The Amazon is Never Far From It's Tipping Point

One fact distinguishes the Amazon from other forests. It's also the Amazon's Achilles Heel.

While other forests hold a good deal of their biomass in the soils, almost all of the Amazonian biomass is in the trees and plants. The soil is all but barren, leached out by millennia of torrential rains.

Nowhere else in the world is the number of animal and plant species as high as in the Amazon rainforest. Not even the rainforests in Asia or Africa can compare. The Amazon region has more species per square kilometer than in the whole of Europe.

Beyond that, there are tens of thousands of plant species, including countless medicinal plants, over 2.5 million insect species, 1,300 kinds of birds, 430 mammals, over 3,000 fish species, hundreds of different amphibians and reptiles. Numerous species are discovered every year, and many have yet to even be been seen by us humans. 

These rainforests are a gigantic accumulation of biomass. Their plants grow on several levels, like floors in a building. There are tree giants that grow to a height of 60 to 80 meters. Then, there is the middle tree level. Below, it is very dark and humid, because the crowns of the trees are so close together that they act as a green blanket. 

In this rainforest "universe," there are infinite niches for animals — thanks to an abundance of food, like leaves, seeds, fruits and nutrients. Everything is in the plants. As is the CO2 the trees extract from the atmosphere and store as they grow. All the while, they produce oxygen. 

The amazing thing is that the soil is as poor in nutrients as the vegetation is rich. The humus layer, which is that dark, organic stuff in the soil that develops when plants or animal matter break down, is minimal nearly everywhere. The soil in the Amazon rainforest is the poorest and most infertile in the world. If one cuts down the forest, it is irretrievably lost. The humus layer is quickly washed out. Three years after clearing the forest (at the latest, nothing will grow there. What remains is washed out, worthless soil.

This accounts for why the Amazon is populated by small tribes each village a considerable distance from the next. Agriculture is impossible leaving the villagers dependent on hunting and gathering, each tribe in its own territory. It's why they have not formed a culture, a civilization.

However, researchers have found evidence that, some 2,500 years ago, there did exist a civilization in the rainforest.  The evidence is in the form of carbon, biochar, that was tilled into the soil to a depth of several feet by some unknown people who once lived in that area.

More than two thousand years later these soils remain rich, fertile and black. The researchers have named the area "Terra Preta" or black soil.

The lesson from this is one that can serve the entire world. We are facing a food security disaster due to the degradation of our farmland. Through reckless application of agri-chemicals (fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides) and exhaustive farming we've depleted the essential carbon from the soil in some places, such as China or India, to the point of desertification. We're cutting our own throats.

It has been argued that the Amazon is reaching a tipping point beyond which it will not be able to recover, gone, in practical terms, forever. It may be too late for the Amazon but it's not too late for Europe or the United States or Canada. It's really a matter of finding the political will to act but, given our pathetic response to climate change, it's hard to imagine we'll ever find that essential will.