ally lantz
AVID TRAIL RUNNER
stories from
the ground
Climate change is a vast phenomenon that can feel too complex for any one person to truly understand. Part of the difficulty is that almost every aspect of it is connected through intricate feedback loops and cycles which impact each other despite showing their effects in very different ways. Air pollution is related to biodiversity loss, which is related to soil health, which is related to wildfires and so on. But exactly how specific negative environmental actions like deforestation affect other aspects of climate change can sometimes be blurry.
As modern lifestyles drive us towards further atomisation and introspection, it is easy not to notice that life on earth is a complex web, where living and non-living things affect each other constantly. When a section of forest is destroyed it affects the animals and ecosystems in that area but it also goes far beyond that.
deforestation and displacement
Deforestation’s effects reach far beyond the damage to ecosystems and animals. Deforestation forces people from their homes whilst those who depend on forests to continue their livelihoods lose everything. Many are pushed into a world they are not used to living in, often forced not into luxurious condos in cities but shantytowns that are decidedly less safe than the ones they know. Outside of the forest, many still rely on the things it provides, which again has massive, knock-on effects that most of us could never have predicted.
In Uganda, families often rely on young girls to carry firewood to their families for fuel. As deforestation continues its march into the country, they have to travel further and further away, creating a knock-on effect that severely impacts their educations and life possibilities. Sanga Moses, a young Ugandan entrepreneur, was inspired to create an eco-friendly cooking fuel after watching his sister struggle to collect firewood from ever more distant places. “When my sister saw me, she started crying and told me she was tired of missing school to gather firewood,” he says. “This troubled me so much because I was paying school fees for my sister and wanted her to get an education.”
Despite Sanga’s brilliant work, relying on scientific solutions like these amounts to the naive belief that humanity will invent its way out of the climate crisis. The fact is that the crisis exists because human systems, which operate on a scale far too large to be repaired by singular inventions, continue to pollute and destroy the earth. So whilst these innovative solutions can solve particular problems, they only stop the effects of deforestation and do little to address the extractivist mindset that has led humanity into this situation: that the earth and everything on it is just one big, limitless resource.
breathing in deforestation
Most deforestation is carried out using a tool that brings further pollution into the world: fire. Forest clearing is most often done through fire, which is chosen for its speed and ease, in addition to the added short term benefits that charcoal from the slash and burn method has on soil health. The fires in the Amazon were not acts of God: many were intentionally set by farmers eager to clear more land.
As of August 2019, more than 80,000 fires burned there, releasing hundreds of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere along with a host of other polluting particles. And whilst some businesses might adopt greenwashing PR strategies that imply that replanting trees offers the same carbon capture rate as the ones they have burnt, it is important to note that young trees absorb only 26% of the carbon that 10 year old trees do — and that doesn’t even include all the stored carbon that is released into the atmosphere on combustion.
The fires caused health problems locally and exacerbated climate change all across the world. 2,195 hospitalisations due to respiratory illness in Brazil have been attributed to these fires. Indigenous populations were particularly impacted by the ripple effects of the fires as a lack of safe water sources, minimal government policy on safe waste disposal, no food safety standards and chronic malnutrition caused 50 deaths per 1000 people in the indigenous population in 2019.
Humanrightswatch details the story of the municipal health secretary in Lábrea. “I suffer greatly myself. […] I can barely speak, and my throat and eyes dry up,” she said. “The demand in health care increases by 30 percent during the fire season, with a 20 percent increase in the purchase of medicine, equipment and inhalers.” She mentions an increase in children and older people requiring ambulances, with many relapses, as they continue to “feel the damaging effects of the fires, the dust, the smoke, the soot [and] they end up returning … [in some cases] once a week.”
