"The Amazon Is Completely Lawless" - Brazil's Rainforest After A Year Of Bolsonaro

Last edited Thu Dec 5, 2019, 10:49 AM - Edit history (1)

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“It confirms the Amazon is completely lawless,” Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist with the University of São Paulo, said of the data. “The environmental criminals feel more and more empowered.” He warned that the Amazon may soon cross a tipping point and begin to self-destruct. “Law enforcement has reached its minimum effectiveness in a decade,” he said. “It is a worrying warning for the future.”

Mr. Bolsonaro’s government has made some nods to combating illegal clear-cutting, but the president has reaffirmed his longstanding position of disdain toward conservation work. He once said that Brazil’s environmental policy was “suffocating the country”; he vowed on the campaign trail that not “a square centimeter” of land would be designated for Indigenous people; and last month he brushed aside official data about deforestation.

His stance has been widely noted on the Amazon frontier, where the rainforest is transformed into land for cattle, soybeans and other crops in a process that can be murky, sometimes illegal and frequently violent.

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A soybean plantation near the city of Paragominas.

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An illegal gold mining operation deep in the Brazilian Amazon.

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A soybean plantation whose owners have used burning to expand into the Amazon rainforest near the city of Porto Velho.

Scientists also warn that decades of destruction have brought the forest close to a tipping point, in which lower rainfall and longer dry seasons would turn most of it into savanna. According to research by Mr. Nobre, the tipping point will likely be reached at 20 to 25 percent of deforestation across the Amazon basin — or even sooner, depending on the rate of climate change. There is no accurate measure of deforestation across the nine countries containing the Amazon, but many researchers believe about 17 percent of the forest has been lost already. Whether this year’s figures represent an acceleration of that process or an exception to the trend will only become evident next summer, when the dry season returns.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html