{"id":48042,"date":"2019-08-27T16:38:30","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T21:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48042"},"modified":"2019-08-27T16:38:31","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T21:38:31","slug":"rainforest-on-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48042","title":{"rendered":"Rainforest on Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2019\/07\/06\/brazil-amazon-rainforest-indigenous-conservation-agribusiness-ranching\/\">RAINFOREST ON FIRE<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro\u2019s War on the Amazon, Brazil\u2019s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">THE RIVER BASIN\u00a0at the center of Latin America called the Amazon is roughly the size of Australia. Created at the beginning of the world by a smashing of tectonic plates, it was the cradle of inland seas and continental lakes. For the last several million years, it has been blanketed by a teeming tropical biome of 400 billion trees and vegetation so dense and heavy with water, it exhales a fifth of Earth\u2019s oxygen, stores centuries of carbon, and deflects and consumes an unknown but significant amount of solar heat. Twenty percent of the world\u2019s fresh water cycles through its rivers, plants, soils, and air. This moisture fuels and regulates multiple planet-scale systems, including the production of \u201crivers in the air\u201d by evapotranspiration, a ceaseless churning flux in which the forest breathes its water into great hemispheric conveyer belts that carry it as far as the breadbaskets of Argentina and the American Midwest, where it is released as rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the last half-century, about one-fifth of this forest, or some 300,000 square miles, has been cut and burned in Brazil, whose borders contain almost two-thirds of the Amazon basin. This is an area larger than Texas, the U.S. state that Brazil\u2019s denuded lands most resemble, with their post-forest landscapes of silent sunbaked pasture, bean fields, and evangelical churches. This epochal deforestation \u2014\u00a0matched by harder to quantify but similar levels of forest degradation and fragmentation \u2014 has caused measurable disruptions to regional climates and rainfall. It has set loose so much stored carbon that it has\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1126\/science.aam5962\">negated the forest\u2019s benefit<\/a>\u00a0as a carbon sink, the world\u2019s largest after the oceans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>RAINFOREST ON FIRE On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro\u2019s War on the Amazon, Brazil\u2019s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe THE RIVER BASIN\u00a0at the center of Latin America called the Amazon is roughly the size of Australia. Created at the beginning of the world by a smashing of tectonic plates, it was the cradle of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[90,112,4296,1596,26619,15266,5567,4849],"class_list":["post-48042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-brazil","tag-carbon","tag-carbon-sink","tag-deforestation","tag-leia-em-portugues","tag-rainfall","tag-the-intercept","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48042"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48044,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48042\/revisions\/48044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}