I was looking through some old vacation pictures and came across this one. It sure gives a perspective on how big these trees are.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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This is such a sad picture. Imagine the life that tree could have facilitated and harbored over its lifetime. We should all be replanting natives as fast as we possibly can.
The cool part about humanity is we could do it again. We made the Amazon rainforest by abandoning millions of acres of farmland and letting it grow over into a rainforest. We didn't do it on purpose, but now that we understand what happened, we totally could. All it requires is multigenerational discipline. So it might as well be a dream lmao
Go back over the part where "We made the amazon rainforest" for me?
Alright, so before the whites showed up, there were massive civilizations living where the Amazon rainforest is today. I'm talking cities of hundreds of thousands of people numbering in the dozens. A massive population center. All those people needed food, and for the most part, they farmed. A lot of ice cream bean trees, for example. They also used controlled burning to build up soil so good we still can't replicate it perfectly today (check out terra prima). At or around the time the white devils first showed up, these population centers had already been largely abandoned due to social upheaval and/or disease. We're talking within a generation or three. By the time more white devils showed up with their book burnings and God bothering, those population centers had already become myth. Took the dumb whites another couple hundred years to figure out that the city of gold wasn't literally made of gold, but rather the massive cities surrounded by cops ready for harvest. We're juuuust now finding them using LIDAR to scan what is now rainforest floor.
Wait, did I miss something? When was the Amazon rainforest ever farmland during the lifetime of humanity?
Central, north, and south America have been home to humanity for tens of thousands of years. Did you think they all just lived in mud huts and worshiped the sun?
The Amazon rainforest is less than 1000 years old. We know that because we can find 1000 year old human ruins built UNDER the rainforest. Did you think the first settlers to reach south America just lied about the cities and people's they found?
(Edit: actually 2k years back is the start of the forest. It really took off after people left and the farmland went wild)
Sorry, but that's just wrong. The Amazon rainforest is tens of millions of years old. Just think about the incredible amount of biodiversity, it could never develop in just 1000 years.
If I'm wrong, please show me studies, but this doesn't pass the basic logic check.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amazon-rainforest-is-much-younger-than-commonly-believed/
You can think what you want but the science is there. People took grasslands and farmed them for generations, then died off and the forests took over. 1-2k years is nothing when it comes to geologic time.
This is a single study, and it states that "that perhaps a fifth of the Amazon basin, in the south, may have been savannah until the shift, with forests covering the rest". So it's not that the forest was all farmland, there was farmland close to the forest and it grew to cover it. This is very different from what you're claiming.
And again, it's not possible for such biodiversity to develop in such a short amount of time.
My claim is that humanity made the Amazon rainforest what it is today. I stand by that, and my claim grows stronger with each new ancient city discovered under the trees.
Yeah, I disagree. We didn't play an active part in doing this, we played a passive one by not fucking it up. I'm also not responsible for a mountain just because I don't dig it up.
Even if you were right, your own study says that we'd at most be responsible for 1/5th.