Updated Aug. 25,
2019, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/opinion/sunday/amazon-fire.html
A global treasure lies at
the mercy of the smallest, dullest, pettiest of men.
São Paulo, Brazil — When I first set foot in the Amazon rain forest, in
the Anavilhanas Archipelago, northwest of the city of Manaus, I experienced
something that can only be described as awe: an overwhelming sense of
connection with the universe. Cheesy, I know. But this is something that we
rarely feel — only upon seeing a clear tropical night sky, or the ghostly
flickering of the northern lights or even the vastness of a French Gothic
cathedral.
Image
A protestor against the deforestation of the Amazon
outside the Brazilian embassy
in Mumbai on Friday.CreditIndranil Mukherjee/Agence France-Presse
— Getty Images
From the outside, the Amazon is a massive, undistinguished canopy of
trees, but once you’re inside it, it is indeed a “monumental universe,”
in the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It has a strikingly
layered structure: The soil lies beneath an entanglement of roots, mosses and
decomposing leaves; pale trunks appear and disappear as they climb up into the
lush foliage. The tallest trees can reach up to 200 feet, almost the height of
the towers of Notre-Dame. And now it is their turn to burn.
The first sign that the Amazon would not have a good year came this
month, when the government sacked the head of the National Institute for
Space Research, the physicist Ricardo Galvão, who was
unpatriotic enough to release data showing a 278 percent jump in deforestation in
July compared with the same month the
previous year. President Jair Bolsonaro
said that he should have been warned about such evidence, which could cause the
country great harm internationally. “This is not a posture from a Brazilian,
someone who wants to serve his country and is concerned about Brazil’s
businesses,” Mr. Bolsonaro said. He suggested that the agency could be lying to
make the government look bad.
By then, however, a number of satellite images had emerged showing truly
alarming numbers of fires across the Amazon: dozens of smoldering patches of
scorched earth, clouding the dark green landscape. Soon they were followed by a
more concrete image of a local firefighter offering water to a thirsty armadillo,
prompting outrage across the globe. (Later, in an interview, the firefighter
explained that the photo had not been taken in the Amazon, but rather in a
nearby grassland region.)
According to the institute, the number of fires detected in Brazil so
far this year is 84 percent higher than in the comparable period last year;
more than half of those are in the Amazon region. More than 1,300 new fires were added over the course of just two days this week. Satellites
have captured images of the smoke from the flames sweeping across several
Brazilian states. In São Paulo, where I live, dark clouds blackened the sun on
Monday, turning day into night. The city is thousands of miles away from the
Amazon. Meteorologists scrambled to explain what had happened, but many suspect
that the culprit was low-lying clouds from a cold front combining with smoke.
On Twitter, the environment minister, Ricardo Salles, attributed the surge in fires to dry
weather, wind and heat. But scientists and environmental organizations
disagree. According to a recent statement by
researchers from the Federal University of Acre and the Amazon Environmental
Research Institute, the fires are directly related to deforestation. They were
probably set by cattle ranchers, farmers and loggers to clear the land: First
they cut the trees; then they wait for the dry season; then they wait until
it’s clear they have a president who will do nothing to stop them; then they
set it all ablaze.
On Aug. 10, farmers from the northern state of Pará organized a
coordinated “fire day” to burn land
for agriculture, emboldened by Mr. Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental rhetoric and
encouraged by the government’s commitment to weakening the agencies that
enforce environmental regulations.
Mr. Bolsonaro, who once threatened to leave the Paris climate accord, is
famously dismissive of any environmental concerns — he claims Brazil suffers
from an “environmental psychosis” — which, in his opinion, only hinder economic
development. In July, he said that environmental issues mattered only to “vegans, who eat only vegetables.”
He also declared Brazil and its resources a “virgin”
that “every pervert outsider wants.” When asked about the fires, the president suggested, with no evidence, that
nongovernmental organizations could have started them to generate negative
attention toward his government.
It’s been heartbreaking to watch the country burn, both literally and
figuratively, under Mr. Bolsonaro. Right now, Brazilians feel a collective,
perplexed grief for everything we stand to lose — not only as Brazilian
citizens, but as humans. The Amazon is often described as the Earth’s “lungs,”
producing 20 percent of our atmosphere’s oxygen. It also stores carbon dioxide,
a major cause of global warming.
And yet, what hurts me most is the bare idea of the millions of
Notre-Dames, high cathedrals of terrestrial biodiversity, burning to the
ground; all those layers of 100-year-old chestnut trees, vines, rubber trees,
palm trees, banana plants, orchids, bromeliads, passion fruit flowers; the
macaws, toucans, capybaras, sloths, jaguars, anacondas and ants that called
them home. A monumental universe, turning, as I write this, into pasture and
soy.
*Vanessa Barbara is
the editor of the literary website A Hortaliça, the author of two novels and
two nonfiction books in Portuguese, and a contributing opinion writer.
A version of this
article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2019, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York
edition with the headline: As the Amazon Burns.
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