It is estimated that there are around 5.2 Billion Palm Trees in the Amazon.

The Amazon. The largest rainforest in the world and home to one-tenth of the species of the world. The current Prime Minister of Brazil plans to ravage the Amazon by building a highway through the entire Rainforest, no matter what destruction comes to the area and Ecosystem. He also wants to open the area to animal farming, agriculture, ranches, mining and logging. The image above is of one of the food webs in the Amazon. Using the Golden Lion as an example, we can see what happens if one of the organisms of the food web I removed. Now, the overall population of the Ocelots decreases (but still has a few prey species) due to the inability to use a food source that it’s been using for a long time. The Palm Tree, however, is the prey of the Golden Lion. Without its main predator keeping the amounts of the (edible) parts of it down, the Palm Trees would increase more and more.

In a bigger/more complex food web, the repercussions of removing even one factor are catastrophically different. For example, the species that you remove sends a shockwave through its entire line of a food chain. The species’ prey would grow higher than before. This would cause the prey’s prey to decrease, as there’s more of prey #1 to eat prey #2. The original species’s predator, however, would decrease as they don’t have as much prey as before. As they decrease, the predator’s predator will also decrease, due to the lack of food. This effect repeats itself throughout the web until the damage is irreparable.

Back to the Golden Lion, as I said before when removed, Palm Trees would have grown more due to the lack of a previous predator. What I didn’t say, was that this particular food source (Palm Trees) has more than one predator. And when the prey increases, the predator has more to eat, therefore increasing its population. The effect from above is applied here, but now something that has happened to one food web has harmed the order of a separate web.

On a different note, if a highway us built directly through the Amazon, it’s bound to go through some rivers. Blocking these rivers, which are constantly flowing through the rainforest would create new issues, such as a lack of a water source for many animals, and trees would be dehydrated too. If the trees are TOO dehydrated, then they start to die out. And with the example of palm trees above, you can see what problems this could pose.

#SaveTheAmazon

If climate change keeps going at this rate, more species will decrease/go extinct

As devastation to the planet increases, more coral dies, more trees are chopped down and more smog fills the sky. When the sea is affected by pollution such as trash, oil and factory waste, water increase due to icebergs melting, aquatic life decreases, which affects the entire food web of the sea, as seen from #1. When trees are chopped down for fuel or materials, it also affects the ecosystem and contributes to global warming. Finally, smog in the sky is a massive contributor to tearing the ozone layer, which heats the Earth. If a highway is built, trees will fall, the Sea will be filled with more waste and the logging will further increase global warming.

If logging is introduced to the remaining part of the Amazon, it will directly affect the atmosphere.

Bolsonaro wants to introduce logging to the Amazon to make a clearer path for the highway. The consequences of deforestation of the Amazon is that trees do many things, such as provide cover for animals and insects, protecting them from predators because the prey has evolved to avoid them. Trees also convert Carbon Dioxide into Oxygen, which is vital to the Oxygen in the Atmosphere. Chopping down so many trees will take away all of these benefits and with so many fewer trees, Carbon Dioxide increases drastically, which greatly worsens the Global Warming situation. Finally, trees are necessary for rain because they create a cold and humid atmosphere required for rain. Also, when it rains, trees hold back some of the water and therefore do not allow to pass over the soil which avoids floods.

Thank you for reading, please consider signing this petition so that we can be one step closer 

#StopDeforestation