South American Forest Fires - The lie within a lie.

[C-Mag]

Damn...……… Torched.

[Speaker to Animals]

Thing is, those tribes do slash and burn but it's not to enrich the soil.
They use the land for a couple of years and then repeat the process on the adjoining bit of forest. They just keep going in a straight line and never go back. On a small scale it works, there's always a new bit of forest to move on to and the clearing behind you has as long as it needs to recover. On a large scale, you eventually run out of forest and then you run out of soil. The end game is a desert.

Check this out:


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

Hmm. That's interesting. Thanks for posting.
Seems like many solutions to today's problems may lie in the rainforests. I heard on the radio today that around 25% of medicines and up to 70 % of cancer medicines were originally found in tropical rainforests.

The type of burning going on today is not producing low-temperature, low oxygen charcoal though. The article suggests that high temp, high oxygen burning may actually deplete the soil rather than replenish it.

Well worth more study into it, claims of adding 1cm of soil per year is remarkable if true.

I wonder if the pottery is from ancient charcoal burning techniques. Charcoal made for use in smelting was produced by burning wood sealed in clay burners (clay-lined holes in the ground with small air vents) in order to control the amount of oxygen as it slowly smouldered.

If we can figure out what those little rainforest geniuses did, we could create self-regenerating soil anywhere..


But.. yeah.. it says what people are doing today is the typical shitty slash and burn agriculture. Which means they have to keep burning and destroying more rainforest.

Whatever that mysterious civilization did in there before the European diseases wiped them out.. that's some kind of super biochar.