Amazon is still on fire: 4 essential reads on Brazil’s vanishing rainforest

Environmental researchers explain how farming, big infrastructure projects and roads drive the deforestation that’s slowly killing the Amazon

Nearly 40,000 fires are incinerating Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the latest outbreak in an overactive fire season that has charred 1,330 square miles of the rainforest this year. Don’t blame dry weather for the swift destruction of the world’s largest tropical forest, say environmentalists. These Amazonian wildfires are a human-made disaster, set by loggers and cattle ranchers who use a “slash and burn” method to clear land. Feeding off very dry conditions, some of those fires have spread out of control.

Brazil has long struggled to preserve the Amazon Rain Forest, sometimes called the “lungs of the world” because it produces 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen. Despite the increasingly strict environmental protections of recent decades, about a quarter of this massive rainforest is already gone – an area the size of Texas. While climate change endangers the Amazon, bringing hotter weather and longer droughts, development may be the greatest threat facing the rainforest…

1. Farming in the jungle

“Deforestation is largely due to land clearing for agricultural purposes, particularly cattle ranching but also soybean production,” writes Rachel Garrett, a professor at Boston University who studies land use in Brazil.

Since farmers need “a massive amount of land for grazing,” Garrett says, they are driven to “continuously clear forest – illegally – to expand pastureland.” Twelve percent of what was once Amazonian forest – about 93 million acres – is now farmland….