Saturday, January 31, 2009

No Need To Save The Rainforest

It is saving itself, according to this New York Times article about rainforest regrowth.

Two things.

One, it never ceases to amaze me that these gonzo-environmentalists believe that if you cut down a tree, nothing will ever grow back. Nonsense.

Two, while overall I think this article good, I do quibble with the premise "primeval rainforest" since the native South Americans like the Maya and the Incas and the Aztecs pretty much chopped down HUGE swathes of the rainforest when they built their astonishing civilizations. The current rainforest is secondary growth and what is growing back now is tertiary.

So the handwringing over whether the "new" rainforest is any "good" seems pretty petty and absurd and quite frankly, simply gonzo-environmentalists trying to protect their staked out claims.

Otherwise, a surprisingly good article from the NYT.

2 comments:

  1. Its quite necessary that rain forest should be considered. According to recent scientific developments, the Amazon rainforest
    is much more fragile than previous research has indicated.

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  2. Stewardship.

    So many environmental solutions assume man is nothing but a destructive force. Indeed, if you look at some of the founding documents of large, well-funded environmental groups like the Sierra Club, you will find they support eugenic-like measures for populuation control and reduction.

    My point is that we are beaten with this stick by the gonzo environmentalists and never get a chance to consider stewardship solutions to protecting the rainforest while enjoying its resources.

    A well-managed resource like the rainforest or a fertile plain can be productive while maintaining a certain postive level of grown and "pristine-ness".

    But environmentalists have other agendas and, in my opinion, their concern with the rainforest has less to do with maintaining plant life as it does reducing human life by not allowing the inhabitants of the rainforest to either exploit the rainforest or enjoy the same benefits of modern life (like clean water and electricity) as those environmentalists do.

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