Life: watching the world around me, sadness

New satellite imaging reveals that the destruction to rainforests in the Amazon is much worse than previously known. (links 1, 2, 3)The cause? Beef (links 1, 2 (pdf.), 3). Beef and (mostly) illegal harvest of prized Amazonian hardwoods and other trees (links 1, 2). Who buys it? Not Brazilian farmers and ranchers. Americans, Europeans, and other affluent folks like you and me.

Beef: It’s cheaper to cut down an acre of rainforest, plant grass, raise a cow, kill and ‘process’ it, and ship it to the US or Europe than it is to buy locally raised beef. That is amazing and sad. That is wasteful and stupid.

Wood products are the same. Demand and the high prices and regulations amongst the affluent nations and cheap labor and plentiful resources in poorer nations drives the flow of products. It might be justifiable if it weren’t for our meddling in their political affairs and replacing their grower’s co-ops and people’s markets with Starbucks and McDonalds.

It is sad, the amount of waste involved. When so many go without, so many die due to lack of food. We can ship beef from Amazonian forests to New York City and Paris, but we can’t get a meal to the starving children in Rio de Janeiro. But it is everywhere… overwhelming. I just try to do what I can to reduce my own consumption: no meat, no new furniture, a little cut back here, a little cut back there.

It’s like we’re all on a very large boat going in the wrong direction: if each of us puts out an oar to turn the ship, and gets some people around us to do likewise, then slowly but surely we’ll get headed the right way. Meanwhile, we all have lives to live, and live them we must. And live them well we shall, all the while putting out our oar when we see things headed in the wrong direction.