On Brazil's Madeira River: "The Forest Is Burning. Animals Are Burning. Everything Is Burning"

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“I’ve never seen it like this,” said Souza, a 44-year-old subsistence farmer as her canoe glided through the murk towards her smog-shrouded hamlet, chaperoned by river dolphins whose aquatic home is growing smaller by the day. To reach Souza’s wooden house in Paraíso Grande (Big Paradise) – a former rubber-tapping community near the port town of Humaitá – visitors must now scale a sun-scorched bluff that has been exposed by the plummeting waters. Vast, desert-like expanses of red-hot sand lie between some river-dwellers and the waters on which they depend for food, transport, education and work. Some of those beaches are hundreds of metres wide.

“In the old days we used to understand the river’s rise and fall … But lately man has started to affect nature to such an extent that we no longer know how things work,” complained village leader José Francisco Vieira dos Santos, describing how the Amazon’s annual rainy and dry seasons were being scrambled for reasons locals struggled to comprehend. “Even the animals can feel the change,” added Santos, 42. An Amazon catfish called the “bodó” used to lay its eggs in January. Now locals said it was happening as early as October. “Everything has spun out of control,” said Santos, who suspected construction of two hydroelectric dams further up the Madeira had added to the problem.

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Indigenous communities have been hit particularly hard, with dozens of waterways drying up and dry vegetation supercharging wildfires that are ripping through their ancestral homes. Megaron Txucarramãe, an Indigenous leader from the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, said at least four territories in his region were going up in smoke, including in the Capoto Jarina area where a firefighter was killed in the blaze. “I’ve lived here since I was born and I’ve never seen the forest burn like this … The forest is burning. Animals are burning. Trees are burning. Everything’s burning,” he said, lamenting how Indigenous sages who understood rain patterns were no longer alive to help out. “The firefighters aren’t managing to put out these fires – only rain can do this.”

Erika Berenguer, a tropical forest expert from Oxford University who studies the Amazon, said she feared climate change meant that 2024’s “apocalyptic scenario” and “dystopian sunsets” might simply be a glimpse of an even bleaker future. “It’s scary to think that this might be the best extreme drought that we have in the next 20 years. Because … in terms of the Amazon, we already have across the basin a 1.5-degree increase in temperature [since the 1970s]. Parts of the basin have a dry season that is one week longer [than before]. Parts of the basin have a dry season that is 34% drier,” she said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/28/brazils-paradise-on-fire-the-forest-is-burning-animals-are-burning-trees-are-burning-everythings-burning

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