Who Owns the Amazon?

Who owns Flint, Michigan.

maybe Brazil will taketh position that if the USA, saudi arabia, iran, russia, and a few other countries reduce their production of oil by 50%, brazil will put out the fires.

Ban Brazil from the World Cup. In fact make World Cup admission dependent on a number of factors which contribute to the world rather than destroy it. "You have to be a working, operating at civilized level society if you want to play; playing while you destroy your own environment and/or set a bad example to the world will not be tolerated". Correct already existing corruption at World Cup level and add a bunch of United Nations type rules and restrictions for admission to game.

If National Sovereignty is used to destroy the world's 'lungs' (the Amazon) unilaterally, just because Bolsonaro is such an ignorant thug abusing his power, to accelerate climate change, and bringing mother Earth to it's knees, then we, as a global humanity, ought to have some say in this matter...and stop this despot in his tracks. Poor Brasil.

Who owns the Amazon? Hopefully not the people who managed the Carrier Pigeon, Whooping Crane, and whatever forested areas remain in California.

The quintessential Trump suggestion, nuking a hurricane. In his megalomaniacal narcissism if he thinks it up, it's magnificent. Of course even a thermonuclear bomb would not eliminate a hurricane but it would add radiation contamination to the catastrophe. While he won't do this, enough of his edicts are subject to being adhered to. This is the nature of the Presidential Emergencies laws. They were originally subject to a majority of both houses retracting, until 1983 Supreme Court decision,INS v. Chadha , ruled 7 to 2 (impassioned dissents) that President can veto the retraction. Now, a President with a passive majority plenary authority over more than we can imagine.

Brazil does in fact own most of the Amazon, Jeff Bezos however, owns Amazon, and is worth 109 Billion. Instead of flying rocket ships to Mars perhaps Mr. Bezos would consider helping with his company's namesake.

Brazil's sovereignty requires stewardship of resources that impact other sovereign nations citizens. If they put citizens of other sovereign nations at risk it should be treated as an act of war. We have the largest military budget in the world in order to protect US citizens. This lack of action by Brazil to protect planetary natural resource is a direct threat to other citizens of sovereign nations across the globe. Either fix it or accept the consequences. The US is a great Nationalist country that has every right to protect its shoreline, property and citizens breathable air. Our great President owns coastal property. I expect he won't mess around with Brazil. He's a very tough hombre.

The Amazon produces twenty percent of the free oxygen in the atmosphere. If burned, the carbon in the trees and foliage will rise as gases into the atmosphere, probably increasing it by at least 25 percent. The trees and foliage removes a full percent of the carbon gases from the air to create food through photosynthesis. In other words, the Amazon is part of all of our lives beyond Brazil and what happens to it happens to us all. Brazil has recognized sovereignty over it's territory but not over the world's air, water, and the biosphere itself -- those things are owned by nobody but needed by everybody. Allowing Brazil to destroy the Amazon is simply allowing them to destroy everyone's basis for life. Life trumps property rights.

While there are many easy and moderately difficult steps we can take to maturely deal with monster problems like climate change, species depletion, water, hunger, human rights, a renewed arms race; the need for even harder strategies do not go away. Concepts and mindsets that have long been considered supreme and untouchable are going to need to be intelligently challenged (both intellectually and emotionally). Sovereignty is just one of them. Unlimited population size is another. And, yes, I know the problematic history, complicated from the already-monster immigration issue. But it makes nearly everything else more difficult. So, it's not going away. Other comfortable concepts/mindsets that will need re-thinking and brave, creative new approaches are: politics as wasteland, the unlimited pursuit of self-interest (in individuals, tribes, businesses, countries); justification for endless conflict based on incompatible driving narratives; accepted dualities that actually aren't, such as: objectivity "versus" subjectivity, reductionism "versus" systems thinking," identity "versus" what we all have in common, keeping things simple "versus" the reality of complexity, technology as friend or foe. The next generations are going to have to be uniquely accepting of uncertainty, ambiguity, evaluating ethics, perpetual learning, adaptability, holistic thinking. I hope they are seeing this and older folk are passing on seasoned, but not obsolete, advice to give them a fighting chance.

The Amazon rainforest is home to 10% of the known species in the world, including more than 1500 of the bird species. There are over 40,000 different plant species and approximately 2.5 million insect species. These species belong to the planet, to the Amazon's rich, complex, biodiverse ecosystem.......not to Bolsonaro and his crews of arsonists. Genocide and the world's armed forces move in on corrupt and murderous tyrants. It should be the same with ecocide on this level. Send in the world's firefighters and UN occupying forces to stabilize while a long-term solution is created. If Brazil can't or won't protect the Amazon rainforest, buy it and/or make it a UN protectorate state. A recent UN report predicts 1 million species extinctions in the near future. Let the Amazon rainforest be a wake-up call to the world, a new way of thinking that fights for the health of our living planet. We must never give up, for like the species of the Amazon, we have nowhere else to go.

Unfortunately, we have long passed the point where we can think solely in terms of nation-states. We live in one world, and must work collectively, or face climate-based horrors that modern humans have not seen.

We can postulate all we want about how climate change affects national sovereignty, but nothing will happen. Nations will do what they will do. But what hasn't been discussed is sweetening the pot. The idea of buying the Amazon is not a bad one, but a better one might be the idea of leasing it. Let's pick a number - let's say a 100 billion dollars a year coughed up by the G20 and sent to Brazil. In return for a ten to twenty year lease we control, protect, patrol and reforest the Amazon. It could be a win/win situation - of course for Brazil, and increasingly so, for the rest of the planet. It might be such a winning strategy that the lease will be renewed...

This article is completely out of line and wreaks of imperialism. That part of the Amazon belongs to Brazil and we, nor any other country, has any right to do anything. The concept that other countries can intercede in another countries affairs because it affects the world is scary. Where else could this justification be used to meddle? With global warming as a justification the sky is the limit.

"One of the puzzles of the current age is how a cadre of nationalist leaders are both struggling with the reality of crises spanning national boundaries and doing their best to double down on the idea of borders in the first place." It's not an easy problem to solve. Buy borders don't disappear as the default solution. National control is still a prerequisite.

This is an imperialistic point of view. There are many things going on in America right now that contribute to global warming and climate change and we are not talking about the world taking over your resources. It is so arrogant and ignorant.

Several countries own a part of the Amazon rain forest. Who owns Wyoming? Been there lately?

Sadly, not even considered for ownership are the animals that live there. Shame on us for our treatment of those who have no voice.

Who owns the Biosphere? Apparently, whoever has the money and power to take possession. Right now, it's those wealthy enough to strip-mine the Planet for their very own personal gain. The rest of us? To the victor goes the spoils. They get the Earth's riches, and We get a spoiled Planet. However -- we happen to outnumber them, by about a million to one. They will do, what we Allow them to.

Brazil has no more right to dictate what happens to the Amazon rainforest, whose viability affects the entire world, than a country has the right to explode a nuclear bomb over its own territory without regard to whether dangerous radiation will spread to other countries.

The real question is "who owns the Earth?". With the population rapidly approaching 10 billion people, and planetary resources remaining constant, it is only a matter of time before Malthus is fatally correct. His apocaliptic forcast can only be avoided by recognizing IMMEDIATELY that the planet does NOT belong to the greediest and most sociopathic among us but to all of us, especially the meek.

"Who Owns the Amazon?" American liberals? Always forward-looking Europeans? Green warriors all over the world? Vegans? Vegetarians? Certainly not Brazil, and certainly not now that they dared electing that president whom those listed above cannot stand.

"Who Owns the Amazon?" I asked several acquaintances, and they all replied Jeff Bezos.

Who owns the Amazon forest? The same people who own everything else in the world and the world itself. For all supposed nobility of the human race, our fundamental goodness as a species, and our capacity to build civilization, and optimists among us, we seem little more than a dumb, strutting, incompetent species led by the usual wealthy, vulgar people familiar from history, and all great accomplishment, nobility, is just a sidebar and ineffective protest and corrective to this sad tale. Not a day passes that I don't seem to be awakening from a vast cultural brainwash, that it was all a sham all this consumption, waste, overpopulation, forced happiness of modern society, all this meat on plate, raise a family, go to work, vacation, smile and be human nonsense. All this "morality of humans and difference from the animals"; all this religion and secular humanism nonsense as well; capitalism, socialism, the economic whatever of it all. It's all been primarily just more and more people piled on the world, and the quality of people as represented by leaders just the same old unoriginal and wealthy people of old, the entire effect the triumph of a horizontal population increasing, banal viewpoint developing process, when what we need is fewer people and greater imagination and insight and discipline and leaders far removed from ilk of old. I don't think the human race can do it. I don't think the human race could save itself if it could. It would insult our dear leaders.

Actually Brazil is missing a chance at a power play. The same way the middle east countries have the oil, Brazil has the oxygen.

Money is not the answer, doing away with money is.

Respect Brazil's sovereignty whilst encouraging consensus using a platform such as the UN. No time for quibbling. Put out the fire and then implement a strategy to safeguard Earth going forward. We are Earthlings and the young are depending on our cooperation and collaboration as never before.

Brazil should be paid to fix C dioxide in their rain forest, via the global C dioxide trade system. Meat production & consumption should be taxed by an environmental tax to rationalize its' value chain.

The greatest gains could be had by outlawing the use of coal to generate electricity world wide. So lets go to Germany, Russia, China, India, and the USA, and demand that all electric generation using coal cease immediately. Let me know how that goes. If you think you can just decide to unilaterally violate the sovereignty of nations, I have a large snow covered island off the coast of Canada that I would like to sell you.

The rapid destruction of the Amazon rain forest is a global emergency. Arguing about who owns it while it burns is senseless. Put the fires out, then develop a plan to preserve it and Brazilian pride. But get those fires doused!

Let's save violation of national sovereignty for cases in which a government is murdering people. We haven't even done that. This is about trees. Wood is less important than people.

This is a crime against humanity, but people with little to lose and lots to gain can’t think beyond their hungry family and tin shelter. We must give them a reason to care - and the international language of persuasion is money.

It is time to strengthen global cooperation. Nationalism will not solve global issues. Brazil must be compensated by all nations for the value of the Amazon to all. If China or any other nation is trading in bad faith then all nations must cooperate to counter this. Bickering or grandstanding nation to nation does not deliver robust long-term solutions.

That climate change effects everyone in the world (except perhaps for the extremely wealthy who think they will just buy all the world's mountain tops to build refuge aeries; or the extremely religious who welcome conditions becoming so bad that the Earth will split open, swallow all the sinners, i.e., everyone but them, at which time the messiah will lift all the true believers, i.e., them, to external life and bliss in heaven), maybe it's finally time for all the rest of us to think in terms of the sovereignty of the Earth takes precedence over the sovereignty of nations, and have an internationally body like UN, but not controlled by the vetoes of 5 of its members, take over the management of the Earth. As sovereign nations are apparently incapable of doing so. Hopefully too, the world's less extreme religionists will show their true love and devotion to their God by putting the protection of the Earth and live He created before all other religious offerings, rituals, commandments, and votes for climate change deniers. Acting swiftly will undoubtedly be difficult and require sacrifice from all, but keep putting it off any longer out of that fear will only make the hardship worse.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is the single-largest consumer of fuel in the world. Who owns the Military Industrial Complex?

Just as the world pays Saudi Arabia for its oil, the world should pay Brazil for its rain forest. People are already putting value on tons of CO2. Why not pay Brazil for the number of tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere? That would encourage conservation and provide the Brazilian economy with resources so that they wouldn’t have to destroy the Amazon for agriculture.

Ask the citizens of the counties in the EU, what they think of sovereignty. Many would love to be able to control their own borders again. That's what Brexit was really about.

Like it or not, the Amazon is Brazil’s just like Yellowstone is the US’. France and every other developed nation could afford to displace their farmers and city dwellers so they could replant forests that were cut down long ago. We choose not to. Why should Brazil bear the economic burden of the developed world’s sudden “come to Jesus” moment? I don’t see manhattanites moving out of their skyscrapers that exist on deforested land. Until that happens maybe the people of Brazil should be able to enjoy the fruits that destroying forests brings.

Who owns the oceans? Who owns the air? Who owns the soil? Who owns the water? There are so many necessities we need to share, and we do not even have the language for it. We must first learn to think and act like earthlings. The language of compromise, sharing, and planning will follow.

I think beginning these conversations sooner, rather than later, is an important step to lay the foundation of future global environmental cooperation.

OK, so let's see how far you are willing to go with your idea. Since global warming is an existential threat, and since it is the industrialized nations that are the main drivers of CO2 emissions, we have decided for the good of mankind everyone should cut their emissions by 20%. We realize this will have the effect of a deep recession on the effected nations but it is for the general good.

The title - this is exactly what I was thinking. The amazon rain forest is too important for the planet to be owned - and at the mercy of - one nation.

Any implication by Bolsonaro that Brazil 'owns' the Amazon is like the US saying they 'own' the Atlantic Ocean, or that some other country 'owns' the sun that shines down on them. Collectively, we must all take care of the earth, our waters, our skies, for our own good.

The most industrialized economies, France included, are the world's champions in producing greenhouse gasses responsible for for climate change. Why don't mr Macron speak against them? It's easy to kick a dead dog, or to concentrate blame in a immensely wide country which has limited resources to care for a forest bigger than a reunion of European countries. In the Amazon forest zone rain stops in early April and returns only in in September. There is, of course, man-made mismanagement, but there is also natural-occurring fires too. Mr. Macron should be more wise...