Peruvian Amazon burning by canttakesky

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Peruvian Amazon burning

POSTED BY: CANTTAKESKY
UPDATED: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 06:44
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 5:42 AM

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/as-people-move-to-amazonian-cities-so
-the-amazon-is-burning

Farming, logging, and strip mining has long altered much of the Amazon rainforest, with slash-and-burn land-clearing techniques turning large portions of the forest into patchworks of pastures, second-growth forest, and degraded land. Now, rural people are increasingly moving to booming Amazonian cities; paradoxically, the land they're leaving behind is being ravaged by wildfires.

A new paper published in PNAS shows that in the Peruvian Amazon, land use changes and depopulation have let large wildfires fly through converted land. It puts a damper on those optimistic that the urbanization of the Amazon may allow parts of the forest to recover, by centralizing populated areas and leaving old converted land to be slowly gobbled up by the encroaching forest.

Amazonian wildfires are nearly all manmade. Pristine forest is simply too dense and too wet for natural fires to occur regularly, unlike in U.S. forest systems. As such, slash-and-burn techniques has razed massive swaths of forest in recent decades.

Read more at link....

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 6:44 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Damn, damn and damn. I hadn't heard about population moving to the cities...I would have been encouraged that it would cause less deforestation until I heard this.

I have no DOUBT any wildfires down there are man made. I didn't even know the amazonian rainforest COULD burn! Of course, it's not the amazon rainforest anymore there, is it? Shite.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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