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The Lawless Frontier at the Heart of the Burning Amazon
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/amazon-burning-bolsonaro-novo-progresso-deforestation-885114/. . .
FROM INDONESIA to the Congo, the world’s forests, a fragile buffer against climate change, are vanishing. In 2017 alone, 39 million acres of tropical forests disappeared. This is the equivalent of losing 40 football fields of trees every minute for an entire year.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon, which contains 40 percent of the world’s rainforests and has more biodiversity than anywhere else on the planet. Two of the world’s leading climate scientists, Brazil’s Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University, estimate that if another 3 to 8 percent of the forest disappears, it will begin to consume itself.
In February 2018, Nobre and Lovejoy released a paper announcing we are at the precipice of a tipping point. In 2016, for the first time in recorded history, the Amazon released more carbon into the atmosphere than it absorbed. The causes — widespread drought and forest fire — were in themselves the effects of climate change, but Nobre and Lovejoy warn that if deforestation in the Amazon continues at its current pace, more than half the rainforest could die permanently, a runaway climate change scenario terrifying in its implications. Weather patterns would change all over South America and billions of tons of carbon would be released into the atmosphere.
The tragedy of what’s unfolding in Brazil, home to 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, is that under the leftist Worker’s Party, deforestation plummeted by 70 percent between 2005 and 2013 due to a series of aggressive reforms, including setting aside 150 million acres of rainforest, an area roughly the size of France, for protection. Space-agency monitoring triggered alerts of the loss of forest in real time, farmers caught chopping down trees lost access to credit, and an elite squad of environmental cops cracked down on the worst offenders, flying in to areas of destruction on helicopters, where they smashed up machinery for mining, or torched the tractors and bulldozers used to raze the jungle. What they didn’t destroy, they confiscated.
In 2014, the trend began to reverse. This coincided with the worst corruption scandal in Brazilian history, which ousted the Workers Party and gave rise to a far-right political coalition known as the Bible, Beef and Bullets caucus. Under President Michel Temer, a longtime patron of cattle and soy farmers, the Environment Ministry’s budget was slashed and the agency responsible for protecting Brazil’s indigenous reserves, FUNAI, had to fight off attempts by the farm lobby to kill it. Even so, dozens of FUNAI bases were shut down and their budget was cut nearly in half.
Then came Jair Bolsonaro. A former army captain from Rio de Janeiro who has a fetish for Brazil’s years under military rule, he is known as the Trump of the Tropics. A racist and a homophobe, no one took him seriously when he began his run for the presidency; he had once told a colleague on the floor of congress that he wouldn’t rape her because “she wasn’t worthy of it” — she was “too ugly.”
But by aligning the growing evangelical voting bloc in Brazil with the farm lobby, also known as the ruralistas, Bolsonaro tapped into a global populist wave. Like Trump, he expressed an open disdain for science, and he declared climate change a Marxist conspiracy. He promised to open the Amazon for development and vowed to eliminate environmental-impact studies on infrastructure projects bogged down in red tape. Roads that had long gone unpaved, like BR-163, would be finished. And he would not allow for “a centimeter more of indigenous land.”
FROM INDONESIA to the Congo, the world’s forests, a fragile buffer against climate change, are vanishing. In 2017 alone, 39 million acres of tropical forests disappeared. This is the equivalent of losing 40 football fields of trees every minute for an entire year.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon, which contains 40 percent of the world’s rainforests and has more biodiversity than anywhere else on the planet. Two of the world’s leading climate scientists, Brazil’s Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University, estimate that if another 3 to 8 percent of the forest disappears, it will begin to consume itself.
In February 2018, Nobre and Lovejoy released a paper announcing we are at the precipice of a tipping point. In 2016, for the first time in recorded history, the Amazon released more carbon into the atmosphere than it absorbed. The causes — widespread drought and forest fire — were in themselves the effects of climate change, but Nobre and Lovejoy warn that if deforestation in the Amazon continues at its current pace, more than half the rainforest could die permanently, a runaway climate change scenario terrifying in its implications. Weather patterns would change all over South America and billions of tons of carbon would be released into the atmosphere.
The tragedy of what’s unfolding in Brazil, home to 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, is that under the leftist Worker’s Party, deforestation plummeted by 70 percent between 2005 and 2013 due to a series of aggressive reforms, including setting aside 150 million acres of rainforest, an area roughly the size of France, for protection. Space-agency monitoring triggered alerts of the loss of forest in real time, farmers caught chopping down trees lost access to credit, and an elite squad of environmental cops cracked down on the worst offenders, flying in to areas of destruction on helicopters, where they smashed up machinery for mining, or torched the tractors and bulldozers used to raze the jungle. What they didn’t destroy, they confiscated.
In 2014, the trend began to reverse. This coincided with the worst corruption scandal in Brazilian history, which ousted the Workers Party and gave rise to a far-right political coalition known as the Bible, Beef and Bullets caucus. Under President Michel Temer, a longtime patron of cattle and soy farmers, the Environment Ministry’s budget was slashed and the agency responsible for protecting Brazil’s indigenous reserves, FUNAI, had to fight off attempts by the farm lobby to kill it. Even so, dozens of FUNAI bases were shut down and their budget was cut nearly in half.
Then came Jair Bolsonaro. A former army captain from Rio de Janeiro who has a fetish for Brazil’s years under military rule, he is known as the Trump of the Tropics. A racist and a homophobe, no one took him seriously when he began his run for the presidency; he had once told a colleague on the floor of congress that he wouldn’t rape her because “she wasn’t worthy of it” — she was “too ugly.”
But by aligning the growing evangelical voting bloc in Brazil with the farm lobby, also known as the ruralistas, Bolsonaro tapped into a global populist wave. Like Trump, he expressed an open disdain for science, and he declared climate change a Marxist conspiracy. He promised to open the Amazon for development and vowed to eliminate environmental-impact studies on infrastructure projects bogged down in red tape. Roads that had long gone unpaved, like BR-163, would be finished. And he would not allow for “a centimeter more of indigenous land.”
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