SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – Let’s look at it this way. Some sounds are scarier than others. It all depends on your fear threshold. The scratchy sound of a mouse running across a wooden floor or a creaking door at night might bring beads of sweat to some foreheads and none to others.
In the vast reaches of 1.5 million square miles of the Brazilian Amazon, part of the largest tropical rainforest in the world and six or seven times the size of Texas, and which contains, according to the World Wildlife Fund, ten percent of the world’s known biodiversity, it is not the sounds of wild beasts foraging for food that induce fear.
Until relatively recently, the Amazon has been a paradise where nature and wildlife flourished unbothered by the indigenous tribes for whom it has been a home for centuries, living simple lives along the banks of the many Amazon rivers.
The sounds of nature are familiar and comforting. But now one strident sound strikes fear into the native population, Brazil’s environmentalists and increasingly concerned citizens everywhere.
It is the brutal sounds made by bulldozers and power saws, and the swish of falling trees that follows in their wake.
According to The Economist, “800,000 km2 of Amazon forest has been lost to logging, farming, mining, roads, dams, and other forms of development, an area equivalent to that of Turkey.” The noise of “development” is getting louder and louder as Brazil’s new government rolls back previous environmental regulations and ignores the dangers of deforestation.
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s elected president, takes an extremely short-sighted view of what he sees as a “Brazilian national resource” to be exploited to the maximum for commercial gain. No wonder he is called “the most environmentally dangerous head of state in the world”.
Along with Trump and other right-wing populist climate change deniers, that’s a very low bar against which to be judged.
Sacked as head of the government agency formerly tasked with monitoring deforestation, respected scientist Ricardo Galvão told the “Guardian” that he was “praying to the heavens the far-right leader would change tack before the Amazon – and Brazil’s international reputation as an environmental leader – was ruined.”
Bolsonaro has answered criticism of his opening the Amazon to increased commercial activity in these words: “Brazil is the virgin that every foreign pervert wants to get their hands on.”
It is fair to ask, as many Brazilians have done: Whose Amazon is it anyway? What business is it of non-Brazilians to concern themselves with the fate of this “virgin”? The Amazon (or at least the 60 percent of it that lies in territorial Brazil) is, after all, a national asset.
No argument there.
But while the Amazon certainly belongs to Brazil, it has a stunning impact on the rest of the world. There comes a moment, and that moment is overdue, when each of us to survive must look beyond our short term interests if we hope to have a world with clean air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat and flowers, a world our grandchildren can enjoy.
For more than a decade, the international Amazon Fund, run by BNDES, the Brazilian Development Bank, has worked to raise international understanding of the dangers to the Amazon and encourage foreign donations “in efforts to prevent, monitor and combat deforestation, as well as to promote the preservation and sustainable use of forests in the Amazon Biome.”
Its supporters understood that the health and well-being of the Amazon was as much a world issue as a Brazilian one. Now its main supporters are at loggerheads with Bolsonaro and his ministers. Just in the past few weeks two of the biggest donors, Norway and Germany, halted their donations to the Fund. The German embassy says the decision “reflects major concern over the increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.”
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has reacted angrily to a decision by Norway to stop funding projects to curb deforestation in Brazil after its right-wing government blocked operations of a fund receiving the aid.
“Isn’t Norway that country that kills whales up there in the North Pole?” he told reporters after Norway said it would halt the payment of about US$33 million. “Take that money and help Angela Merkel reforest Germany.”
Why does the Amazon Fund matter? For the same reason the 2015 Paris Accord on Climate Change was signed by 195 nations: it matters because protecting the environment takes different forms in different regions, but is greater than any of them.
“The Amazon Forest,” says the Amazon Fund, “is one of the richest areas on the planet in biodiversity and natural resources, concentrating close to 30 percent of the known species of the planet’s flora and fauna in an area of 5.5 million square kilometers. Its preservation is, therefore, crucial for ecological balance and is an important factor in the climate changes the planet has been facing.
The Amazon matters to global climate because it is a carbon sink that mitigates warming. If the deforestation continues unabated, the rainforest itself is likely to die back.
This would release a large amount of greenhouse gases; this release would speed up the dying process. Sensitive changes in temperature and rainfall, as well as to atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels, matter to the Amazon, too.
Nature knows no political boundaries. As deforestation expands and lines the pockets of anti-environmentalists, it threatens not only the native indigenous populations whose lives are disrupted and who must ultimately pay the price, but potentially the entire world.
It is not a threat to the distant future: it is a threat now.
This, according to experts quoted in The Economist, “has led to worries about tipping-points. In an influential paper in 2007, Gilvan Sampaio and Carlos Nobre of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) forecast that, were forty percent of the forest to perish, the loss of water-recycling capacity would mean very little of the remainder would have enough rainfall to survive.” The carry-over effect on El Nino and other weather systems would be devastating.
In July, President Bolsonaro called deforestation data “lies” and said he wanted to review them before they were released to the public.
Hamilton Mourão, Brazil’s Vice President, says that other countries’ professed concern for the Amazon masks “covetousness” for precious minerals in the region. Ricardo Salles, the Environment Minister, likes to point out that many rich countries cut down their own forests but have not fulfilled promises to pay Brazil not to do the same. “You can’t give Brazil the onus of being the world’s lungs without any benefits,” he argues.
According to Folha de S.Paulo, deforestation in the Amazon has grown sharply. Destruction in June increased 88 percent and in July 278 percent – compared to June and July 2018 — according to data from INPE’s monitoring systerm Deter (Detecting Real Deforestation).
The Bolsonaro government has criticized the disclosure of deforestation data and has stated that it may undermine trade agreements. Government criticism, however, is not backed by scientific information.
Making believe that the problem doesn’t exist will not make it go away. No national borders contain the environment and what happens in any one part of the world affects many others. Global warming and climate change are today’s greatest global threats.
While vitally important resources may “belong” to one nation or another, the provincial idea that what happens to them is a domestic rather than a worldwide issue is both naïve and dangerous.
The very sound of this “development” is very scary.