> [!summary] [[As the Amazon Burns, Cattle Ranchers Are Blamed But It’s Complicated by Charlie Hamilton James]] > **Cattle ranching drives significant deforestation in the Amazon, exacerbating climate change.** > > > Cattle ranching in the Amazon is perhaps the main culprit of the fires we are seeing now. It is an industry of thousands of small-scale ranchers cutting forest, burning it and turning it to pasture. Ranchers increase forage for their cows by cutting down forest. They were the ‘bad guys’, the slash and burn cattle ranchers, who had ravaged and destroyed much of the western Amazon and had been doing so for decades. > [!summary] [Wildfires and the disastrous legacy of environmentalism via DSL](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,11962.0.html) Humans basically evolved on the African savannah, and left to our own devices we try to turn everything back into grassland with a couple of trees; even our yards.