"Cattle ranching, responsible for the great majority of deforestation in the Amazon, is pushing the forest to the edge of what scientists warn could be a vast and irreversible dieback that claims much of the biome. Despite agreement that change is necessary to avert disaster, despite attempts at reform, despite the resources of Brazil’s federal government and powerful beef companies, the destruction continues. But the ongoing failure to protect the world’s largest rainforest from rapacious cattle ranching is no longer Brazil’s alone, a Washington Post investigation shows. It is now shared by the United States — and the American consumer. - Washington Post (Original)

As of November, nine major mining companies considered key players in the extraction of rare metals for electric vehicle batteries had 225 active applications to expand operations into or near Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. U.S.-based financial institutions are among their top funders, according to a new report by Amazon Watch and the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous People, or APIB. In the past, those mining companies caused environmental damage that sickened Indigenous communities, stirred social discontent and contributed to the “trail of destruction” of the Amazon rainforest.  - Inside Climate News

The number of trees cut down in the Brazilian Amazon in January far exceeded deforestation for the same month last year, according to government satellite data. The area destroyed was five times larger than 2021, the highest January total since records began in 2015. Environmentalists accuse Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro of allowing deforestation to accelerate. Protecting the Amazon is essential if we are to tackle climate change. Trees are felled for their wood as well as to clear spaces to plant crops to supply global food companies. At the climate change summit COP26, more than 100 governments promised to stop and reverse deforestation by 2030. - BBC

Near the Freire home, there was a stream so wide that the children – aged between 5 and 12 when they arrived – would dare each other to reach the other side. They called it Jaguar's Creek. Now it's not a meter wide and can be cleared with a single step. The loss of such streams, and the wider water problems they are a part of, fill scientists with foreboding.Covering an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States and accounting for more than half of the world's rainforest, the Amazon exerts power over the carbon cycle like no other terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. The tree loss from an extremely dry year in 2005, for example, released an additional quantity of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere equivalent to the annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined, according to a 2009 study published in Science magazine. - Reuters 

Trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans, too, ecologist Suzanne Simard says.  Trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain, she explains. In one study, Simard watched as a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect.  "This was a breakthrough," Simard says. The trees were sharing "information that actually is important to the health of the whole forest." - NPR