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….

Don’t hold your breath: Amazon fires aren’t depleting Earth’s oxygen supply

There’s enough oxygen in the air to last for millions of years, and the amount is set by geology rather than land use

Don’t hold your breath: Amazon fires aren’t depleting Earth’s oxygen supply on Business Standard. There’s enough oxygen in the air to last for millions of years, and the amount is set by geology rather than land use

Current Affairs: Fires in the Amazon rainforest have captured attention worldwide in recent days. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in 2019, pledged in his campaign to reduce environmental protection and increase agricultural development in the Amazon, and he appears to have followed through on that promise.

The resurgence of forest clearing in the Amazon, which had decreased more than 80% following a peak in 2004, is alarming for many reasons. Tropical forests harbor many species of plants and animals found nowhere else. They are important refuges for indigenous people, and contain enormous stores of carbon as wood and other organic matter that would otherwise contribute to the climate crisis.

Some media accounts have suggested that fires in the Amazon also threaten the atmospheric oxygen that we breathe. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Aug. 22 that “the Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire.”

The oft-repeated claim that the Amazon rainforest produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen is based on a misunderstanding. In fact nearly all of Earth’s breathable oxygen originated in the oceans, and there is enough of it to last for millions of years. There are many reasons to be appalled by this year’s Amazon fires, but depleting Earth’s oxygen supply is not one of them…