AMAZON
RAINFOREST
The Pope Makes Plea to Save the Amazon — Will the
World Listen?
MongabayFeb. 18, 2020 03:41PM EST
by Justin
Catanoso
Pope
Francis, in an effort to reignite his influence as a global environmental
leader, released an impassioned document Feb. 12 entitled Dear Amazon — a
response to the historic Vatican meeting last autumn regarding the fate of the
Amazon biome and its indigenous people.
In a
94-page "exhortation," Francis argued for the ecological importance
of Amazonia — the world's largest and most biodiverse tropical rainforest —
describing the ecosystem services the biome provides, the region's greatly
beneficial weather, and the climate change mitigation the forest offers via
carbon storage. The pope stressed that those best suited to protect the Amazon
are the indigenous people who have lived there since time immemorial.
The
document comes as the Amazon faces "deforestation at breakneck
rates," driven by illegal logging, mining, ranching and agribusiness in
Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Brazil, a nation that has also seen a sharp spike
in killings of indigenous activists.
Dear Amazon
isn't only addressed to Catholics, but "to all persons of good will."
It sums up the findings of a three-week Vatican synod, a formal meeting held
last October that brought together for the first-time hundreds of Catholic
bishops, indigenous leaders and environmental activists from nine South
American countries with territory in the Amazon. Francis' post-synod response
is organized into four "dreams:" societal, cultural, ecclesial and
ecological.
His plea in
defense of the rainforest is at once scientific, humanistic, political, and
spiritual: "If the care of people and the care of ecosystems are
inseparable, this becomes especially important in places where the forest is
not a resource to be exploited; it is a being, or various beings, with which we
have to relate," Francis writes in the ecological section. "When
indigenous peoples remain on their land, they themselves care for it best,
provided they do not let themselves be taken in by the siren song and
self-serving proposals of power groups."
Francis
joins with Amazon scientists and activists in their alarm. Rapidly escalating
deforestation in the biome is already threatening the key goal of the 2015
Paris Agreement — keeping the world from overshooting a 1.5 degrees Celsius
(2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) rise since the preindustrial era. The Paris accord
specifically cites the carbon-sink-and-sequestration capacity, and vital
importance, of large, intact forests as a reliable way to slow global warming.
Top
scientists are already warning that climate change and deforestation could be
causing the Amazon to cross a critical rainforest-to-savanna tipping point, at
which time the biome could begin releasing vast sums of stored carbon, pushing
the world toward climate catastrophe.
That
warning comes as Brazil, which includes much of the Amazon basin, has been
beset by wildfires and aggressive land grabbing. The Brazilian Amazon lost
3,475 square miles of forest — seven times the size of New York City — in 2019,
a staggering 85 percent increase over 2018.
But as
reported in the Jesuit magazine America, "Pope Francis' words will
certainly not please Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro who, on the eve of the
exhortation's publication, sent a proposed law to the Brazilian Congress that
would permit mining activities within the reserves of indigenous peoples,
including the Amazon region, without the people's consent."
Defending
Nature — Again
Dear Amazon
stands as an emphatic complement to Laudato Si, On Care for Our Common Home, a
papal encyclical released in June 2015 with the express purpose of spurring a
positive outcome to the United Nations negotiations that resulted in the
landmark Paris Agreement that December. An encyclical is a Catholic teaching
document of the highest order, possessing "moral authority."
Laudato Si
established Francis on the world stage as an ecumenical leader and advocate for
environmental protection. He bluntly blamed human activity for global warming
and castigated rampant consumerism and unbridled capitalism as hastening the
destruction of the earth.
Myriad
faith communities around the globe were inspired to organize and act on the
pope's urgings. However, the controversial manifesto met with mixed reviews in
Latin America where some see conservation as a hindrance to economic growth and
the relief of the poor in developing nations. Vatican officials have since
touted climate action as a "moral imperative."
The message
of Dear Amazon seems even more urgent than the 2015 encyclical, coming in
response to the rapidly worsening Amazon emergency: "We are water, air,
earth and life of the environment created by God," Francis writes.
"For this reason, we demand an end to the mistreatment and destruction of
mother Earth. The land has blood, and it is bleeding; the multinationals have
cut the veins of our mother Earth."
Laudauto Si
was released when the progressive pope was at the height of global popularity,
and it was heralded and cited for months by international media. But the urgent
call of Dear Amazon has so far been largely ignored. Mainstream media accounts
in the past week instead focused almost exclusively on Francis' decision to not
allow the marriage of priests serving in the Amazon as a way of boosting their
dramatically diminished numbers.
The New
York Times — which like other accounts stressed the Catholic church's
progressive and conservative political divide — went so far as to report that
"his closest advisers have acknowledged that the pope's impact has waned
on the global stage, especially on core issues like immigration and the
environment."
People of
Faith Respond
Francis
won't likely be standing down without a fight. He calls on Latin American
governments to enforce their environmental protection laws, return land rights
to indigenous peoples, and recognize that Amazonian rainforests are more than
an economic resource to be monetized for "extraction, energy, timber and
other industries that destroy and pollute."
"The
equilibrium of our planet depends on the health of the Amazon region,"
Francis writes. "Together with the biome of the Congo and Borneo, it
contains a dazzling diversity of woodlands on which rain cycles, climate
balance and a great variety of living beings also depend."
Faith
leaders contacted by Mongabay looked past Vatican politics and cheered the
pope's message in Dear Amazon, saying that it is invigorating their
conservation work and strategies.
"Protecting
rainforests is fundamentally an ethical issue, where care for creation and the
realization of social justice for indigenous peoples and forest communities are
part of one moral fabric," said Joe Corcoran, the UN project manager for
the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI), an NGO which lobbies for
governmental climate action in six rainforest countries.
"Through
IRI, we are seeing that not only is the leadership of Pope Francis rallying
Catholics to act, but [it is] also inspiring religious leaders from other
faiths to protect rainforests around the world," Corcoran said.
Laura
Vargas leads IRI's initiatives in Peru: "I believe Dear Amazon marks a
turning point for the whole life of the church in the Amazon and beyond its
borders. If we believe everything is interconnected, we realize that what
happens to the largest tropical forest in the world affects the entire
planet."
Meanwhile,
at London-based Christian Aid, a global environmental activism organization,
spokesman Joe Ware said, "The pope remains one of the most popular and
loved pope's with significant influence not just over one billion Catholics,
but of many others, too."
Ware
stressed that 2020 is a crucial year, the year the Paris Agreement goes into
force. The agreement remains dangerously incomplete as leaders of the
industrialized world continue dragging their feet to establish aggressive
carbon emission-reduction policies, even as time runs short to dramatically
begin decarbonizing the global economy — the UN itself warned in 2018 that the
world's nations have just 12 years to act to avoid climate catastrophe.
"It's
vital," Ware said, "that we have the voice of the Catholic Church and
people of faith around the world pushing political leaders this year to make
the boldest decisions possible."
Reposted
with permission from Mongabay.
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