alt Hacker News> In the past 40 years, Amazônia has lost more than 13% of its vegetation cover.
This is loss of original forest cover, replaced by non-native vegetation: pasture, agriculture & tree plantations. 13% is about the amount of vegetation coverage domesticated in Amazonia over 40 years. It has been converted from wilderness into a renewable, denser source of ingredients for food, clothing and shelter.
Replies
aaron425 • today at 1:46 AM
Can you defend your statement and cite how renewable this domesticated area is? Aren’t most areas deforested for cattle farming (legendarily inefficient) and soy plantations (monoculture)?
➕ show 1 reply
GroksBarnacles • today at 1:46 AM
You know "wilderness" serves functions too, right?
The Amazon rainforest was extensively modified by pre-Columbian indigenous societies. Some anthropologists have even called it a "manufactured landscape". Modern LiDAR mapping has revealed thousands of large geometric ditches, reservoirs, causeways, mounds, and earthen infrastructure.[0][1] Up to 10% of soils are highly fertile man-made terra preta soils and trees like cocoa, acai, and brazilnut show an unnatural "hyperdominance" distribution due to ancient orchards. Many plants throughout show some degree of domestication[2][3]
And some have even proposed a possible human role in the transition of parts of the Amazon from grassland to rainforest about 10k years ago[4]
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/282/1812/201...
You don't achieve a population of 3M people without such extensive landscape modification.
[0] https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/archaeologist...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/humans-living-...
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeolo...
[4] https://www.discovermagazine.com/10-800-years-ago-early-huma...