Through the actions of carelessness, mankind has forever destroyed one of the worlds greatest natural assets. So how does the burning of the Amazon directly affect everyone? As many people have heard, the Amazon Forest in Brazil caught on fire at the beginning of this year. While fires in of themselves are dangerous and bad, this fire not only directly affected those in Brazil but everyone all over the world. Forests help sustain our world and environment and additionally are homes to people and numerous species. While not all sources report the same specific details on how the fire started, they all agree that it was started by humankind. 85% of all wildland fires begin due to careless humans, leaving only 15% of wildfires to begin by natural occurrences such as lightning or spontaneous combustion (National Park Services, 2018). Spontaneous combustion, while quite rare, can occur when natural elements such as dry leaves, hay, straw, dead branches, etc have low oxygen and rub together at a high frequency to create friction. Unfortunately, this world-altering fire was among the 85% of human begun fires, so in retrospect, it could have easily been avoided.
Wondering what started this historic fire though, well a majority of sources agree that it was begun by ranchers and farmers who were looking to clear the land quickly for farming and cattle grazing. Environmentalists are blaming Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for encouraging such acts. President Bolsonaro originally claimed to restore and rebuild Brazils economy when running for President, but environmentalists believe that instead, President Bolsonaro encouraged farmers, ranchers, and loggers to burn the Amazon rainforest like never before. In a statement, Amazon Watch pointed to widespread local media reports that just last week, farmers had organized a coordinated "fire day" to burn land for agriculture, inspired by Bolsonaro's rhetoric (Yeung, 2019). The act of forest burning is a long and popular tactic which is likely the reason behind the unusually high number of fires burning in the Amazon today (Yeung, 2019). But how does this affect the world at large one might wonder, well the Amazon forest provides the world with a required resource for survival.
This resource is oxygen, the very air we breathe! We as humans breath in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide. Plants on the other hand 'breath' in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen. It is a well-balanced system, so much so that plants aid in the lowering of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere which leads to global warming, but that's for a different discussion. By burning thousands upon thousands of acres of trees and plants, the carbon dioxide and oxygen ratio dramatically shifts. Not only will there now be an excess of carbon dioxide in our environment, due to fewer plants, but there will also be less oxygen for humans due to fewer plants producing it. This is just one of the ways in which the burning of the Amazon will affect humankind. Find out additional ways of how burning down the Amazon Forest will affect the world as we know it by looking for part two of this blog at a future date.
