deforestation driven by unsustainable meat production and monocultures in developing countries is motivated by international demand (this doesn’t exclude the importance of tackling the local drivers, just to be clear). Basically, all of us, anywhere in the world, have a relevant influence on worldwide conservation, food production, and overall our future.
I don’t mean we all need to carry this burden as if it was all our personal fault. Of course it’s not! But as adult residents of this world, it is our responsibility to do better each day within whatever is in our reach and capabilities. After all, our simple food choice on our daily supermarket visit might be driving these murders and fires. No, I’m not exagerating. Every little thing we buy is supporting someone, so let’s do our best to support the small local businesses that do things properly. Wanting to help developing countries doesn’t mean buying a three euro avocado (I still feel guilty about the last avocado I bought here). Again: empathy. There’s so many little luxuries we can live without!
Some sort of Eulogy
Deforestation in the Amazon has been long studied and models show a sad future unless we do something NOW. We just released this important carbon sink on an already climatically critical world. Even before the Tropical Trump (as they call Bolsonaro) came in place, the Amazon was already changing, with longer and more intense dry seasons, different precipitation patterns, and bigger and more prolonged wildfires that have been more frequent at least since around 2013. The fact that “this is not new” is not an excuse to stop caring, or give up, or “wait for someone else to come solve the world”.
As a conservationist that has had the privilege of working in part of the Amazon basin and been born in the country of the Maya Rainforest, the selfishness of making this personal is inevitable. It was challenging to write this “sticking to the facts”, when there’s a big emotional thread tying this whole thing. It hurts me deeply not only to read about these cases but to actually picture myself back there, with the people that live there, wildlife, the fascinating sounds and smells of those wonderful mornings that made you love work so much, and having it burnt down in a matter of days for the greed and arrogance of a few. I’ll never understand how these people can go to bed each night aware of the human lives, wildlife and future they’re murdering and even not realizing how they’re also burning their own future supplies. The soils and water needed for the very activities they intend to pursue are now compromised.
Stop waiting for things like this to become “big news” and act daily. I guess it’s utopic to expect everyone to understand, love, and respect nature for its intrinsic value the same way some of us see it. I guess the point, in the end, is to try to be more empathic day by day to improve the decisions we take, stop being so oblivious to what is going on all around the world. This won’t be solved over night and it will take some generations, but we need to get over human arrogance as soon as possible.
Sadly, there’s not much more we can do right now for the Amazon in situ, but double check where what we buy is coming from! (Don’t just protect the Amazon, throw in all critical ecosystems in your equation)
Nature doesn’t know country borders. Any endangered ecosystem worldwide is of concern to all of us. Take care of yourself, it’s as “simple” as that.
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Recommended references:
- Pendrill, F. et al. 2019. Agricultural and Forestry Trade Drives Large Share of Tropical Deforestation Emissions. Global Environmental Change. 56:1-10.
- Butt, N., Lambrick, F., Menton, M. & Renwick, A. 2019. The Supply Chain of Violence. Nature Sustainability. 2:742-747.
- Prevedello, J.A., Winck, G.R., Weber, M.M., Nichols, E. & Sinervo, B. 2019. Impacts of Forestation and Defeorestation on Local Temperature Across the Globe. PLos ONE 14(3):e0213368.
- Baker, I.T., Denning, A.S., Randall, D.a., Dazlich, D. & Branson, M. 2013. Impact of Evapotranspiration on Dry Season Climate in the Amazon Forest. Journal of Climate 27(2):574-591.
- Esquivel-Muelbert, et al. 2018. Compositional Response of Amazon Forests to Climate Change. Global Change Biology 2010:1-18.
- Feldpausch, T.R. et al. 2016. Amazon Forest Response to Repeated Droughts. Global Biogeochemical Cycles. 7(30)
Excellent text! Thank you!
Thank you for reading!