Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source
I spent the last 10 days in a hut on the edge of the Amazon and am in a hotel in Lima, waiting for my flight out of Peru. Seeing this story, I thought I&#x27;d add one brief first hand account.<p>The jungle was noticeably cut down since I had last been there 7 months ago. What had been just a hiking trail to our camp had been widened to the size of a road by all the tree clearing. The trees are pretty thin and not the best wood. I hear they&#x27;re mostly used for making charcoal.<p>Next to where I was staying is land owned by a wealthy foreigner in Lima. She bought it to maintain it as jungle. But &quot;ownership&quot; is a funny thing. People moved onto her land and set up a community. It&#x27;s what locals call an invasión. They had the backing of a politician, so the cops did nothing. The rumor was she was beating them in court and some people were going to jail. At the same time, a bulldozer was coming in widening the trail to the invasión into a road.<p>The land there is more like settling the frontier than buying a parcel in a suburb. People don&#x27;t respect a barbed wire fence, no trespassing sign and a piece of paper. They will generally respect you living on the land. Residents visibly establish their ownership. Even the smallest town will have a giant sign welcoming you. Houses sitting on just two acres will have a sign and name (usually <i>fundo</i> something) and maybe even their claimed property borders on it. You need to reside in your home, or someone else might be when you get back.<p>I&#x27;m sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You&#x27;re living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you&#x27;re not supposed to. Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can&#x27;t do the same? I get why you&#x27;d buy a machete and walk off into the jungle, then buy a chainsaw once you can afford it.<p>At the same time, I&#x27;d rather they didn&#x27;t do that. I used to feel guilt about visiting the jungle. The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere. Maybe the best thing to do if you love nature is live downtown in a city and send money to a preservation charity. But I also see the value of people who are stewards of the land. You have to cut down an acre to build the community, but that lets you protect many more. So I plan to keep visiting and keep supporting.