Georgina Gustin writes:

The Amazon is enveloping and lush, a place of stupefying richness. But a powerful web of extractive forces is also at work here.

Every day, thousands of miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers burn or cut roughly 10,000 acres of forest, working to satisfy a growing demand for the resources it contains. They are tiny cogs in a sprawling global machine that has destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Brazilian rainforest—an area about the size of California—over the last 35 years, driving more than 10,000 plant and animal species toward extinction.

The Amazon is the biggest in a belt of forests that wraps the planet’s midsection. It is a jungle so hot and humid, it makes its own rain. Its web of rivers is the largest in the world and contains about one-sixth of the world’s fresh water.

The rainforest is home to more than 10 percent of all plant and animal species, with new ones being discovered, on average, every other day. Under its canopy, insects fly around, looking like Pixar characters; rare, tiny mammals with humanly earnest faces scamper along branches, bird song rings through the leaves. Everything is pulsing and oxygenated, cycling through life and death and back to life.

Within this cycle, the Amazon’s soils and vegetation store between 150 billion to 200 billion tons of carbon—roughly five times the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, helping to stabilize the atmosphere and provide a counterweight to global warming.

If the planet loses the Amazon, it will be almost impossible to maintain that balance.

“A vast amount of carbon would be converted from organic matter into carbon dioxide and that would add to the carbon dioxide we’re already putting into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels,” said Scott Denning, an atmospheric scientist with Colorado State University. “That would be a catastrophe for humanity and for everything else.” [Continue reading…]