Brazilian here. I'm 100% for combating and arresting illegal miners, loggers and farmers, but I also know how big the rainforest is, how long the borders are, and how little personnel there is to do the work. Most people don't have a sense of how vast that region is: the brazilian part of the Amazon rainforest is about half the area of the U.S. Now look up how many soldiers and federal police officers are working there. It's daunting, feels like the drug war, only fifty times worse, because there's no solution anywhere close to something like legalization.
At least with mining and logging it leaves evidence in aerial imagery, unlike a clandestine lab. Maybe one day the amazon can be automatically patrolled by drones that mark targets for these smaller squads.
> patrolled by drones that mark targets for these smaller squads.
Surely it could be scaled better with satellite imagery? Assuming it can be updated "reasonably frequently". I imagine drones would run into maintenance problems, especially in such "remote" regions.
Also a brazilian. I don't really care about it. I'd rather they used that vast amount of land for something that's more economically relevant. If you told me I could push a button to get state of the art semiconductor factories but the side effect was the destruction of the amazon... I wouldn't even think twice.
And also ensure they can continue their journey to having 1TB large game assets, as suddenly hundreds of 3D modellers need to create thousands of new foliage models each.
Creating realistic looking trees is one area that has now been almost entirely automated with tooling - there are some absolutely incredible tools for generating whatever kind of tree you want in any number of permutations. So really this would be more like 2-3 people just in charge of verifying the output and making sure it's stylistically consistent.
As someone who went through grade-school in the 90s, with all of our "Save the Rainforest" campaigns, all I can think is: a fat lot of good that "awareness" did...
But how would we know though right? I mean without having an A/B comparison.
Sure it didn't stop the destruction, but I don't think that was ever in the cards. But it might have helped by some amount even if small. 1%? 2%? 6%?
If it reduced destruction by 2%, would that have made the campaign worth it?
I think there's a chance it did do some good in that it was in enough awareness to end up somewhere on a foreign policy agenda higher than it might have otherwise been, and thus policies might have been negotiated in trade agreements, treaties, company due diligence source tracing, etc.
In my grade school we were asked to donate money to buy part of the rainforest in order to stop it from being cut down.
I thought this was a brilliant idea, and it wasn't until the first time I visited Brazil (which is, somehow, 20 years ago now) that I learned that it wasn't really helping at all. In part, it's not that easy to "buy part of the rainforest". But more importantly (as the article describes), small-scale miners and loggers don't usually respect those property claims (or designations of areas as protected parkland).
The last few Call of Duty games has featured Mexico and involves raining fire down on forested environments with an AC-130 gunship. So maybe not the best example of environmental protection.
The French do the same against illegal gold miners in French Guiana Amazon. They have approximately 1,000 soldiers compared to up to 9,000 illegal prospectors. I can't imagine how a single unit will be capable to curb anything when you look at the size of Brazil's Amazon.
Wireless sensors, synthetic aperatire radar, aerial surveillance all are things that exist. These things have existed since Vietnam and are significantly better now than they were then. The record for Lorawan sensor mad range was ~1,300 km / 830ish miles. You could partition the rainforest into grids and use these sorts of sensors if you wanted to be excessively thorough. Not easy or cheap, but very doable with today’s technology and a bit of customization.
Note: my grandfather invented some of the rf sensor technology designed to be airdropped by the US military over the forests of Vietnam for this exact thing. It worked well for what it was designed for.
The larger prospectors will be tied to hard to move assets (cyanide leach pools, crushers, screens) in semi cleared areas near rivers. The unit will have helicopeters and possible access to sat imagery.
The plan would be to gather intel, map, and move through, one group at a time with enough soldiers (50 to 100) to deal with smaller unmiliterised enclaves.
Probably true - but having a great many soldiers in an area where there are an extremely isolated people such as the "uncontacted" Yanomami also poses its own risks. If they're focusing on the most sensitive areas with highly trained personnel and making use of the impressive knowledge and expertise in Brazil's Indian affairs department, FUNAI, much could be achieved. The situation in French Guiana is quite different, with perhaps only small numbers of Wayãpi living in isolation.
Brazil is rolling back the free-for-all that was established under Bolsonaro, but if they're handling it delicately, that's likely good news.
They should have a lot more troops involved, for sure, but GEF can be very efficient by leveraging surveillance tech.
Brazil deployed SIVAM [1] about 20 years ago. At the time it was a state-of-the-art radar surveillance system. Not sure how they kept up with tech advances, but it still gives a significant edge to the GEF unit.
It seems like the largest cause of deforestation of the rainforest is farming(1). Prevention of illegal destruction is probably a good idea, but if this is to replace it by its legal counterpart...
These communities are insular and lawless, not to mention hours away from any significantly sized town. They know who belongs there and who doesn't.
The spy would have to be internal people who are turned, which is not easy either because these folks are not educated, and would have trouble hiding their new income or acting within the confines of a information providing program.
Not impossible, but unfortunately, our government doesn't have the resources.
Regarding drones, the area is impossibly large. If we had enough cash, live satellite monitoring and deployed army stations for every zone would be the ideal solution.
"live satellite monitoring" are you talking about launching a geosynchronous spy-satellite as well as the analysis, communications and command structure to make use of the satellite information? Along with stationing thousands of troops deep in the jungle with no existing supporting infrastructure? And that being cheaper than deploying some loitering and FPS suicide drones? You could probably hike out with a "solar birdhouse" of FPS drones, attach it to a tree and deploy an FPS drone as needed while running 24/7 zones of loitering drone surveillance for very cheap.
The real issue would be distinguishing between "illegal and prohibited" and "illegal but allowed" and "not illegal" activities in these communities since they rely so deeply on their environments for everything.
And you think there's phone signal on the middle of the jungle? Sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest asphalt road?
Check google maps and see how you'd get to and from here (notice, getting up here would be the "easy" part of the journey - there's even "street view" https://maps.app.goo.gl/2XEL3J3aJWoLEGY58 )
> Unlikely, given that isn't even a partner in Brazil yet
The article mentions thrice the use of Starlink by the miners:
> Cabral said; they must have been warned that the G.E.F. was coming. He pointed to a white rectangular antenna on a tall pole in the center of the camp and said, “Starlink”—Elon Musk’s portable satellite-communications system.
> “Wherever the miners have Starlink, we’re at a real disadvantage,” Finger told me. “They can warn each other there is a raid going on in the territory, and they can organize their work better.”
> The new farm had a Starlink connection, and, as the rains abated, a pilot said that he was sure the farm manager would warn the miners that we were coming.
Gold, weapons, heavy ammunition and Starlink antennas have become "the new normal" in seizures by Brazilian security forces in illegal mining areas, according to an Ibama spokesperson, told BBC News Brasil.
>It can’t be hard to get a labourer on site with a cellphone or even just a tracker no?
And then do what with it? I live in an EU country where illegal timber exploitation is rife, and there's not much a lone person with a drone can do.
A lot of these areas are relatively remote and the underfunded police and rangers are usually quite far away and slow to show up, even when they're not paid by the timber mafia to look the other way. And by the time authorities do show up, the mobsters have been most likely tipped off and cleared the area.
And if you're an average joe trying to directly interfere you're putting your life in danger since you're standing in the way of a multi million euro industry and there's camera footage of volunteer forest watchers being assaulted by timer mobsters on quad bikes wearing balaklavas.
If this is happening in the EU I can't imagine what it's like in other places.
Death squads were vigilante self-organizing groups of cops and sometimes their friends which would beat and murder "bad people". I don't think they exist in significant numbers today but in the past those groups existed in the open.
"In May 2022, after shaking hands with then-president Jair Bolsonaro at a luxury resort in the interior of São Paulo, the businessman (Elon Musk) said he was "super excited for the launch of Starlink for 19 thousand disconnected schools in rural areas and environmental monitoring of the Amazon. .. The promise never came to fruition, according to the Ministry of Education and state secretariats."
It may not be quite that simple. Moving an army is no small feat, the logistics required is complicated and could be miserable to try to manage in the Amazon.
If they did manage to get a large enough military force in to catch most of the illegal miners, how much damage would be done to the Amazon just by the army getting in there?
The article has multiple instances of umlauts over the letter o. The first one I saw, figured it was a typo. But several more appeared. Strange, I wonder why?
Not an umlaut, a diaeresis - it shows that the letter has its own sound (unlike the word "coop", for example).
You'd generally use it for proper nouns (like Brontë or Boötes) and rare loanwords - it doesn't seem very useful for common dictionary words, since anyone who can understand the word itself probably knows how to pronounce it.
Actually, given English's crazy spelling, it's pretty useful in English.
There was a restaurant in my town -- the sign is still up but it's closed -- called "Cooper's Coop". For a while after they put their sign up I thought it was a cooperative/coöperative. If there'd been a diaresis I would have known it was the chicken coop sort of coop they had in mind.
For non-native English speakers, it's something like
/ku:p/ for chickens
/'koʊ.ɑp/ for cooperatives
People sometimes spell the latter "co-op" (as an alternative to the New Yorker's "coöp") to make clear that it's two syllables. There's also a college merchandise shop in Cambridge, MA, called The Coop that seems to encourage people to use the chicken-oriented pronunciation as a joke.
It's a great tool for discussing sales of the eggs from your coop at the coöp. But it nearly disappeared once. https://archive.is/3Oz0F
"""
We do change our style from time to time. My predecessor (and the former keeper of the comma shaker) told me that she used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
"""
I am grateful it persists.
As someone learning Dutch, it is VERY helpful in words like zeeën - ( zee-en - seas). Much easier to know what it is vs. zeeen. I hope it is similarly helpful for foreigners learning English.
Sibling comments cover the diaeresis. Its use is extremely inconsistent in English.
I can't say I've ever seen it used for co-ordinate or co-operate. Usually these are typed with the hyphen or nothing.
But, it's more common on some words than others - Noël, aïoli, and naïve come to mind. None would ever appear with a hyphen (at least in my experience).
And zoölogical and reëlect just look WRONG to me. I don't think you'd ever use a hyphen with zoological, but might (or might not) with re-elect.
All three of those were borrowed from French, which uses the diaeresis, so this is "just" keeping the original French spelling.
> I don't think you'd ever use a hyphen with zoological, but might (or might not) with re-elect.
The hyphen only works with words where the vowels came together as a result of compounding (here, adding a prefix like re- or co- to the beginning of another word that already starts with a vowel).
At least in Noël and naïve, the vowels came together because French lost a <t> that was present in Latin between two vowels -- interestingly in both cases here a word related to "birth" (natalis and nativus).
NGO's come and claim resources on the land to mine what is rightfully Brazil's. Happening for a long time now and Lula has the pipeline open again for anyone to come in and get a piece and loot. Also, author left out how Lula was in jail for corruption before he became pres again.
"in jail for corruption" Can you please explain to our global audience what crime he committed to be jailed for corruption?!
Can you also explain why the judge who sentenced him manipulated the law to judge a case that was completely out of his jurisdiction? Also, that Lula was the number one candidate in pools before he was jailed? And that this same judge went to become a minister of the candidate he helped elect by getting Lula out of the run?
>Also, author left out how Lula was in jail for corruption before he became pres again.
You left out a few things, like the corrupt judge that sentenced Lula during an election where he was the absolute favourite, and months later was made minister by the genocidal president he helped elect.
Thankfully a modicum of sanity is being restored and the corrupt judge is now being investigated.
Bullshit. Moro vice is vanity not corruption. Lula was freed not because he is innocent but because the mafia judges nullified the process. Crime took a significant hit when Moro was minister of justice, reduction in homicides, effective border control. No wonder that criminals and their leftists supporters hate him. The current government is incapable of fighting crime and it is thriving to the dismay of millions of daily victims. I'm ashamed of being Brazilian because of people like you.
You are factually wrong. The homicide rate is still declining as of 2023. Also worth it to note that the military dictatorship was responsible for the explosion in urban crime and violence in the 70s and 80s, which persists to this day.
The feeling of shame is mutual and I'll add disgust. I decided to leave Brazil after Bolsonaro was elected and I heard gunshots and death calls from neighbors, savages like yourself.
The things that made the world shocked and disgusted about Bolsonaro - the promotion of violence, the ties with the milícias (mafia), the contempt with human life and dignity, the hate of the natural environment - foreigners did not understand that those were exactly the things his supporters, like you probably are, loved about him.
Bolsonaro routinely said things like "we should have murdered 30,000 people (during the dictatorship)". Those statements don't lose votes, they gain votes from an appalling, bloodthirsty, evil minority like the commentor above.
> The feeling of shame is mutual and I'll add disgust. I decided to leave Brazil after Bolsonaro was elected and I heard gunshots and death calls from neighbors, savages like yourself.
You're wrongly assuming I'm a Bolsonaro supporter because in your world anyone that criticizes your idol must be a Bolsonaro supporter and evil. The truth is that both Lula and Bolsonaro are evil beyond doubt but most of their supporters are victims of polarization and disinformation rather than bad persons.
Dude, Brazil was always a savage place. Obviously it's not a good thing but you're very privileged if this is the worst you have faced and you were able to leave the country. The reality is that most Brazilian face worse and can only dream of emigrating.
> Bolsonaro routinely said things like "we should have murdered 30,000 people (during the dictatorship)". Those statements don't lose votes, they gain votes from an appalling, bloodthirsty, evil minority like the commentor above.
What do you expect from a population heavily traumatized by crime and violence where yearly homicides far exceed 30K?
I'm more worried about a minority in Brazil which openly support a socialist revolution with mass executions and all. I'm worried about seemingly educated individuals supporting a corrupt president that is friends with dictators and evil regimes like Putin, Maduro, al-Assad, Gaddafi, Xi, Iran, Hamas.
> You are factually wrong. The homicide rate is still declining as of 2023.
I'm not. In 2018 and 2019 when Moro was Minister of Justice we saw unprecedented 2-digits decline in homicide rate. In 2020 after he was fired homicide rate increased. Further declines were timid in comparison and crime is thriving despite homicides falling because the current system rewards crime and the current government doesn't care about crime.
> Also worth it to note that the military dictatorship was responsible for the explosion in urban crime and violence in the 70s and 80s, which persists to this day.
Moro anti-crime measures weren't by no optic authoritarian. I don't see how those events can be relevant to this discussion besides you wanting to make false implications.
