It was supposed to be a good-news story out of the damaged Amazon rainforest: a project that replanted hundreds of thousands of trees in an illegally deforested nature reserve in Brazil.
As nice as it sounds, I don’t think it’s feasible. The Amazon is absolutely massive and not very populated. The logistics of keeping armed guards all around the protected areas sounds like a nightmare. The only way I can see deforestation actually stopping is if cattle, soy and wood stop being lucrative businesses somehow.
I mean, couldn’t policies be attempted to at least make the business less lucrative in protected areas specifically? For example, if a protected area burns down, having a policy of occasionally inspecting that bit of burned land and confiscating any cattle found grazing there, to make illegally cleared land more risky to use?
That’s probably closer to what they actually try to do, which is much more reasonable but still requires a lot of resources. The problem is, there’s a lot of money behind these criminals and not a lot of political good will towards preservation (right-wingers here basically think the forest stands in the way of our progress, so less environmental protections = more jobs and development, somehow) so getting funds to protect our forests is usually an uphill battle.
As nice as it sounds, I don’t think it’s feasible. The Amazon is absolutely massive and not very populated. The logistics of keeping armed guards all around the protected areas sounds like a nightmare. The only way I can see deforestation actually stopping is if cattle, soy and wood stop being lucrative businesses somehow.
I mean, couldn’t policies be attempted to at least make the business less lucrative in protected areas specifically? For example, if a protected area burns down, having a policy of occasionally inspecting that bit of burned land and confiscating any cattle found grazing there, to make illegally cleared land more risky to use?
That’s probably closer to what they actually try to do, which is much more reasonable but still requires a lot of resources. The problem is, there’s a lot of money behind these criminals and not a lot of political good will towards preservation (right-wingers here basically think the forest stands in the way of our progress, so less environmental protections = more jobs and development, somehow) so getting funds to protect our forests is usually an uphill battle.