Brazil to open 860K acres of protected Amazon rainforest to logging, mining, etc

Re:Brazil to open 860K acres of protected Amazon rainforest ... by mc32 on Sunday July 16, 2017 @12:36AM (#14780503)

I would like to remind you it's not capitalism, it's any economic system. In the USSR, they used to use (and still use) track vehicles to harvest wood and what have you natural resources in the Siberian tundra --heavy track vehicles crack and damage the permafrost[1] resulting in terrible enviro damage. Once the permafrost is cracked it does not heal.

The motto for the Soviets was pretty summed up as "git er done" no matter the cost. That meant lots of enviro damage --look at the Aral sea for another example.

[1]http://images.sciencesource.com/p/14185350/Damaged-tundra-de...

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Re:Brazil to open 860K acres of protected Amazon rainforest ... by sedachv on Sunday July 16, 2017 @02:08AM (#14780747)

Native Americans practiced setting fires as a forest management technique for thousands of years and the forests of the Pacific Northwest survived. It took less than a hundred years of logging by the USA following the Indian Wars of the 19th century to wipe all of those forests out.

The Caledonian Forest of Scotland was destroyed in roughly the same amount of time during the 19th century by the English following the Highland Clearances.

Obviously there are economic and political forms of organization that do not result in massive environmental destruction. Saying that "it's not capitalism because the USSR did it too" when clearly the example of the current situation in Brazil is capitalist is disingenuous.

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Re:Brazil to open 860K acres of protected Amazon rainforest ... by mc32 on Sunday July 16, 2017 @02:25AM (#14780796)

Right, I also recall how the Mayans depleted their forests and farmlands which resulted in droughts and famines and eventual social collapse. It happened rather quickly too. You are so right.

Brazil likes to think of itself as socialist --the Worker's Party (o partido dos trabalhadores) was in power for pretty long till recently (during which lots of the rainforest plundering took place). So even in Brazil, the leftists didn't care about the enviro.

I could also bring up a litany of Chinese projects, North Korean projects, Vietnamese, Former Soviet repubs. I think you get the picture. Much of the degradation was due to utilizing outdated technology, other times, just complete disregard for nature in the name of progress --three gorges dam, for example.

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