Robert Walker, a professor of Latin American geographers and geography in the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies, grew up in Clearwater, Fla. He remembers driving down long stretches of I-75, peering out at mile after mile of slash pine and palmetto on his way to splash in the crystal-clear Silver Springs.  

Walker liked to hunt, fish and surf. A Florida kid, through and through. As he got older, his love of science, sense of wanderlust and attraction to tropical environments drew him to one of the last truly wild places on Earth—the Amazon rainforest.  

Walker’s research focuses on tropical deforestation in the Amazon Basin, something he’s witnessed rise and fall since he first started studying it in the 1980s. In his field work, he talks to peasant farmers, ranchers, indigenous people and loggers to get the full story about how people change their environment.  

amazon fires satellite
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens

This month, nearly 40,000 fires ravaged Walker’s study site. Media outlets far and wide ran dramatic photos of blazing flames consuming parts of the world’s largest rainforest, which despite strict environmental protections in recent decades, has lost an area roughly the size of Texas.  

Emilio Bruna, the director of the Florida-Brazil Linkage Institute at UF has known he wanted to study tropical rainforests since he was just a kid.  

“The Amazon rainforest touches us in ways we can’t even possibly imagine,” Bruna said.  

Think: Your morning cup of coffee. Your grandparent’s blood pressure medication. Your chocolate fix. The list goes on. 

“Even if you’re far removed from it physically in terms of the forest itself, you’re never very far away from it personally,” Bruna said of the region, which houses 10% of all of Earth’s species. 

Especially in Florida. Sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazilthe state’s largest international trading partner. When environmental disasters wreak economic havoc in Brazil, Florida can feel the ripple effects. 

Both Bruna and Walker agree that the ongoing disaster in the Amazon can teach us important lessons about the future of our environment, statewide and globally. But, before we look at those lessons, let’s review the facts and misconceptions of the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires.  

The Facts  

Deforestation is directly correlated to fires in the Amazon.  

deforestation in the Amazon

In the early 1980s, landmark studies by British scientist Norman Myers began to address the issue of deforestation and its link to environmental decline.  After 2004, deforestation in the Amazon fell dramatically thanks to effective environmental policies and voluntary actions by the private sector aimed at saving the rainforest. In 2012, rainforest clearing hit an all-time low. But as administrations and policies change, the trend has begun to creep upward. Deforestation is back on the uptick. 

The Amazon is not supposed to burn. 

In Florida, many ecosystems are adapted to withstand fire. In fact, many species of plants and animals need fire to survive and reproduce. Longleaf pine cones require heat to open and disperse their seeds, for example. And adult pines are equipped with thick bark, so when the flames singe the outer layer the inside of the tree is protected.

But in the Amazon rainforest, the trees have thin bark, leading to an easy death in the face of fires. When the trees die, gaps are opened in the cool, dark understory exposing shade-adapted plants to the heat of the sun. As the humidity goes down, the forest becomes more fire prone.  

Rainforests are an important carbon sink. 

Trees in the rainforest act like a sponge, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, which can act as a buffer against climate change. But it can be a double-edged sword.  

“As soon as you cut it down and burn it, you’ve gone from something that is pulling carbon out of the air to something that is emitting carbon, which will lead to the elevation of global temperatures,” Walker said. 

The Amazon rainforest helps regulate the climate and brings rain to the region.

“These trees give off, through evapotranspiration, the moisture that then gets rained back on this whole region of Brazil,” Bruna said. “And those cycles do not act alone. What happens in the polar climate is not independent of what happens in the Amazon.” 

The Misconceptions 

The Amazon rainforest is the “lungs of the planet.”

While it’s true that the rainforest produces a large amount of oxygen, this metaphor is a bit misleading, Walker and Bruna say. This is because the ecosystem absorbs about the same amount of oxygen as it produces.  

“The area’s soybean plantations would produce as much oxygen as the rainforest that was there before,” Bruna said. 

In other words, though the metaphor makes a catchy headline, it’s not exactly accurate.  

Most of this year’s fires were in the lush, green part of the rainforest. 

In reality, a majority of the fires occurred on areas that had already been cleared for agriculture.  

“Which is the tragedy,” Bruna said. “The fires followed deforestation.” 

To understand why this happens in cleared areas, we need to understand a few things about the rainforest. First, despite what intuition might suggest, the soils in the Amazon are nutrient poor. Most of the nutrients needed for growth and survival are bound up in the plants. When the plants are cut down, so are the nutrients. What’s left is acidic soil that’s not amenable to Brazil’s top crops, like soybean and wheat. To return nutrients to the soil, the downed trees are burned once they have dried out. Most of the fires occurred in these areas 

“But that doesn’t mean fire that wasn’t in the main forest isn’t bad,” Bruna said. “In fact, a lot of the fire on cleared areas will escape into the forest, burn the edges and make its way in. Once that happens, recovery can be really difficult.” 

These were the worst fires the Amazon has ever seen. 

There are fires in the Amazon every year, Walker said.  And it’s true that the number of fires this year is the highest since 2010.  

“If you look at the numbers from the Brazilian Space Agency, it turns out that the number of fires this year falls within the historical variability so it’s not necessarily an extreme event,” Walker said.  

Still, the fact that this occurred in a non-drought year is worrisome.  

“The real impact of the fires is not so much that you have fires in any given year, but the fact that the impact is cumulative,” Walker said.  

In other words, the worst fires are likely still to come. This is because the moist forest environment acts as a control to keep the fires from spreading. But as the ground fires emanate out, killing trees and vegetation, the forest becomes more flammable.  

“At this point in time, we haven’t experienced the kind of mega fires that we observe in California,” Walker said.  “But there will come a time in the Amazon when we will –once there’s enough flammable material.” 

Think of it as the Amazon’s “tipping point.”    

Walker said when it comes to the Amazon, the tipping point is the deforestation level beyond which any more will trigger a shift in ecology, from a lush rainforest to a fire-prone scrub. At one point, researchers thought this threshold to be around 40% deforestation. But new models suggest that number could be closer to 25% thanks to climate change. The current deforestation level is 20%.  

“So, that’s what’s alarming,” Walker said.  

Bruna agrees.  

“We are focusing on the fires because the fires are very dramatic and have all kinds of consequences for human health and ecosystem health,” Bruna said. “But what we should really be worrying about is deforestation starting to work its way back up.” 

Florida as a Mirror 

Pine forest being cleared in the Tampa area in 1919.
Pine forest being cleared in the Tampa area in 1919. State Archives of Florida photo.

As Walker reflects on his research career from his office in Gainesville, he realizes he didn’t have to go far to witness environmental degradation. Florida was facing many of the same problems.  

When Walker moved back to Florida from a 15-year stint at Michigan State University, he was stunned by the change he witnessed.  

“I didn’t see a single pine tree,” Walker said. “You saw houses that were built down into sinkholes almost and all the cypress had been taken out.” 

He knew this. In 1997, Walker published a study that found between 1975 and 1986, 13% of Florida’s natural land was plowed for human uses, like agriculture and transportation. At the time, the rate of deforestation in Florida was 60% higher than the global rate of tropical deforestation.  

“If you look at Florida, it’s an example of what’s going to happen to the Amazon if you don’t stop destroying it.” Walker said. 

For Bruna, the lesson is about short-term gain versus long-term ecosystem health. 

“We face the same decisions as they do there.  How do we make decisions about the best way to provide the economic benefits that come from our native ecosystems? Are we being short sighted?” Bruna said.   

“I think there’s real lessons to be learned from Brazil–that what people perceive as short-term gain is not really as much gain as they think.” 

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