Fires are
devouring the Amazon. And Jair Bolsonaro is to blame
David Miranda
The ongoing destruction of the Amazon is taking place
because of policy choices made by those who now rule Brazil
Mon 26 Aug 2019 07.00 BST
‘The raging fires have become so potent that the smoke they
generate plunged the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, São Paulo, into total
darkness’ Photograph: Victor Moriyama/AFP/Getty Images
As the world watches in horror and terror as the Amazon
burns, scientists have made clear that the cause, principally if not entirely,
is human activity.
Here in Brazil, that human activity has human names and
faces: those of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his extremist
Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles. They have not merely permitted these
devastating fires, but have encouraged and fueled them.
They have done so with a toxic brew of radical ideology,
political corruption and banal greed. Put simply, the ongoing destruction of
the Amazon is taking place because of policy choices made by those who now rule
Brazil.
The magnitude of these fires, and the severity of the
dangers they pose to the world, have been widely demonstrated over the last
week. As the New York Times reported on Wednesday, the National Institute for
Space Research documented that it “had detected 39,194 fires this year in the
world’s largest rain forest, a 77% increase from the same period in 2018.”
The raging fires have become so potent that the smoke they
generate plunged the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, São Paulo, into total
darkness in the middle of the day on Tuesday. What was particularly shocking
about that sudden event was that the Amazonian fires are hundreds of miles away
from that city, but have become so dense and overwhelming that they snuffed out
light in that distant major metropolis.
To the extent one can locate any silver lining in this
literal dark cloud, it is that the cause of these fires are almost entirely
manmade, which means they can be stopped with changes in human behavior -
specifically, with policy changes by Brazil’s new government.
President Bolsonaro’s election victory last November was a
shock to the Brazilian political system because, as a Congressman for almost 30
years, his retrograde and unhinged views had relegated him to the fringe of
politics life. His presence in the Congress was regarded by most as a national
embarrassment; that he would one day occupy the presidential palace was
unthinkable.
But as has happened in numerous other countries in the
democratic world, including the United States, a series of crises and failures
validly attributed to the establishment class have driven large sections of the
country’s population into the arms of any self-styled outsider, no matter how
demagogic and radical.
Among Bolsonaro’s many extremist views is climate denialism
as stubborn and extreme as any prominent world figure, if not more so. He has long dismissed the scientific
consensus about climate scenarios as a hoax. And he campaigned on an explicit
pledge to exploit - ie destroy - the Amazon, which currently provides 20% of
the world’s oxygen and which climate scientists widely regard as the most
valuable asset humanity possesses in our increasingly difficult battle to avoid
climate catastrophes.
Since his election,
Bolsonaro has not only made good on his promises to fundamentally subvert our
country’s long-standing commitment to protect the Amazon, but has done so with
a speed and aggression that has surprised even his most virulent critics. To be
sure, Bolsonaro’s predecessors - including those from the center-left Workers’
Party - have earned their share of valid criticisms from environmentalists for
harming the Amazon for industrial gain. But - after just eight moths in
office - Bolsonaro’s damage to the world’s greatest rain forest is in an
entirely different universe of magnitude.
Deforestation is an affirmative goal of Bolsonaro. That can
be achieved by cutting down trees or, more efficiently, by simply burning large
areas that Brazil’s agricultural industry wants to exploit. It also means displacing the indigenous tribes
that have lived in those forests for centuries: people for whom Bolsonaro has
repeatedly expressed contempt. Their displacement from those lands has
often been accomplished with violence against environmental activists and
indigenous leaders.
Bolsonaro’s
choice for his Environment Minster, Ricardo Salles from the so-called New Party
(Partido Novo), exemplifies the radical and even violent anti-environmentalism
fueling these fires. Last year, Salles, while serving as a state environmental
official in São Paulo, was found guilty of administrative improprieties for
having altered a map to benefit mining companies.
He was fined and deprived of his political rights -
including his right to seek elected office - for eight years. Bolsonaro
evidently viewed these transgressions as a virtue since he announced his
selection of Salles to serve in his cabinet a mere three weeks after his
conviction.
In 2018, Salles - now the custodian of the Brazilian Amazon
- ran for federal Congress with a political ad that displayed bullets from a
rifle as his solution for environmental activists, indigenous tribes impeding
the destruction of their land, and “leftists.” Salles lost his bid for
Congress, but was rewarded with a much more powerful position: Bolsonaro’s
Environment Minister.
Bolsonaro and Salles view deforestation as such a pressing
priority that they openly despise anyone who seeks to impede it. Earlier this
month, Bolsonaro fired a top scientist after he warned the country that
deforestation was taking place at an unprecedented and dangerous rate. Last
month, when a reporter asked Bolsonaro about the damage being done to the
environment by his industrial policies, the President contemptuously told the
reporter he should defecate less: “one day yes, one day no.” And, in the face
of rising political pressure over the Amazonian fires, he infamously, and
baselessly, blamed environmental groups this week for having started them.
The agencies charged with safeguarding the nearly one
million indigenous people in Brazil have suffered such severe budget cuts under
Bolsonaro that they are now barely functioning. During the campaign, he vowed: “Not one centimetre will be demarcated for
indigenous reserves or quilombolas.” In late July, gold miners invaded
an indigenous village and one of its leaders was stabbed to death.
All of these dramatic changes have occurred not only from
ideology but also political captivity. Along with right-wing evangelicals and
supporters of Brazil’s past military dictatorship, Brazil’s powerful
agribusiness sector is a critical component of the coalition that swept
Bolsonaro into office.
Their gamble on Bolsonaro has paid dividends: a huge array
of previously banned pesticides has been approved for use this year with
virtually no debate or study. One result: the death of 500 million bees in the
last three months alone.
Worst of all, deforestation is consuming the Amazon at a
horrifically rapid pace. As The New York Times put it this week: “The
destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the
nation’s new far-right president took over and his government scaled back
efforts to fight illegal logging, ranching and mining.”
The government agency responsible for monitoring
deforestation documented the loss of “1,330 square miles of forest cover in the
first half of 2019, a 39 percent increase over the same period last year.”
What the world is witnessing is as deliberate as it is
dangerous. It is insufficient, and arguably offensive, for already-developed
and rich western powers which have done so much damage to the planet to simply
dictate to Brazil that it must not exploit its resources the way the west has
done with such great environmental damage.
But the world also cannot stand by and let the Bolsonaro
government destroy the Amazon. In lieu of unilateral decrees that smack of
arrogant colonialism, rich industrialized countries who need the Amazon to
survive should fund social programs for poor Brazilians who compose a large
majority of our supremely unequal country, in exchange for preservation of this
vital environmental asset.
Identifying the culprit - President Bolsonaron and Minister
Salles - is necessary but not sufficient to avert the environmental disaster.
The Amazon belongs to Brazil, but the need to save the planet belongs to all of
humanity, and all of us must bear this burden collectively.
David Miranda is a federal Congressman in Brazil
representing the state of Rio de Janeiro with the Party of Socialism and
Liberty (PSOL)
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