74,155 fires
About that Amazon rain forest…
Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.
That’s the gist of an announcement this week by the country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in the Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year, and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.
Over half of those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as all of 2018 combined. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities such as São Paulo.
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus puts it this way:
The Amazon rainforest—an irreplaceable part of what makes life on Earth possible—is burning at a record rate. Global CO2 emissions are at a record high. Last month was the hottest month on our planet in recorded history. We are in a climate emergency.
You know what happened to Rapanui, aka Easter Island?
The Easter Island of ancient times supported a sub-tropical forest complete with the tall Easter Island Palm, a tree suitable for building homes, canoes, and latticing necessary for the construction of such statues. With the vegetation of the island, natives had fuelwood and the resources to make rope. With their sea-worthy canoes, Easter Islanders lived off a steady diet of porpoise. A complex social structure developed complete with a centralized government and religious priests.
It was this Easter Island society that built the famous statues and hauled them around the island using wooden platforms and rope constructed from the forest. The construction of these statues peaked from 1200 to 1500 AD, probably when the civilization was at its greatest level. However, pollen analysis shows that at this time the tree population of the island was rapidly declining as deforestation took its toll.
Around 1400 the Easter Island palm became extinct due to overharvesting. Its capability to reproduce has become severely limited by the proliferation of rats, introduced by the islanders when they first arrived, which ate its seeds. In the years after the disappearance of the palm, ancient garbage piles reveal that porpoise bones declined sharply. The islanders, no longer with the palm wood needed for canoe building, could no longer make journeys out to sea. Consequently, the consumption of land birds, migratory birds, and mollusks increased. Soon land birds went extinct and migratory bird numbers were severely reduced, thus spelling an end for Easter Island’s forests. Already under intense pressure by the human population for firewood and building material, the forests lost their animal pollinators and seed dispersers with the disappearance of the birds. Today, only one of the original 22 species of seabird still nests on Easter Island.
With the loss of their forest, the quality of life for Islanders plummeted. Streams and drinking water supplies dried up. Crop yields declined as wind, rain, and sunlight eroded topsoils. Fires became a luxury since no wood could be found on the island, and grasses had to be used for fuel. No longer could rope by manufactured to move the stone statues and they were abandoned. The Easter Islanders began to starve, lacking their access to porpoise meat and having depleted the island of birds.
We’re doing the same thing to the whole planet, and the disappearances and dryings up and plummetings are speeding up.
The so-neat-there-should-be-a-bow-on-it deforestation “ecocide” narrative popularized by Jared Diamond in Collapse is no longer thought to be based on sound science. Most experts now believe that the ecological disaster was quite beyond human control, caused by stowaway rats rapidly multiplying in a predator-free environment, feeding on palm tree roots and seeds. In a way, the ongoing survival of any Easter Islanders in the aftermath of such a thorough-going ecological disaster is a testament to human ingenuity and perseverance, not a story of “How could those idiots not realize they were destroying themselves?”
But whether it was caused by human stupidity or just an out-of-control invasive species, it’s still a chilling story with potentially disturbing implications, as briefly discussed here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/what-happened-on-easter-island-a-new-even-scarier-scenario
And Bolsonaro fired the guy that made that announcement, specifically because the news was bad.
Diamond himself doesn’t frame it as “how could those idiots?” although he does say one wonders what the person who cut down the last tree was thinking – and it’s a memorable line and kind of sticks out. But overall he frames it as a matter of not seeing what’s happening as it’s happening…and he does include the rats.
The real idiots were the Norse in Greenland who watched the Inuit use kayaks to hunt seals but didn’t follow suit and so starved, after eating everything including all the dogs and the feet of their cattle, which would normally be discarded.
Sorry in advance for the fuzziness of my recollections –
There was this documentary we were shown when I was in school (must have been early to mid-nineties) that was made as a follow-up to an earlier film from the seventies(ish). The original one had explored the ecosystem in an area of the Baltic Ocean (maybe the North Sea?) and the follow-up focused on the consequences of overfishing and general human fuckery, and used old footage to contrast with the new footage. It was the difference between abundant wildlife, and an underwater desert. The one thing I remember very clearly was the fishermen complaining about how 20 years ago, they were catching huge numbers of large lobsters, but now they were having to put out far more traps to catch anything at all, and the lobsters were all tiny. Somehow it had escaped them that scooping almost the entire population of a creature out of an area would result in there not being any of those creatures in that area.