beef consumption threatening rainforest

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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby Ian C. Kuzushi on Wed May 04, 2022 10:42 pm

soy fields, which are growing industrial soy, not edamame. They are growing soy beans to make soy oil to cook french fries, cook beef in, or may other horrible shelf stable things that people in other countries will eat. It's not sustainable. Neither is massive beef consumption. Eat local, or at least intelligently, most of the time.

Do you just try to be a complete fucking dumb ass? Or does it come naturally?
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby yeniseri on Wed May 04, 2022 11:00 pm

origami_itto wrote:And they are cutting down the trees because.....


Isn't is obvious...but here is my point of view:
1. That is how the Western mindset operates to create power centres..
2. They steal land from indigenous peoples then create ranches to be owned by those who have money to buy and sell "product'
3. These ranches become power centres of influence increasing the monetary and influence of these new landowners...
4. These landowners become part of the political landscape over time and land use suffers with chemical agrricultural as a base, which increase soil erosion
5. The loss of trees, forest, and fauna of the Amazon increases climate change to the extent that these areas will flood major parts of Northern South AMerica causing disasters never seen before on the continent.
6. CO2 increase in the atmosphere (Amazon) will cuase extremes in temperature meaning fires where they never existed before
7. The indigenous people have lost their natural habitat and they create a burden on the state for support since their homelands have been taken away from them with no compensation for their stolen lands.
8. Currently, the US AMerican Wester states are a template for what will happen in the Amazon along wiht recent wildfires in Siberia! WHo wouda thought.... ???

SIberia battle heatwave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXd4gDV0HBo

SIberia fires larger than all of EU fires combined
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXd4gDV0HBo

Amazon fires....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAQZvlaNF4s

Beef is just a byproduct of those behaviours that can be used and is used as a commodity for now...
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby vadaga on Thu May 05, 2022 1:03 am

Ian C. Kuzushi wrote:SNIP They are growing soy beans to make soy oil to cook french fries, cook beef in, or may other horrible shelf stable things that people in other countries will eat. It's not sustainable. SNIP



also animal feed and soy milk FWIW.

If you buy Alpro, that is brazillian soybeans. They have a little 'proterra' certification on the carton meaning that the soybeans are farmed on land that cannot have been deforested after 2008. https://www.proterrafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ProTerra-Standard-V4.1_EN-2.pdf

If you buy salmon in the EU (Norway is the main producer for all markets other than UK, inside of UK it is Scotland) it is likely fed a diet of containing around 20% non-GMO brazillian soybeans, usually also Proterra certified.

If you eat chicken, there is a lot of soy in chicken feed as well... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/14/feed-supplier-to-uk-farm-animals-still-linked-to-amazon-deforestation

@Origami_itto- FWIW it's not just a 'western' mindset- it's a product of the global economy at this point- 70%+ of Brazillian soybeans is going to China, again for animal feed (pigs and chickens)
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby windwalker on Thu May 05, 2022 1:30 am

lets see what happens....
betting nothing will but ya never know...

Everything, including the world, eventually finds
It’s own balance.
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby Giles on Thu May 05, 2022 5:04 am

windwalker wrote:Everything, including the world, eventually finds
It’s own balance.


This is true. In the long term, our planet and life on it shows incredible resilience and diversity.

However. Paleontological, geological and historical research reveals that when a regional or global ecosystem gets depleted/damaged/destroyed beyond a tipping point, recovery and restoration of this balance - often with new interactions, new species - can require some time. Assuming the damage is relatively local and there are intact ecosystem areas not too far away to 'reseed', then still generations or centuries. The more severe and widespread the ecological damage, the longer the recovery or 'new balance'. Then we're quickly talking about thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. 'Life' will surely find a way, but the rich and wonderful ecosystems that we still have (mostly, more or less) may well change beyond recognition, with ecological poverty in the 'wilderness years'. Apart from the general ethical considerations of us (the human race) screwing up much of the world and extinguishing other species, this also means sawing at the branch we ourselves are sitting on. Humans in some form will probably hang on, even if things go really bad. Maybe. But in the meantime, it would mean so much disruption to the foundations of our societies and economies in so many ways that we'd very probably experience a new 'Dark Age', quite possibly with a population level to match. Just with better technology for those who can still access it. Or maybe not even that, because in the longer term, advanced technology also requires a broad social and economic base. And that, unavoidably, requires functioning ecoystems that can continually regenerate and as a by-product let us grow our food, breathe decent air etc.
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby Quigga on Thu May 05, 2022 5:20 am

I'm just waiting 5-10 years until the first step in a chain of events happen

Plankton dying off, ocean streams and weather changing. Once the first domino falls change is going to come rather quickly, whether we want it or not with governments being dismantled, Yakuza type structures rising everywhere and both the dark and light side living much closer together than now - how many people have to be killed each year to sustain the lifestyle of one person considered to be in the top 30-40%?

We were all born guilty.

Some persons in history said to place all of their guilt and blame upon them, because this person can deal better with it. Providing possible solutions

The changes we need to make to prevent this from happening seem next to impossible, maybe certainly impossible if one relies on organic growth of our societal systems

We may as well just start talking about terraforming Earth

I don't know and I am afraid
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby everything on Thu May 05, 2022 8:26 am

I don’t think consumers will easily change, but reducing beef consumption by 20% would help.

It’s happening, just not at that rate.

But going to cleaner energy would help more.

Also happening, but slowly.

I drive gas guzzlers and eat meat and buy crap, so I can’t preach at anyone.

As Michio Kaku was saying,
Most species go extinct.
Are we different enough to prevent our own?
Maybe yes, maybe no?
Certainly we cause it on others.
Last edited by everything on Thu May 05, 2022 8:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby Quigga on Thu May 05, 2022 9:22 am

Just 20% reduction would help? I mean yeah obviously... Better to try and fail than to not try at all. At least that's often the case.

Cleaner energy would be nuclear for me. We can deal with radioactive trash in the ground later. Besides I've heard it's not all that bad which totally makes me an expert

But building a reactor in a Tsunami zone is just less than ideal

Going by that logic I can't preach either

How many species have caused their own extinction? Predators and prey naturally balance each other out in biological systems
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby everything on Thu May 05, 2022 9:47 am

not an expert, either. this was in the news yesterday.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586- ... ng%20study.

20% reduction .... 50% less deforestation by 2050.
50% reduction ... 80% less deforestation by 2050....
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby everything on Thu May 05, 2022 9:48 am

nuclear

get musk or bezos to send the waste to the dark side of the moon. :D ;D
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby windwalker on Thu May 05, 2022 10:05 am


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAifu7lu8TU

Richard Wrangham, is a biological anthropologist at Harvard, specializing in the study of primates and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, and culture. He’s also a MacArthur fellow—the so-called “genius grant”—and the author of books like
'The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution' and
'Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.'



Intersting clip, explores a question of

"do female apes trade "sex" for meat". ;D

Of course that doesn't happen in human societies... ;)

In general explores a lot of behavioral traits thought to be
similar between chimpanzees and humans.


52:56

Talks about how chimpanzees kill other troops expanding their territory gaining the resources...
and the amount of time they spend feeding due to their diet.

Analogous to humans, able to shorten this time due to dietary changes, more "meat" the proclivity to use fire for cooking…
allowing humans to develop outside of the time requirements looking for and eating food.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXNWBkkGJXE
Last edited by windwalker on Thu May 05, 2022 10:36 am, edited 8 times in total.
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby everything on Thu May 05, 2022 10:37 am

Tom wrote:
everything wrote:
nuclear

get musk or bezos to send the waste to the dark side of the moon. :D ;D


I'm no jimmy (only jimmy is jimmy), but . . .



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLOth-BuCNY


Excellent attempt at a "Jimmy" reply.... ;D
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby D_Glenn on Wed May 11, 2022 7:00 am

A bigger problem, imo, is tearing down the rainforests in order to have more land to plant sugarcane for environmentally friendly ethanol fuel :(

And the US buys ethanol fuel from Brazil.

And the US is promoting more ethanol. So more Rainforest will be coming down.

.
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby Ian C. Kuzushi on Wed May 11, 2022 5:55 pm

I am familiar with soy being a culprit, but as of yet, sugar cane is planted almost exclusively in already slash and burned land that was previously used for pasture or other agricultural use. So, it's not currently a primary direct driver of deforestation.

I am, however, aware that Bolsonaro has made some horrible policy decisions to expand and ramp up this sort of intensive and destructive agriculture.

Rudorff et al. (2010) found that sugarcane expands almost exclusively over pasture land and annual agricultural crops in the state of São Paulo. Some researchers, however, have theorized that cattle pastures are displaced by mechanized farming and, as a result, are reconstituted in distant regions on forest frontiers


https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... Uz_wZC7D28

Some broad strokes.

People have been deforesting the Earth for thousands of years, primarily to clear land for crops or livestock. Although tropical forests are largely confined to developing countries, they aren’t just meeting local or national needs; economic globalization means that the needs and wants of the global population are bearing down on them as well. Direct causes of deforestation are agricultural expansion, wood extraction (e.g., logging or wood harvest for domestic fuel or charcoal), and infrastructure expansion such as road building and urbanization. Rarely is there a single direct cause for deforestation. Most often, multiple processes work simultaneously or sequentially to cause deforestation.

The single biggest direct cause of tropical deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, mostly for subsistence, which is growing crops or raising livestock to meet daily needs. The conversion to agricultural land usually results from multiple direct factors. For example, countries build roads into remote areas to improve overland transportation of goods. The road development itself causes a limited amount of deforestation. But roads also provide entry to previously inaccessible—and often unclaimed—land. Logging, both legal and illegal, often follows road expansion (and in some cases is the reason for the road expansion). When loggers have harvested an area’s valuable timber, they move on. The roads and the logged areas become a magnet for settlers—farmers and ranchers who slash and burn the remaining forest for cropland or cattle pasture, completing the deforestation chain that began with road building. In other cases, forests that have been degraded by logging become fire-prone and are eventually deforested by repeated accidental fires from adjacent farms or pastures.

Although subsistence activities have dominated agriculture-driven deforestation in the tropics to date, large-scale commercial activities are playing an increasingly significant role. In the Amazon, industrial-scale cattle ranching and soybean production for world markets are increasingly important causes of deforestation, and in Indonesia, the conversion of tropical forest to commercial palm tree plantations to produce bio-fuels for export is a major cause of deforestation on Borneo and Sumatra.


Underlying Causes

Although poverty is often cited as the underlying cause of tropical deforestation, analyses of multiple scientific studies indicate that that explanation is an oversimplification. Poverty does drive people to migrate to forest frontiers, where they engage in slash and burn forest clearing for subsistence. But rarely does one factor alone bear the sole responsibility for tropical deforestation.

State policies to encourage economic development, such as road and railway expansion projects, have caused significant, unintentional deforestation in the Amazon and Central America. Agricultural subsidies and tax breaks, as well as timber concessions, have encouraged forest clearing as well. Global economic factors such as a country’s foreign debt, expanding global markets for rainforest timber and pulpwood, or low domestic costs of land, labor, and fuel can encourage deforestation over more sustainable land use.

Access to technology may either enhance or diminish deforestation. The availability of technologies that allow “industrial-scale” agriculture can spur rapid forest clearing, while inefficient technology in the logging industry increases collateral damage in surrounding forests, making subsequent deforestation more likely. Underlying factors are rarely isolated; instead, multiple global and local factors exert synergistic influences on tropical deforestation in different geographic locations.
Rates of Tropical Deforestation

Several international groups produce routine estimates of tropical deforestation, most notably the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which has been producing a global forest resources assessment every five to ten years since the late 1940s. The FAO report is based on statistics provided by countries themselves, and because the ability of countries to accurately assess their forest resources varies depending on their financial, technological, and institutional resources, the estimates for some countries are likely more accurate then others. Many countries use satellite imagery as the basis for their assessments, and a few research teams have used satellite data as the basis for worldwide estimates of tropical deforestation in the 1980s and 1990s.

Some scientists and conservationists argue that the FAO provides too conservative an estimate of rates of deforestation because they consider any area larger than one hectare (0.01 square miles) with a minimum tree cover of 10 percent to be forested. This generous definition of “forest” means that a significant amount of degradation can occur before the FAO categorizes an area as deforested. On the other hand, some satellite-based studies indicate deforestation rates are lower than even the FAO reports suggest. In the FAO’s most recent forest assessment report, published in 2005, the organization itself revised downward the deforestation rates for the 1990s that it reported in 2001. Despite revisions and discrepancies, the FAO assessment is the most comprehensive, longest-term, and widely used metric of global forest resources.


In addition to local factors, international trends drive deforestation. The expansion of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia is a response to high petroleum prices and, ironically, to an increasing global demand for bio-fuels perceived to be “green.” (Photograph ©2006 Badly Drawn Dad.)
Graph of tropical forest loss by area deforested


The FAO report does not compile statistics for tropical forest regions as a whole, but the country-by-country and regional-scale statistics provide a grim picture. The scope and impact of deforestation can be viewed in different ways. One is in absolute numbers: total area of forest cleared over a certain period. By that metric, all three major tropical forest areas, including South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, are represented near the top of the list. Brazil led the world in terms of total deforested area between 1990 and 2005. The country lost 42,330,000 hectares (163,436 square miles) of forest, roughly the size of California. Rounding out the top five tropical countries with the greatest total area of deforestation were Indonesia, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Although all major tropical forest sub-regions (coded by color) are represented in a list of the top 20 countries that cleared the largest percentage of their forests between 1990 and 2005, African countries (blue bars) dominate, beginning with Comoros, a small island nation north of Madagascar. (Graphic by Robert Simmon, based on data provided by individual countries to the U.N. Foreign Agricultural Organization for the Global Forest Resources Assessment Report 2005.)


Another way to look at deforestation is in terms of the percent of a country’s forest that was cleared over time. By this metric, the island nation of Comoros (north of Madagascar) fared the worst, clearing nearly 60 percent of its forests between 1990 and 2005. Landlocked Burundi in central Africa was second, clearing 47 percent of its forests. The other top five countries that cleared large percentages of their forests were Togo, in West Africa (44 percent); Honduras (37 percent); and Mauritania (36 percent). Thirteen other tropical countries or island territories cleared 20 percent or more of their forests between 1990-2005.

back NASA Tropical Deforestation Research
back Climate Impacts




https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/featu ... pdate3.php
Last edited by Ian C. Kuzushi on Wed May 11, 2022 5:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: beef consumption threatening rainforest

Postby Ian C. Kuzushi on Wed May 11, 2022 7:49 pm

Look, the more I read the science and projections, the harder it is to be optimistic. But, the alternative is worse.

There is a chance that Lula could win against Jair, and that he would take major policy action to reverse the asinine trends of the current protofascist regime. There is no predicting the future. But, we must take steps to shape it. For that reason, Devlin's post was an important one. His tense was not consistent throughout his post, so I simply sought to bring clarity. Also, while the SD link is not saying anything completely crazy, it is all complete speculation in regards to whether sugar cane will or will not require deforestation. It makes the argument that this will happen, but that hasn't been the case in the past, so we will have to see. Really, there is no need to get hyperfocused on one specific crop, even though the processing of cane is more deleterious. The fact is, industrial ag of all sorts is a major problem in the rainforests, as is cattle production.

It sure would be nice to have a popular revolt against Bolsonaro and to see some progressive, Gaia-loving policy restored and expanded. For the love of Pachamama, it would be nice to get some good news!
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