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
