Slash and burn isn’t evil—it’s a tool. Like a chainsaw, it can build a home or destroy a forest depending on who holds it. The problem is scale. When you burn a patch the size of a backyard, the forest heals. When you burn a patch the size of a city, you create a desert. And when you repeat it every year, you get the Amazon turning into a savanna, which then feeds back into climate change, which then makes fires bigger and more frequent. It’s a snake eating its own tail—and the tail is on fire.
So the next time you hear someone trash “slash and burn,” remember: it’s not the method that’s broken; it’s the greed that hijacked it. Maybe we should rename it “slash, burn, and actually be smart about it.” But that wouldn’t fit on a protest sign, would it?
