Nothing.

Seriously, there is nothing you can do although there are already people asking you to donate money to their foundations and organizations that are possibly somewhere very far from the fire and have no firefighting capabilities.

It is the Dry Season in the are where the fire is burning. There are very few paved rods, no modern or even old infrastructure and certainly no fire departments. It is a jungle, not a forest park full of bambis an winnies.

What caused the fire? Nobody knows. Some are speculating that local farmers did a slash & burn to clear space for planting and it got out of control. I also find funny that experts are discovering that slash and burn is used down there to clear a space for cultivation. It is done every year since the first settlers decided to try to eek a sustenance out of what is possible the worst soil in the world for agriculture short of the Sahara. And the reason that Slash and Burn is done every year is the same reason why I am not to worried about the fire: Everything will grow back again to the way it was, probably in a year or two.

We are in the downward side of the Dry Season. It is the Amazon and some rain will happen but don’t expect miracles. Rainy season south of the equator starts in October and ends in May and by then we will probably see a lot of the damage covered in new growth.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, a shipping magnate by the name of Daniel K. Ludwig decided to build a paper pulp plant in Brazil. H ordered a plant built in Japan, brought it by ship all the way to the site and cleared acres of jungle that I recall NASA claimed you could see the  scar from space. After sinking  hundreds of millions in the project, Ludwig quit;

But after investing $845 million in the complex, Mr. Ludwig is calling it quits. He is turning over the grandiose jungle development plan and its acreage, as big as Connecticut, to an all-Brazilian consortium being formed by private businessmen.

The reason: Mr. Ludwig was unable to overcome the problems of Amazon development. The tropical rain forest that blankets the 2-million-square-mile Amazonia kept swallowing up his development.

The scary part? about a year later, you could not tell from space that they cleared anything at all. The plant is active now and producing pulp, but it took decades to bring it online and it has been a sinkhole of Brazilian money.

It is going to sound like spooky tales, but the Amazonian Jungle is a living entity on its own. There is no such thin as Old Growth Forests because the roots do not penetrate the ground much if at all. The Amazon creates its own “soil” and in fact it is the champion mulcher of the world.  Old vegetation becomes the soil where future trees and bushes will grow and EVERYTHING grows fast down there. People living in the jungle carry machetes everywhere because they must clear roads and pathway from vegetation every day or risk being swallowed and work three times as hard to clear it. That bring us back to how to clear a plot of land for farming: Slash and burn.

So save your pennies because they are not going to be used to fight fires but line the pockets of some environmentalists. To kill the Amazon Jungle I figure about a dozen Fission bombs may do the job, but even so I would not guarantee it would remain done for long.

 

Spread the love

By Miguel.GFZ

Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.

8 thoughts on “The Amazon is on fire. What can you do to help?”
  1. According to some scientist, the Amazon area was heavily populated & cultivated in the long centuries before Columbus.
    The belief that it’s some sort of pristine environment came about because moderns could not literally see the gardens through the trees, and had no idea that the prehistoric Amazon peoples depended more on trees for food over the usual food crops.
    It’s a really interesting area of study.

  2. Not enough coffee yet this morning. I glanced at the headline and read ‘Amazon is on fire’, and my caffeine deprived brain thought ‘who cares’ and why is one of the mega billion dollar companies wanting my pennies to help to put out the fires……. Plus, is it going to delay my shipment of dog food?

    Need more coffee…….

  3. Remember Mt St Helen? It blew its cookies, hard. All the envirowhackers back then were saying the whole area would never recover. The very next year there was little trees bushes and grass poking up outta the ashes. There are more trees in America than when George Washington was choppin them down. 95% of America is undeveloped land. The enviros are almost as bad as the climatemorons

    1. Yes, as a NH resident I know this well.
      Look at 19th century photos of NH and you see mostly open land, with occasional trees. Look at the same spots now, and you will usually see mostly forest. In the 19th century, NH was 90% open land. Now it’s around 90% forest.
      If you wander around the forests, you keep tripping over stone walls. Those mark boundaries between what used to be farm fields a century ago. Most of the farmers picked up and moved to the midwest where you can actually plow land without running into a granite rock every 50 feet.

      1. Likewise, the “pristine” forest of North America were also heavily managed and modified by the original Indians.

Comments are closed.