Brazil's Wilderness Half Gone to Farming; Drowned Balkan Livestock Hamper Rescue Efforts

What’s next for Brazil’s Cerrado, deforested focus of booming agriculture? Around 50 percent of the Cerrado—about 250 million acres—has already been converted to agriculture, mostly cattle pasture but also cropland. The area I’m flying over at the moment appears to be 80 percent converted for food production. The Cerrado is a curious beast that bridges the gap between rainforest and savannah. Much of it is located at higher altitude. It receives a lot of rain during the wet season, which runs from the southern hemisphere spring through fall, and almost none during the dry season. It’s home to a dizzying array of plants, many of which occur only here. Few people outside of Brazil even know it exists, and half of it is already gone.

Tons of drowned livestock a new Balkan threat. A new calamity emerged Tuesday in the flood-hit Balkans as rescue workers battled overflowing rivers – and were confronted by wastelands of drowned livestock.

Dead cows wait to taken away by the Bosnian military from a farm near the Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac along river Sava, 200 kms north of Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, on Tuesday, May 20, 2014.

Sources: Daily Climate, US News.

Paul Brown is a retired neuroscience professor whose primary interests are human rights, overpopulation, mass extinction, global warming, and the military-industrial complex. Links to all his Before It’s News articles are at /contributor/pages/189/210/stories.html.