Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon dropped by 22.3% in the 12 months through July, government data showed Thursday, as President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made progress on a pledge to rein in rainforest destruction.
The issue with the Amazon rainforest is that the soil isn’t fertile enough to sustain a forest by itself. It heavily relies on the already existing plant mass to die and give up nutrients to new plants (and some complicated air currents that include desert minerals).
If you remove enough trees, you kill this nutrient cycle and when you try to plant new ones, they will not grow.
That’s ignoring all the other living beings that would get disrupted in this process, and that we couldn’t feasibly achieve this due to the insane amount of different species interdependent in a forest like the Amazon - we can’t just select three or four native trees and replant everything.
what if we replant the trees? we’ll lose species we didn’t even know existed let alone could save but we can save what’s left, right?
The issue with the Amazon rainforest is that the soil isn’t fertile enough to sustain a forest by itself. It heavily relies on the already existing plant mass to die and give up nutrients to new plants (and some complicated air currents that include desert minerals).
If you remove enough trees, you kill this nutrient cycle and when you try to plant new ones, they will not grow.
That’s ignoring all the other living beings that would get disrupted in this process, and that we couldn’t feasibly achieve this due to the insane amount of different species interdependent in a forest like the Amazon - we can’t just select three or four native trees and replant everything.