[kellyhound]

Sifaka lemurs can grow up to 55 cm tall and move by leaping. This species is endangered due to deforestation in Madagascar.

[Mr.NoCredit]

What an amazing creature. Why they’re cutting trees or anything in Madagascar is beyond me. There’s a few places on earth that should be off limits to corporations period. This is one of them. There are species in Madagascar that don’t exist anywhere else on earth.

The dollar doesn’t care about life anywhere.

[yah]

They're cool as fuck!

[kellyhound]

Originally Posted by Mr.NoCredit ↗

There’s a few places on earth that should be off limits to corporations period.

The dollar doesn’t care about life anywhere.

It's the rapid growth of the population. Kids function as vital economic assets rather than financial liabilities.

The island is home to around 33.5 million people, surging up from just 11.3 million in 1988. The country adds nearly 800,000 new residents to its population each year.

70% of the rural population there lives in poverty with virtually no access to electricity so families rely on local timber for firewood and charcoal to meet basic, daily needs like cooking, heating and lighting etc.

Smallholder farmers use a traditional method called tavy, where they cut down patches of forest and burn them. The ash temporarily fertilizes the soil to grow staple crops like rice.

Dense rainforests within national parks are frequently cleared to make room for high-value cash crops like vanilla, marijuana and corn to tap into lucrative international and domestic illegal trade networks.

some cartels exploit weak law enforcement to log rare, premium hardwoods like rosewood and ebony.

also 500,000 to 1 million local citizens are involved in small-scale, illegal mining. Severe droughts and/or floods wipe out crops in the south, tens of thousands of rural citizens migrate across the island in massive gem rushes.

Poor miners rarely have the money for food or basic supplies to start digging. Local wealthy elites and middle-men supply them with rice, water pumps, and basic tools in exchange for buying the gems they find at dirt-cheap prices.

These people leverage weak local law enforcement and bribes to allow hundreds of miners to set up temporary camps inside strictly protected national parks.

Madagascar accounts for roughly 40% of the world's sapphire supply. After the smuggled stones are cut and polished in Asia, they are sold legally on the global market, frequently ending up in luxury jewelry boutiques across Europe and North America.

Reminds me of the Maya's tbh. Madagascar, in this current population rate and cutting forest will face a total collapse between 2040-2050. The Maya empire was around 35% bigger in square feet but on their top they had half the mouths to feed as the population from Madagascar now (and that's growing fast).

Problem is that the Maya's could move to other places but Madagascar is an island so first the population will migrate to the North where the most remaining protectedrain forests are and will cut trees there to survive.

In the old days people could migrate to all directions as there were no real borders but modern international borders are legally closed.

A mass exodus would require millions of people crossing the ocean illegally by boat toward mainland africa, triggering an unprecedented international refugee crisis.

so the government and international aid focuses on making living trees more economically valuable than charcoal. These poor farmers can also be helped by organisations to optimize rice yields on existing fields, so families can dramatically increase food production, removing the financial pressure to cut down remaining forests.

Biggest peoblem is also the drought. Last years an intense combination of record-low rainfall and extreme heat waves caused a catastrophic drop in soil moisture expanding across the entire island, esp. in the south and west, rendering even traditionally fertile zones unable to support crops so the 2040-2050 doomsday scenario can happen way earlier.

Sometimes when people cut down forests some hidden viruses can jump from wild animals to humans aka zoonotic spillover can cause a new (world-wide) pandemic to get nature back in balance unless science can save humans by rapid drug manufacturing to prevent the virusses to spread so then it will be starving to death or by heat.

there are too many people on this planet as the planet cannot sustain the way we currently live. The problem is not the total number of human bodies; it is how we consume resources and distribute wealth.

If all 8 billion people lived like the average American, we would need about 5 Earths worth of resources to survive. If everyone lived like the average person in India, the planet could easily support our current population.

the top 10% and 20% of Americans, the rich bunch, represent an unprecedented concentration of global purchasing power, as the U.S. accounts for roughly 30% of all global consumer spending despite having only about 4% of the world's population.

The Top 10% of Americans drive about 15% of all global consumption. This single, elite slice of the U.S. population (roughly 34 million people) spends more than the entire nations of Germany, France and the UK combined.