[HN Gopher] A lost Amazon world just reappeared in Bolivia
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       A lost Amazon world just reappeared in Bolivia
        
       Author : ashishgupta2209
       Score  : 89 points
       Date   : 2025-12-01 07:30 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.frontiersin.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.frontiersin.org)
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Non-syndicated Source:
       | https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/11/06/landscapes-that-...
        
       | fwipsy wrote:
       | Amazing and humbling to read about technological marvels from
       | 1400 years ago. It really puts our modern achievements in a new
       | light. It's tempting sometimes to think of innovation as a recent
       | phenomen, but people have been innovating and solving the same
       | problems for thousands of years. To be honest, I didn't even know
       | they HAD e-commerce back then!
        
         | anon84873628 wrote:
         | People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one
         | of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and
         | our modern approach is optimal.
         | 
         | When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the
         | most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just
         | bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into
         | submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we
         | generally refer to as "unsustainable".
         | 
         | Because understanding all the complex relationships within an
         | ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus
         | material for human use without intolerable negative
         | consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped
         | science.
         | 
         | The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this
         | problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to
         | understand and appreciate.
        
           | Tarq0n wrote:
           | I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham
           | fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least
           | fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.
        
             | mikey_p wrote:
             | Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use
             | aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but
             | mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with
             | compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.
        
             | anon84873628 wrote:
             | If you believe in Malthusian traps then at best we've just
             | kicked the can down the road and set ourselves up for an
             | even greater collapse. When it's not just that humans are
             | starving, but the topsoil is gone, the pollinators are
             | dead, the oceans have warmed and the ice caps melted, etc
             | etc.
             | 
             | The "green revolution" (a misnomer with our current use of
             | the word) sure was effective; the point is that it was also
             | unsustainable.
             | 
             | Of course the land has a finite carrying capacity. And I'm
             | not anti-ag-tech either. In fact I believe higher precision
             | and intelligence is the answer. We need to create highly
             | diverse and cohesive ecosystems tailored to the local
             | environment, which requires lots of observation and
             | iteration.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-12-04 23:01 UTC)