There are not enough tears to fix this.

The Amazon.

I wanted to go there before it was gone. I wanted to stand in the lungs of the planet, and in the most biodiverse place on the planet. (The Amazon produces 20% of the world's oxygen. That's why they call it the 'lungs of the earth'.) When I got there, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I was already too late. Peru is working really hard to preserve the Amazon, but it is far from pristine.

In the news today, the BBC reports that the Amazon is disappearing faster than last year. After three years of decreasing deforestation, at least 750 square kilometers* were lost last month. The is more than three times as fast as last year (last year 2.7% of Brazil's portion of the rain forest was lost). 20% of the rainforest is already gone.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, so what? Can't we just plant it back again? I mean it's the RAINFOREST, right? It will grow back! But look at this picture:




The wealth of the rainforest is the trees, not the land. The land is poor. Hardly any organic material. Mostly clay. Mostly, it washes away. In this second picture, you can SEE the erosion happening. Where the leaves have fallen onto the red clay soil, it is protected from washing away in the eternal rain. But in between the leaves, the soil is washing down to the river. It doesn't belong there, and creates problems far out to sea. Look at this picture, from satellite images via googlemaps:


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See that yellow? All that yellow, at the mouth of the Amazon? That's the soil that supports the trees that support the oxygen level of the atmosphere that supports you. It's un-recoverable on human time scales. It has now been washed out to sea.

Why is this happening? It's thought that it's because food prices are rising. And the rising demand for cheap soy and beef is convincing farmers and ranchers to raze trees.

So, I wondered. Soy and beef for whom? For Brazilians? Or for me? Naturally, I dread hearing that it's because of me.

So I looked up Brazilian exports. Brazil is the world's leading exporter of sugar, coffee, beef and orange juice. Soybeans are the fastest-growing export, and mostly go to China. The top ten countries buying exports from Brazil?

US: 18.9%
Argentina: 8.4%
China: 5.7%
Netherlands: 4.5%
Germany: 4.2%
Mexico: 3.5%
Chile: 3.1%
Japan: 3.0%
Italy: 2.7%
Russia: 2.5%

Are you eating Amazon rain forest beef? You can't know until tomorrow. WHAT? you say? Well, Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) has not yet been implemented, even though it was approved by Congress in 2002. Due to food industry lobbying, implementation has been delayed. It is finally supposed to go into effect tomorrow. (Literally---September 30th, 2008!) Meat sold in supermarkets WILL be labeled, but not meat in butcher shops. That's usually ok, since you can ask the butcher at Snider's where the beef came from, and there's some reason to think that this person knows what they are talking about and will tell the truth.

COOL labeling is not required in restaurants. Snopes tells me that McDonald's and Burger King use beef imported from Australia and New Zealand, but not South America. (I remember a big flak about this when I was in high school. I seem to remember that at that time, these companies were importing beef raised on rain forest land. This practice seems to have stopped. Hooray for the big flak! Kind of. I still can't get over the fact that meat comes all the way from N.Z. to make a Big Mac, of all things.)

So I am of two minds about that. The beef is probably not coming here. While this is a rare occasion of us not being responsible for messing something up completely (hooray!), at the same time, if we are not responsible, we can't fix it (boo!).