What human activities have caused destruction of the Amazon rainforest?

Answer 1

Chopping down trees, hunting animals, and more!

Pollution, mining, farming, and logging (cutting down trees) have all helped to cause the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

The Amazon Rainforest has been subject to widespread deforestation over a prolonged period of time and it is important to recognize that this process is not one which simply mirrors modern capitalist use of the forest resource - although this is an extremely important aspect of Amazonian deforestation.

Subsistence agriculture is attributable to 33% of deforestation in the Amazon through a process of "slash-and-burn" agriculture. This process is one which has traditionally been used by those indigenous peoples of the region and can operate in equilibrium with a sparsely populated rainforest biome which suffers extremely low exploitation. This process sees land which has been burned take a period of 20-100 years to recover and therefore, alongside rising population in indigenous tribes, agricultural activities have seen increased deforestation.

After the 1970's oil crisis nation states such as Brazil saw their loans default, and were left in a position of debt to the Global North. This and a desire to remove dependence of foreign energy resources saw the Brazilian government extend its reach into the Amazon Rainforest to develop HEP (Hydro-Electic Power) stations while also converting large tracts of land into agricultural areas in order to grow export goods for the world market. These goods include (primarily) free range beef, soya, and oil palm, among others and have caused extremely large scale deforestation.

The Amazon rainforest is also subject to private activities of logging and oil drilling. These practices have seen private companies, often outside of the rule of law, exploit the forest for primary resources. These activities are facilitated by national projects of road development, indeed 80% of deforestation occurs within 50km of roads within this forest, without which the forest would remain inaccessible to all private entities.

It is important to recognise therefore that human activities are multifaceted and operate at a micro scale controlled and monitered in their nature and scope by macro scale processes (such as BsE in Europe calling for increased soya production to feed cattle and thus increasing deforestation to grow this resource). Concurrently the forest is destroyed by small scale agriculture though one must consider that demographic processes are not the main cause of deforestation and that it is the interests of large scale private companies that have caused the greatest degree of deforestation.

Contemporary destruction of the Amazon Rainforest will be led by the changes in regional and global climate. The projections for, particularly the South East of the forest, suggest that there could be anywhere up to a 20% reduction in precipitation by 2050. This figure may be magnified by the internal processes of the rainforest which see around 50% of rainfall recycled in a fully operational pristine forest - deforestation of this area may see a switch to another stable state in which the region becomes a Savannah biome causing widespread extinctions. To avoid this process it has been argued that around 70% of the original habitat rainforest biomes must be retained intact.