The great rapist lie: I’ll put it in a little bit if it hurts I’ll take it out
Now I am surrounded by forest, I see flames as the death of trees and all the living creatures that depend on them.
Source: Witness to Paradise Lost: My Year in the Dying Amazon – Mother Jones
In more and more of the country Amazon acts like an employer in a company town, sucking up whole communities and shaping public goods and services to fit its profit-making needs.
Source: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
“Amazon Empire” is a compelling, succinct summary of what enormous success means in the capitalist landscape as we currently know it, one that clarifies our essential part in that success and the frightening fact that there is no way to truly opt out of feeding its bottom line without completely going off the grid. You can decide not to order any products from Amazon or subscribe to any of its services, yet if you’re reading this you’re probably utilizing in some aspect of the Internet’s infrastructure that feeds back into Amazon.
Reducing wildfires requires going beyond addressing the ignition sources and fighting the flames themselves, and also encouraging actions that limit forest flammability. Tackling deforestation remains key as it exposes forest edges to the hotter and drier microclimate of agricultural land, and contributes to regional reductions in rainfall.
Selective logging also plays a key role in making tropical forests more flammable. Walking in a selectively logged forest in the dry season, you feel the sun’s heat directly on your face and the leaf litter crackles and crunches underfoot. In contrast, unlogged primary forests are a shadier world where the leaf litter remains moist. Fire prevention needs to be a key condition of long-term forest stewardship. This will only work if widespread illegal logging is effectively controlled, as cheaper timber undermines the viability of best-practice forest management.
Finally, climate change itself is making dry seasons longer and forests more flammable. Increased temperatures are also resulting in more frequent tropical forest fires in non-drought years. And climate change may also be driving the increasing frequency and intensity of climate anomalies, such as El Niño events that affect fire season intensity across Amazonia.
Addressing these challenges requires integrated national and global actions, collaboration between scientists and policy makers, and long-term funding – approaches that the current Brazilian administration seems intent on destroying.The Conversation
via Horrific Amazon Wildfires: How do they Threaten Us, and how can we stop them?
But even this doesn’t have to be scary. Amazon’s recent decision to raise the wages of its US and UK employees demonstrates that, regardless of its size, it is still vulnerable to pressure from organised labour, activists and politicians in exactly the same way as other companies.
Amazon’s enormous global distribution network makes purchasing goods extremely convenient, a huge improvement on the stupid time-wasting practice of “going to the shops”. The bad stuff about it is it has some obvious remedies that go unapplied, not because the company is uniquely powerful or evil but because those remedies would affect all of its competitors as well. The relevant conflict here isn’t between Jeff Bezos and Gerry Harvey – it’s between both of them on one side and the large mass of the rest of us on the other. Give me my bendy rollers but also a fair economic system that works for everyone.
The Amazon boss’s philanthropy fund flies in the face of the way he treats his workers. Yet he wants to be seen as a messiah
The expansion of US online giant Amazon in Australia will be a game-changer in the country’s retail landscape, transforming the way we shop and threatening the supremacy of established local retailers.
Source: Amazon in Australia: what it means for you as a shopper
Bird’s-eye view photographs of an entirely isolated Amazonian tribe have revealed a rare insight into a lost Neolithic way of life. Brazilian photographer Ricardo Stuckert captured these high-resolution images from a low-flying helicopter above members of the indigenous tribe in a jungle in Jordao, close to the Brazil-Peru border.
Source: Photographer captures images of uncontacted ancient Amazon tribe | The Independent
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