A Year In An Amazon Forest Consumed By Flames, Desperation And Greed

[hatrack]

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There was no immediate danger – the fire was several miles away on the other side of one of the world’s biggest rivers – but it felt personal. More than 90% of fires in the Amazon are started deliberately to clear trees so the land can be used for cattle ranching or crop cultivation. That meant this arson attack against nature was almost certainly carried out by one of my neighbours. I knew it was probably illegal and that, according to climate science, it would nudge the world’s biggest rainforest that much closer to an irreversible tipping point. But there was nothing I could do except watch. The chances of anyone else lifting a finger while Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s president were next to zero.

This was on 27 August. The next morning I learned there were several fires in the rainforest that night. In fact, this was one of the most devastating nights for the Amazon in a decade. Landowners and land-grabbers were rushing to burn with impunity before a presidential election that the polls showed was likely to result in a change of power. August, September and October were months of fire, a human-made season wedged between the driest point of summer and the onset of the winter monsoons. A haze of charred vegetation shrouded many parts of the rainforest for weeks. My asthma returned for the first time in nine months. Viewed from the forest, the contest between Bolsonaro and his main challenger, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was not about tax rises or government spending – it was life or death.

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To be in the Amazon in 2022 is to live between a tipping point that humanity must avoid and a turning point that we must invent. The world’s rainforest has degraded perilously close to a stage where it can no longer regenerate. As more trees are cleared, the forest is less able to produce its own rain. It starts to dry out, to become more vulnerable to fire and lightning strikes, until it changes into another ecosystem entirely, a savannah, which is less biodiverse, less capable of storing carbon, less powerful in generating the rainfall and storms that keep weather systems moving. This is already happening along the arc of deforestation in the south and south-east Amazon, where the forest is turning to savannah as it emits more carbon than it absorbs. The rest of the rainforest is heading in the same direction: 17% has now been cleared and another 17% degraded. Scientists estimate the tipping point will occur when 20% to 25% of the Amazon is lost, which, at the current rate of ecocide, is more likely to be years rather than decades away.

About 70% of this illegally cleared land is then opened up for cattle ranches. It is these two groups that thrived when Bolsonaro and his ministers gutted the forest protection and Indigenous agencies, which led to a surge of invasions by land-grabbers, illegal miners, loggers, ranchers and organised crime gangs. These are the people who trot through the streets on horseback during the annual cowboy parade. These are the customers I shop with at the hardware store, which does a booming trade in chainsaws and gold-panning equipment. These are the listeners of Sertanejo, the country music that has pushed samba and funk aside to dominate the Brazilian music industry. These are also the diehard Bolsonarists, who drive through town in their SUVs with a Brazil flag emblazoned on their bonnet.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/16/year-in-the-life-of-the-amazon-deforestation-climate-disaster-mass-extermination

[2naSalit]

1. K&R