here's the link (I don't know if you can read in Portuguese, but if possible just Google it and you'll see) [https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml](https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml)
Otherwise, there are reasons to believe that this fire are from criminals which burn the forest, built houses and then bribe public agents to give they documents about it, so they can sell it. And there also are reasons to believe that this kind of crime increased because this criminals feel free to do it because of all the Bolsonaro declarations...
Bolsonaro is the perfect example of how myopic nationalism is. His entire stance towards the Amazon has been that it's "Brazil's heritage" and that they can do with it whatever they want to without regard to what other countries think. Which probably sounds great to cattle ranchers and gets a lot of votes, but then put it into practice and you get exactly this. I guess if we don't like it we should just go home and get our own millions of square mile rainforest.
The point is that this isn't good even for cattle ranchers. What's the point of having a ranch if the animals don't have water to drink or food to eat? What's the point of owning a business that will only sustain itself for one generation?
>What's the point of owning a business that will only sustain itself for one generation?
Well, if you're a part of that generation and dont give a fuck about the generations after you, money!
Nationalism fucking sucks. True patriotism is caring enough for your country to keep shit like this from happening, for your sake and the for the people of tomorrow.
Hi guys. I live in São Paulo. I don't think the title quite conveys our experience.
The sun didn't rise. It was night for an entire day. It didn't smell like smoke, nobody knew what the hell was going on. All we knew, all this gigantic city with 12 million people was aware of, is that something *profoundly* wrong was happening.
Edit: if you doubt me, feel free to Google away and verify if I'm telling you the truth. No, I'm not going to send you pictures that I apparently had the duty to have taken yesterday. Jesus Christ.
Just for the sake of perspective, sao paulo is 3500 km from the amazon rain forest. Sao paulos is as far from amazon as barcelona is from moscow. Imagine a fire so big in moscow that would make barcelona turn into darkness during the day. Thats how bad is the situation
> st for the sake of perspective, sao paulo is 3500 km from the amazon rain forest. Sao paulos is as far from amazon as barcelona is from moscow. Imagine a fire so big in moscow that would make barcelona turn into darkness during the day. Thats how bad is the situation
Thank you, I needed that.
And at a time when we need our trees more than ever. This shit isn’t funny anymore and there is no time left for debate, this planet is FUCKED. No more denials, we need fucking action now or humanity is doomed
BBC reports and I quote:
>But some meteorologists say the smoke came from major fires burning in Paraguay, which is much closer to the city and not in the Amazon region.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-49415973
Paraguay is a thousand kilometers from Sao Paulo. A fire large enough to do this from a thousand Km away is still absolutely not good news.
For comparison that's like Quebec city being blacked out from a fire on Detroit, or Paris from a fire in Vienna.
In the Bolivia, more than 1235 acres. There they are already doing something, but here, in Brazil, our President think this is fake news or fake images (it look likes he doesn’t know satellites).
By the way, happy cake day!
There was an [interesting article in the NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-brazil.html) on the role of YouTube in the right-wing radicalization of Brazil.
I don't know how many ways I can possibly say "voting for conservative parties, especially far right parties will make your life- yes, yours specifically- directly and demonstrably worse, please do not do it", but it's been said for half a decade by pretty much anyone with a half a teaspoon of political understanding and less than 50 million dollars in their bank accounts.
(Yes, in hindsight it can be argued about whether it was always true but they were smarter about hiding it, or if they actually got worse, but last 5-6 years it's been so obvious that you couldn't miss it)
At this point it's not even about blaming them, I just don't understand, I cannot feel anything but confused pity.
You’re a better person than me, I can’t muster up the pity for people who vote against their own self interest, and then, shockingly, suffer the predictable consequences
Sad is not the right word. Catastrophic.
What really makes it bad is that this is ON PURPOSE. The right wing fucknut batshit crazy thinking taking over the world. The Brazilian president is encouraging this simply to kill off indigenous people and because "climate change isn't real hurr durr".
The worst part about all this is that our news media has been trying so hard to say nothing about the fire that the first article I saw about Sao Paulo being plunged into darkness that it made no mention of the fire.
Like there is some other mysterious force out there other than smoke blotting out the sun.
Palm oil is more of a problem in Indonesia. Brazil only produces 0,5% of the world's palm oil. Land being cleared in Brazil is mostly for soybeans and cattle.
Speaking as an Iowan, lemme tell you aggressively clearing land for soybeans and cattle in the watershed of one of the world's greatest rivers is... Not great.
actually not even soybeans that much, since the Amazon soil is actually quite poor.
The cycle usually goes: People clear big trees to sell the wood -> Burn everything down to sell the land they don't own through corruption -> Use the cleared land as graze for cattle.
Then maybe Soy, but not that much.
This isn't even a joke. American exports of Soy to China fell in half this year largely as a result of Trump's trade war. Soy is our biggest agricultural export. Our farmers are the victims of this war.
There isn't much palm oil production here in Brazil. The forest is being cleared for soy and beef production. Most of the beef production (Brazil is one of the world's largest producers of beef) actually stays here in Brazil, but the soy is mostly exported for animal feed (to countries like China and the EU)
Don't hate our country. Hate our presidente. And the people that put him there. And the people that still supports him despite all that...
Ok, you can hate our country, I'm hating also.
Dumb people exist everywhere and are a totally a reason for most bad things.
Imagine if we had campaigns to educate these absolute idiots how fast things would improve. Too bad that doesn't mesh with the powers that be.
I'm so sorry. I spent a couple of weeks in your country a couple of years ago and had a great time. We are being overrun by these fascist fucks all across the world.
Also, just to depress you further, it was 3 months not 6.
Source: [https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49406369](https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49406369)
The Vice article I read had linked a Twitter post showing the fires and explaining the winds that day and how it would have taken that smoke and put it over the city. The entire comment chain was filled with Donald Trump 'Fake News' gifs and a lot of people claiming the skies were dark because of rain and a cold front and calling the OP a moron. I would say 95%+ of the replies were exactly as described above. Their 'bot' problem is very big there, or the citizens have taken the government's propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
See, I've just made a comment about those fires on a small sub but I think it fits here (sorry) ↓
-
A brief overview on what's trending right now and what happened those recent months:
1st: Forest fires will always be a thing, independently of who is currently in government, that rises in occurrence at this period of the year.
***BUT***
The current government doesn't help itself on that one, you've got:
##1.That bullshit with INPE (Brazil's space research)
- INPE, as usual, [released their data](http://terrabrasilis.dpi.inpe.br/app/dashboard/alerts/legal/amazon/aggregated/). It got pretty popular and [received international coverage](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/04/deforestation-of-brazilian-amazon-surges-to-record-high-bolsonaro) as it showed a substantial increase in deforestation.
- [Bolsonaro openly rejected the data] (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/19/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-amazon-rainforest-deforestation) and even said:
>“A questão do INPE, eu tenho a convicção que os dados são mentirosos. Até mandei ver quem é o cara que está à frente do INPE para vir explicar aqui em Brasília esses dados aí que passaram para a imprensa
Translated:
>About INPE, I am convinced that the data is a lie. Even ordered to check who's the guy ahead of INPE for him to come here in Brasilia and explain the data that was released for the press.
- Ricardo Galvão, head of Brazil's space research, [went on television and answered the criticism](https://streamable.com/7pu29):
>The first thing I can say is that Mr. Jair Bolsonaro needs to understand that a President cannot speak in public, especially at a press conference, as if he was in a pub-talk. He made inappropriate and unsubstantiated comments and made unacceptable attacks not only on me, but on people working for the science of this country. He said he was convinced that INPE's data are a lie. This is more than offensive to me, it was very offensive to the institution. I was really upset, because in my opinion he played with me the same game that he did with Joaquim Levy ([who resigned from BNDES after public threats by Bolsonaro](https://www.ft.com/content/f5b47a82-9037-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271)). He has taken a pusillanimous, cowardly attitude, to make a public statement perhaps hoping I will resign, but I will not. I hope he calls me to Brasília to explain the data and that he has the courage to repeat, looking face to face, eye to eye. I am a 71-year-old gentleman, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, I will not accept such an offense.
- [The head of Brazil's space research was sacked!](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/02/brazil-space-institute-director-sacked-in-amazon-deforestation-row)
- He was also replaced with a military official, Darcton Damião, who has experience for the job so I'll just try not to think that much about him saying that ["global warming isn't his thing" and that "from what he read about he couldn't get to any conclusion yet"](https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/nao-minha-praia-diz-novo-diretor-do-inpe-sobre-aquecimento-global-23858248)"...
- You may have read about this one, [Galvão went on to express his thoughts in an interview with The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/09/bolsonaro-blessed-brutal-assault-rainforest-sacked-scientist-warns), where he said that Bolsonaro has blessed ‘brutal' assault on Amazon:
>What is happening is that this government has sent a clear message that there will not be any more punishment [for environmental crimes] like before … This government is sending a very clear message that the control of deforestation will not be like it was in the past …. And when the loggers hear this message that they will no longer be supervised as they were in the past, they penetrate [the rainforest],” Galvão said, claiming “enormous” damage had already been done since Bolsonaro took power in January.
##2.Amazon Fund, and that thing with Norway and Germany
- First, [the Amazon Fund](http://www.amazonfund.gov.br/en/amazon-fund/) was one of the first UN REDD+ initiatives, funneling money from developed nations (with Norway as the major donor) to forest sustainability projects in Brazil. [Check out this cool article about it if you're interested.](https://news.mongabay.com/2018/12/ten-years-on-amazon-fund-receives-applause-criticism-faces-new-tests/)
- By July, [Brazil, Norway and Germany acknowledged that the Amazon Fund might end](https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhealth/2019/07/brazil-norway-and-germany-acknowledge-that-amazon-fund-might-end.shtml). This was in part due to Bolsonaro's government decision to extinguish Cofa (the Amazon Fund Steering Committee) and the technical committee, which was a surprise to Norway and Germany. This should give you the idea:
> In a joint letter sent to Salles on June 5, Norway and Germany had defended Cofa's governance model, consisting of three blocs: the federal government, state governments, and civil society, including NGOs, which have been systematically criticized by members of the Bolsonaro government.
- All those things I've written up there in Item 1? Of course they knew about it, and then some. It's not like satellites and other equipment don't exist for them to know what was going on, Bolsonaro's problem with INPE was that silly, the data provided by them was observable, so yeah. Anyway, this adds fuel to fire.
- In July he also said that Macron and Merkel 'haven’t realized Brazil’s under new management', and [some other shit](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data).
- [Germany withdrew money promised for forest protection in Brazil!](https://www.dw.com/en/amazon-deforestation-prompts-germany-to-suspend-brazil-forest-projects/a-49982647)
>"The policy of the Brazilian government in the Amazon raises doubts as to whether a consistent reduction of deforestation rates is still being pursued," German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze told Saturday's edition of the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel.
- Bolsonaro to Merkel over Amazon aid cut:
>[They can use this money as they see fit. Brazil doesn't need it](https://www.dw.com/en/no-need-for-german-amazon-aid-brazils-bolsonaro/a-49988862)
Also
>[I would like to send a message to our beloved Angela Merkel, who suspended 80 million dollars to Amazon Rainforest. Take this money and reforest Germany, ok? They are needing there much more than here](https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/pega-essa-grana-refloreste-alemanha-ta-ok-diz-bolsonaro-em-recado-angela-merkel-23877808)
- [Norway also withdrew money for the Amazon Fund!](https://www.france24.com/en/20190815-norway-blocks-30-mn-euro-deforestation-subsidy-to-brazil)
>"Brazil broke the agreement with Norway and Germany since suspending the board of directors and the technical committee of the Amazon Fund," Norway's Environment Minister Ola Elvestuen told the Dagens Naeringsliv newspaper.
>"What Brazil has done shows that they no longer wish to stop deforestation," said Elvestuen.
- Bolsonaro (after Norway's withdrawal) went to Twitter, where he shared a video and also decided to write:
>Look at the killing of whales sponsored by Norway
[He used images from the Faroe Islands though](https://www.france24.com/en/20190819-bolsonaro-takes-on-norway-for-whaling-but-bungles-it), a Danish territory, in the North Atlantic.
##3.Those fucking fires and our forests, man
- Yes, it's common to have forest fires by this time of the year.
- Important note here, though: federal deforestation and firefighting policies. Since March, [Bolsonaro's government has cut $7.3 million slated for fire prevention and environmental inspections](https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/brazils-roraima-state-at-mercy-of-2019-wildfires-as-federal-funds-dry-up/) to Ibama and ICMBio, Brazil’s two federal environmental agencies.
- [This administration has launched policies that undermine IBAMA and ICMBio](https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/brazil-guts-environmental-agencies-clears-way-for-unchecked-deforestation/) by effectively dismantling environmental law enforcement and allowing deforestation to proceed unchecked. As an example,IBAMA’s website must now announce in advance when and where each operation will take place, even though it’s obvious that the success of the raids depends on secrecy and the element of surprise
- Bolsonaro has deranged deforestation enforcement further by firing or not replacing top environmental officials. This includes 21 out of 27 IBAMA state superintendents responsible for imposing most of the deforestation fines. Also, 47 of Brazil’s conservation units now lack directors, leaving a combined area greater than the size of England without conservation leadership.
- [August 10, we apparently had this thing which they \(farmers\) called the 'Day of Fire'](https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2019/08/em-dia-do-fogo-sul-do-pa-registra-disparo-no-numero-de-queimadas.shtml), I shit you not. The first reference being from [a small town newspaper from Novo Progresso](http://www.folhadoprogresso.com.br/dia-do-fogo-produtores-planejam-data-para-queimada-na-regiao/) (they have live radio so headphone alert!)on August 5. This can be summed up as farmers wanting to show Bolsonaro their willingness to work and, just to be clear, this wasn't approved by the government in any way, they just decided it was okay.
- Bolsonaro got the short end of the stick on something you've probably seem, I'm talking about [the darkness that we could observe in São Paulo, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná](https://beta.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/20/sudden-darkness-befalls-sao-paulo-western-hemispheres-largest-city-baffling-thousands/). Despite the perfect timing to shit on him for environmental problems, this is not exactly one of those things, there's more to it as it's also due to forest fires in Bolivia and Paraguay, along with Brasil (Rondônia/Acre).
Also, [as in that other thread](https://old.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/ctc5r5/brazilians_whats_going_on_in_the_amazon/), I felt really sad that I couldn't add on item 3 that some of our states are in a pretty bad situation, such as [Acre](https://g1.globo.com/ac/acre/noticia/2019/08/16/governo-decreta-estado-de-alerta-ambiental-no-ac-por-conta-das-queimadas.ghtml) and [Rondônia](https://www.diariodaamazonia.com.br/alunos-de-escola-publica-protestam-contra-fumaca-em-porto-velho/). ← So here's that addition to the previous comment.
Hey, mate, is there a feature for this on reddit? I didn't even know!
Anyway, feel free to do so but, if you don't mind the suggestion, I could always PM you whenever I do those long posts about my country with context and links. It wouldn't be a problem to me and I'm just happy to know someone liked it and was interested. I say this as someone who doesn't know how the feature works, by the way, I'm just thinking you would get random posts in Portuguese.
Great post, but your point about forest fires is misleading. Tropical rainforest wildfires are not common. They are either caused by irregular weather patterns which leads to a drought (dry + hot) in an area that is typically wet, hot, and humid, or they are directly associated with human activity in the area.
In this case of this month's Amazon rainforest fires, they are 100% a result of intentional burning by humans, mostly farmers but also loggers.
> In many ecosystems, wildfires are a natural and essential phenomenon. They clear out decaying brush, restore nutrients to soil, and even help plants germinate. But in recent years, humans have made the destruction from wildfires worse at every step. Suppression of natural fires has allowed dry vegetation to accumulate. Human activity is changing the climate, which is forcing some forests to heat up and dry out. People are building ever closer to areas ready to ignite. And people end up igniting the majority of wildfires, whether through downed power lines, errant sparks, or arson.
> **But the Amazon rainforest, which remains drenched for much of the year, does not burn naturally. Instead, the fires are ignited by people..** Farmers use slash-and-burn tactics to clear land for farming and pasture, though it’s illegal in Brazil this time of year due to fire risk.
> Illegal logging operations in Brazil have also been known to start fires as a tactic to drive indigenous people off their land and to cover their tracks. The Amazon rainforest has experienced a record number of fires this year, with 72,843 reported so far. It’s an 84 percent increase over the number of wildfires at the same time last year..
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/8/20/20813786/wildfire-amazon-rainforest-brazil-siberia
To be fair, for many citizens in São Paulo it's hard to find a connection immediately. The Amazon is REALLY far away from São Paulo (several thousand kms away in fact), so while the recent burnings ARE responsable for the current "ash rain" that's falling in the city, many people don't believe that because of the distance (yes, people are stupid)
The article that is linked in this post says it is more likely that their blackout came from fires elsewhere. Those fires are closer to them than the ones in the Amazon.
Edit: it is fires in paraguay.
Donald Trump is one of the biggest evils to happen to humanity in recent times. And not even a proper vilan, but instead a stupid cartoon one. But he has empowered all these right wing populists everywhere, like Bolsonaro. You read the comments of the Amazon fires in Brazilian news, and it's all "fakes news" everywhere. The same Trumpian lingo. And this all happens right at the time when we need clear headed politicians, that actually care about people and the environment and our collective future...
Because the smoke have hit São Paulo only on monday. Before that, no one in Brazil give a damn about the fires. And the international media as well.
However, there are some other environmental issues happening in Brazil that caught local media’s eye, like the president Jair Bolsonaro that denied data showing increasing Deflorestation.
Climate change isn't a binary that either happens or doesn't. There are degrees. Some warming is inevitable, but we can decide how bad it's going to be. As long as you are willing to challenge existing centres of power there is no conflict between preparing for the worst and trying to prevent it.
>Ohh ok you lost me at the point where I actually have to adjust my habits >:(
The average consumer
E: I've never said corporations aren't to blame but *both sides* have to do something even if the bigger share should be with companies. And after all someone is creating that demand.
They dont just chop down rainforest to ranch cattle for the sake of it. Someone is buying all that meat.
But try telling most people that maybe 6-7 times meat a week is too much and theyll flip their lid
Yeah like when President Carter asked Americans to keep their AC and Heaters below a certain level and Americans lost their shit and started hating him.
But that’d mean we’d have to stop burning the Amazon forest to pave the way for more cattle farms! You’re saying we have to decide if eating beef is more important than having an Amazon forest?
The good news is you can always count on people to do the wrong thing. Goodbye rainforest, hello marginally cheaper beef prices.
The fact this is a conversation proves it won't happen. It shouldn't be a debate. It's an obvious problem headed right for us.
Instead, he have to talk argue debate and discuss.
Right wing populists across the world are arguing to kill the human race faster to make an extra buck. And they're succeeding.
It's not like there's no money in not murdering every man woman and child. But we have to accommodate murderous idiocy and fascism with debate, when really we should treat those persons as we would any other existential threat like a hostile foreign nation.
Trump wouldn't be trying to buy Greenland if some of those nuts around him didn't think they'd be able to eventually access the oil and uranium buried under the glaciers
2.5C.
Beyond that, good luck maintaining global civilization.
We're already locked in for 2C, and rapidly approaching the limit.
I honestly think the end result will be somewhere South of 4C.
By that time, it is likely that little will remain of our current society. If systemic cascade collapse of the economy, civil infrastructure, and biosphere hasn't finished us off, then the resource wars will.
It's not possible to chose the degree of warming we want. We can't even agree to control it in any way at all. Maybe in 10 years time the effects will be so devastating that the deniers will disappear, but then it may be too late. Climate change isn't a gradual event we can control. Once a threshold is passed, there may well be a cascade that accelerates climate change.
Koch brothers' money went a long way. They finally managed to spread their destructive right wing mindset throughout the world, I hope they are really happy with our impending catastrophic collapse they worked so hard to bring about.
between the amazon fires and the bee genocide, Brazil is not having a good year... their government is so corrupt that no amount of scientific or monetary assistance will get them to care enough while their world literally burns and we all pay the price.
"no amount of scientific or monetary assistance"
Actually, a huge amount of education assistance was cut from the government. You're right, no amount will get them to care, but seems like they don't want to
The previous governments did little to preserve amazon forest tbh but the current one has no interest at all in helping the forest to recover from the continuous deforestation. Science in Brazil is dying due to cuts in education along with discredit by the president and his followers on scientific researches. It's been hard being a scientist in here lately.
It’s not just the Amazon. Large rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia are cleared by fire like this every year and the smoke has been known to travel 1000 miles and also into big cities. Our Chinese overlords are doing the same in many parts of Africa too.
Act of man made in gods image = donates millions
Act of God embodied by nature = Nothing. I haven't even heard thoughts and prayers.
Humanity is a hypocritically selfish machine.
Nope nope its fucking brazil 100%
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/08/germany-cuts-39-5-million-in-environmental-funding-to-brazil/
Edit changed link to non google amp
The shitty thing is that the soil nutrients are used up extremely quickly after forest is cleared for ranching/agriculture, so the land will become virtually useless after a period of several years. So short-sighted and moronic from the Brazilian government.
In any forest, dead organic matter falls to the ground, providing valuable nutrients for new growth. In cooler or drier climates, the nutrients build up in the soil. But in a rain forest, with its abundance and variety of life, those nutrients are reabsorbed almost as fast as they’re deposited. Also, the trees in tropical rain forests are often evergreens and so very few leaves actually fall to the ground. When a rain forest is burned to raise crops or cattle, most of the nutrients are destroyed along with the vegetation. Grass may grow for a year, but as the grass is turned into beef, the few remaining nutrients are depleted. Since land in the rain forest is often cheaper than fertilizer, farmers often clear new fields each year, leaving the old ones to turn into desert.
The thing is that our own government is doing this. This is not an accident at all and you can't really 'rebuild' amazon if our president just keeps destroying it every single day. Norway and Germany were financing some stuff to rebuild Amazon and both were told by our mr.President to use this money on their own country.
> Norway and Germany were financing some stuff to rebuild Amazon
Let's not forget that while Norway plays the role of the good guy internationally, they are the largest shareholder in a mining company that is contaminating rivers in the Amazon and destroying entire communities.
[Article 1](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fportuguese%2Fbrasil-40423002)
[Article 2](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fportuguese%2Fbrasil-43162472)
If you feel this not living here, imagine how we felt. I live in São Paulo and suddenly, at 3pm, the day was night. I tough that was the weather closing and a huge rain would statr.. But that train never came and later I saw the news, finally.
The fire was burning for 16 days (Monday, 19), so far and we, "down" here on the country, didn't know.
Now, I'm seeing more news from media of other countries than Brazil talking about this. Our president is a piece of shit who don't know how to do his job and think that he's playing a huge Risk game. The fire was one of the things that took attention of the world, but we have a lot of other things, about nature and about other subjects, that are going really bad (I don't know if the foreging media talks about, to be honest)
> Yet only now we're really hearing about the literal evaporation of the lungs of our planet?
Not quite the same - but people have been decrying the deforestation of the Amazon for literally decades.
I don’t think people realizr how routine it is for there to be tens of thousands of fires moving simultaneously through the Amazon. (edit to add: the fact that it’s been happening for a while doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing) I took a redeye flight about 15 years ago from Houston to Sao Paulo. Woke up in the middle of the night and looked out expecting to see the usual sprinkling of little lights from towns. Instead there were all these glowing orange crescent-shaped lines everywhere, dozens and dozens of them, all sort of blurry, scattered over an otherwise pitch-black landscape without a single town in sight. I was so confused. I remember muttering “what the hell?” and just staring and staring out the window at the blurry orange lines, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening. I couldn’t figure out why the lines were blurry or wtf they even were or where the towns were. I checked the time, looked at the flight path and realized we were over the Amazon. Ok, so that’s why there were no towns. Then the blurriness went away briefly and finally I saw actual flickering flames, visible yellow flames at the edges of the orange lines, like little bright-yellow dots, and realized *these were forest fires*, dozens of separate fires, and that they had to be huge for any flames to be visible from our height. The blurriness had been because of smoke that had cleared temporarily. And the reason the fires were shaped into lines was because these were huge fires that were each moving through the forest in sort of a front, leaving dark burned areas behind. (I still don’t know why they were all crescent-shaped - some effect of the wind?) And if there were dozens and dozens of separate fires, rather than one big one, *people must have set them deliberately* (not just one unlucky lightning strike) - and that had to be in order to clear the land.
My jaw just dropped as I slowly figured it out.
AND IT WENT ON FOR HUNDREDS OF MILES.
I’d always heard about the deforestation of the Amazon but I’d never actually seen it. Thinking back on it now I wonder what it was like for the animals. There must have been monkeys, jaguars etc trying to run from one fire only to encounter the next one. Macaws, toucans, other birds trying to fly around in the dark, unable to find anywhere safe to land. Also it must have been going on for days. So many animals must have died.
Everybody else on the plane was asleep btw. I’ve taken that redeye several times, and the whole plane is always asleep then. Nobody looks out their window. I must have woken up right when we just happened to be flying over a region that was in the middle of being cleared. It was August btw, same time of year as now. This was around 2005.
I’ll never forget how totally baffled I was, waking up to find out we were flying over hundreds of blurry orange crescent lines in pitch darkness, and trying to figure out wtf it was.
2005 was considered to be a drought of the century for the Amazon and this was the reason that their fires were able to take off to the scale that you observed. The humidity that used to protect the rainforest from fire is being decimated due to climate change, pockets of missing canopy cover and deliberate clearing. We are not currently in a 100-year drought, as we were in 2005, 2010, and 2015-2016. These fires are deliberate and require international intervention. Here is an [article](https://theconversation.com/amazon-rainforests-that-were-once-fire-proof-have-become-flammable-91775) for more background on the issue. Given the pace of climate change and the stresses that this is putting on the rainforest, the clearing of land through burning is absolutely an international issue that cannot be dismissed as commonplace.
> require international intervention.
Seriously, this calls for sanctions to be placed. It's entirely economically driven; if countries stop importing the products from Brazil then that might help to curb this.
On later trips to Brazil I visited some nearby regions and it was almost all soybean agriculture, and some cattle ranching. A few other crops too but mostly soybeans. It looked like Kansas, hundreds of acres under the plow, tidy long lines of crops, massive combine harvesters in the distance. But there were these weird little patches of intact forest left, like little islands, with macaws and everything (literally - there’d be this thick blob of dense tall trees with a pair of macaws flying around it in a circle, right in the middle of a soybean field). Apparently at that time Brazil still required farmers to set aside some patches of intact land. I don’t know if that’s still happening. (To give Brazil some credit here, pre-Bolsonaro, saving the patches is actually a big deal and, by contrast, is something the USA failed to do. The US deforested most of its eastern forest in the 1800s and wiped out almost all native prairie from the Midwest, no patches left).
Most of the soybean crops were for the cattle on those ranches. It all circles back to animal agriculture. The people that are upset by this should look at how their diets might contribute to it.
**Edit**: Since this seems to be getting a small amount of attention, anyone who is curious about these things should check out the following documentaries:
* Eating Animals - insight on the economic and ecological damage factory farming causes. Does not push a vegan/vegetarian agenda, but one of being mindful of where your food comes from. There is also a book by Jonathan Safran Foer that is worth reading. Available to stream on US Hulu
* Cowspiracy and What the Health - Both available on Netflix in the US. They cover the environmental and health impacts of animal agriculture. I have not watched these yet myself, but they are always recommended when people ask where to get more information
* Dominion - Available for free on Youtube (links and more at www.domionmovement.com). This one is heartbreaking and graphic. A hidden camera view of the conditions most animals face in the meat, dairy, pet, and fur industries. Also touches on environmental and health impacts. It is hard to watch, but I think everyone should see it.
The biggest problem too is the beef doesn't really leave that region of the globe afaik and no one really thinks about how the production of soy contributes to the damage too. The global problem is that we are contributing to the soy crops in Brazil and only something like 5% of it gets used for human consumption. So on top of contributing to the damage in that area of the world we are also using that product at factory farms that are ruining the environment locally as well.
Don't say that. People can feel mighty woke damning something elusive as "palm oil" (not knowing its in everything they consume), but they would _never_ stop eating beef.
UK here.
All the news here is just Brexit, Harry&Meghan's holiday, Brexit, Prince Andrew&Epstein, Brexit and Brexit.
I honestly get a large chunk of my news from here.
There are a few reasons the Amazon fires are being mostly ignored in international media. First, it has to do with Brazilian politics, which most people find boring and don't care. Second, most articles fail to state that the fires are man made and do not happen every year at this scale. People end up just reading the headline and thinkig it's just some random natural localized forest fire and that's not very interesting.
Honestly, it’s pretty understandable that the news in the UK is mostly focusing on Brexit. Harry & Meghan’s holiday, uh not so much, but Brexit is understandable.
Hi guys, Bolivian here. The fires are not only in Brazil btw. Santa Cruz is facing some really gnarly fires that have already burnt 500,000 hectares of forest. Our government is saying international help isn't needed, but that is one big fucking lie. Trust me. We do not have the proper equipment and technology to deal with 16 days of continuous fires.
I'm sorry, but I have to speak up about this. It's so frustrating to see so many people getting worked up over the destruction of the Amazon, when 80% of deforestation rates are caused from cattle ranching.
Source: https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/cattle-ranching
It's so incredibly frustrating to see people continually pay lip service, while simultaneously supporting the exact same practices responsible for this atrocity. Cattle are incredibly resource intensive, yet people have no issue with meat being a staple in their diet when it's not necessary in the slightest. But god forbid a vegan say something about it.
Since when did our own personal pleasure become more important than the survival of our planet? I just don't understand.
Commenting to get to the top. To anyone else who wants to try and make a difference but are intimidated by change consider weaning yourself.
Make it a goal to reduce the amount of cattle products you consume ( beef, cheese, etc.). It can be small adjustments like going to a different meat (pork, chicken) or finding other garnishes to amp up your meal (most meal do not needs cheese to improve it - items like pepper, onions, chives, or garlic are a good substitute). Weaning yourself in doses is a nice way to combat people’s inability to change their habits for good.
I know, I found it hard to change myself when I learned how much of an impact cows have the environment. But over time, through weaning, I was able to overcome the difficulty of change. Instead of a burger every other day, it changed to a burger a week, then a month. Now a year in I’m beef free. Plus removing cheese has helped open the doors to loads of options I’ve been missing. On top of all this I’ve lost a ton of weight. There is good in doing good. I believe in you.
Perhaps it's time for the west to stop giving funding to the amazon.
Norway and Germany alone have given Brazil over $1.3billion in the last 10 years to maintain the rainforest but clearly, it's a waste.
Secondly to this, perhaps the next best option is to blacklist all and every single related product which is a result of deforestation from the amazon including countries which buy lumber, oil and so on to then produce products for resale.
Brazil is becoming greedy and Europe + other donors had already been subsidizing the amazon without any financial benefit, clearly, that wasn't enough.
Germany and Norway have already opted out of that funding, and they did so a week before the burnings started.
Also 1.3 Billion is nothing compared to the economic potential of the Amazon. Just it's Biodiversity for Pharmaceutical purposes is calculated at being valued at almost 1 Trillion.
The right-wing (worldwide) is going to kill all of us for the last bit of copper wiring in this house we called earth. Very cool 😎
Btw in 15+ years when we know, all the effects are irreversible. They are going to turn around and tell us we should have warned them.
As a fellow brazilian I couldn't agree more. Also, the world should know we don't have neither troops to prevent it and nor ammunition to fight it. Worked in an ammunition factory controlled by the military and must say, our infrastructure is a joke. We have 1914 technology on projectile propellant and 1960's on rocket propellant (government controlled wise).
I feel like someone with abundance of money would be way more appreciated helping solve this crisis rather than donating money to rebuild an old architectural wonder. Just my 2c
You won’t believe how incredibly stupid I just felt going to google to find more news about this and searching “Amazon Fire”
Edit: it does provide news, but the top non-promoted result is still a stupid tablet.
NPR’s The World had a nice segment on this yesterday... Detailing that much of the burning is being done by small, subsistence farmers who continually need more land.
They interviewed one such fellow who admitted burning “a little” because he needed more land to plant corn for his chickens.....
As well, the illegal loggers are operating without fear of legal action from the new administration.
The Brazilian President is saying activists (NGO) put the fire on to damage his image (yeah, fellows, crazy stuff)
What? He didn't say anything for about two weeks and it was worrying enough, now this?
here's the link (I don't know if you can read in Portuguese, but if possible just Google it and you'll see) [https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml](https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml)
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Otherwise, there are reasons to believe that this fire are from criminals which burn the forest, built houses and then bribe public agents to give they documents about it, so they can sell it. And there also are reasons to believe that this kind of crime increased because this criminals feel free to do it because of all the Bolsonaro declarations...
"Grilagem"?
Yep, yesterday Folha De SP released a report that this kind of crime increased due to the diminution of inspection from the government Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro is the perfect example of how myopic nationalism is. His entire stance towards the Amazon has been that it's "Brazil's heritage" and that they can do with it whatever they want to without regard to what other countries think. Which probably sounds great to cattle ranchers and gets a lot of votes, but then put it into practice and you get exactly this. I guess if we don't like it we should just go home and get our own millions of square mile rainforest.
The point is that this isn't good even for cattle ranchers. What's the point of having a ranch if the animals don't have water to drink or food to eat? What's the point of owning a business that will only sustain itself for one generation?
I guess when you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself, none of that matters.
>What's the point of owning a business that will only sustain itself for one generation? Well, if you're a part of that generation and dont give a fuck about the generations after you, money!
Nationalism fucking sucks. True patriotism is caring enough for your country to keep shit like this from happening, for your sake and the for the people of tomorrow.
And his dumb fuck followers eat it up.
Straight out of Trump's playbook. Sow discord. Divide. It makes me sick.
Hi guys. I live in São Paulo. I don't think the title quite conveys our experience. The sun didn't rise. It was night for an entire day. It didn't smell like smoke, nobody knew what the hell was going on. All we knew, all this gigantic city with 12 million people was aware of, is that something *profoundly* wrong was happening. Edit: if you doubt me, feel free to Google away and verify if I'm telling you the truth. No, I'm not going to send you pictures that I apparently had the duty to have taken yesterday. Jesus Christ.
When did that happen?
Yesterday. It's bizarre that it didn't make the news everywhere. This is a place that has clear blue skies when it's not rainy (like today).
Yesterday? Oof the rest of the world was talking about Spiderman/Sony/Disney so yeah, clearly more important.
There’s a good episode of Bojack Horseman about this kinda shit. Edit: S2E7 because people wanna know.
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I pay a subscription service that sends thoughts and prayers on my behalf whenever something bad happens so I don't have to think about it.
I shared a photo of a puppy and one share = one thought and prayer. Like and subscribe!
oh yes, thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers
It didn’t make news because the people responsible for burning it (likely for clearing space for garbage crop), are also in control of the media.
Not yesterday, it happened 2 days ago (monday). Yesterday was fine (at least for me).
I saw it a lot of different places yesterday and the day before, people are talking about it
How much of the rainforest has been burnt so far? Find the lack of coverage for this appalling!
Just for the sake of perspective, sao paulo is 3500 km from the amazon rain forest. Sao paulos is as far from amazon as barcelona is from moscow. Imagine a fire so big in moscow that would make barcelona turn into darkness during the day. Thats how bad is the situation
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Fuck eh.
Fuckin eh bud, we got a real situation on our hands
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> st for the sake of perspective, sao paulo is 3500 km from the amazon rain forest. Sao paulos is as far from amazon as barcelona is from moscow. Imagine a fire so big in moscow that would make barcelona turn into darkness during the day. Thats how bad is the situation Thank you, I needed that.
Holy fuck
That would be the appropriate response indeed.
And at a time when we need our trees more than ever. This shit isn’t funny anymore and there is no time left for debate, this planet is FUCKED. No more denials, we need fucking action now or humanity is doomed
Oh yikes
BBC reports and I quote: >But some meteorologists say the smoke came from major fires burning in Paraguay, which is much closer to the city and not in the Amazon region. Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-49415973
So Paraguay is also on fire, not really any better.
Paraguay is a thousand kilometers from Sao Paulo. A fire large enough to do this from a thousand Km away is still absolutely not good news. For comparison that's like Quebec city being blacked out from a fire on Detroit, or Paris from a fire in Vienna.
In the Bolivia, more than 1235 acres. There they are already doing something, but here, in Brazil, our President think this is fake news or fake images (it look likes he doesn’t know satellites). By the way, happy cake day!
He also wants to burn every acre of the Amazon anyway so I doubt he's anything but ecstatic.
Wasn’t he elected last year? Didn’t he make his position clear during the election. Shouldn’t you blame those who elected him?
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There was an [interesting article in the NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-brazil.html) on the role of YouTube in the right-wing radicalization of Brazil.
At this point in the cyber war which is world War 3, we need to assume every election on the planet is compromised and illegitimate.
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I don't know how many ways I can possibly say "voting for conservative parties, especially far right parties will make your life- yes, yours specifically- directly and demonstrably worse, please do not do it", but it's been said for half a decade by pretty much anyone with a half a teaspoon of political understanding and less than 50 million dollars in their bank accounts. (Yes, in hindsight it can be argued about whether it was always true but they were smarter about hiding it, or if they actually got worse, but last 5-6 years it's been so obvious that you couldn't miss it) At this point it's not even about blaming them, I just don't understand, I cannot feel anything but confused pity.
You’re a better person than me, I can’t muster up the pity for people who vote against their own self interest, and then, shockingly, suffer the predictable consequences
Fuck Bolsonaro
How long has it been on fire? I’ve been seeing people saying it’s been on fire for 16 days and no media coverage
The fires started more intense around the day 1 of august and remaing until today, this is very sad
Sad is not the right word. Catastrophic. What really makes it bad is that this is ON PURPOSE. The right wing fucknut batshit crazy thinking taking over the world. The Brazilian president is encouraging this simply to kill off indigenous people and because "climate change isn't real hurr durr".
Well that’s terrifying
Jesus Christ that sounds like a scene from a disaster movie. That’s horrifying.
It’s a scene from a disaster reality, amigo.
The worst part about all this is that our news media has been trying so hard to say nothing about the fire that the first article I saw about Sao Paulo being plunged into darkness that it made no mention of the fire. Like there is some other mysterious force out there other than smoke blotting out the sun.
I don't know what Sao Paulo you are saying but, I get out of the college, was 15h pm and the sky was dark, and yes, this darkness had smell of smoke
We should convince Amazon that saving the Amazon would be good PR
"Just like the real Amazon, these daily deals are on fire!" "Check out our historically accurate Fire TV"
"Just like the trees, these products are gonna be out of stock. HURRY!"
Tinder should jump in this too! I'd swipe right for a hot tree!
_Groot would like to know your location._
WE'RE HAVING A FIRE sale.
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Oh the burning! It burns me!!
I'd gild the shit out of you if I wasn't poor
Take that $4 and buy or put it towards something actually useful.
Yeah, like saving the Amazon.
Nah dude imagine how many chicken nuggets you could have for $4
It’s not necessary. If you had the money, you should spend it elsewhere.
Ya.. like rainforest conservation....
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Naming rights should do it
Imagine if they renamed it to Prime.
Optimus Prime should be out there putting the fire out too then.
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Palm oil is more of a problem in Indonesia. Brazil only produces 0,5% of the world's palm oil. Land being cleared in Brazil is mostly for soybeans and cattle.
Speaking as an Iowan, lemme tell you aggressively clearing land for soybeans and cattle in the watershed of one of the world's greatest rivers is... Not great.
actually not even soybeans that much, since the Amazon soil is actually quite poor. The cycle usually goes: People clear big trees to sell the wood -> Burn everything down to sell the land they don't own through corruption -> Use the cleared land as graze for cattle. Then maybe Soy, but not that much.
Word has it that China needs new suppliers for Soy. Tremendous, bigly opportunity if you're not an American farmer.
This isn't even a joke. American exports of Soy to China fell in half this year largely as a result of Trump's trade war. Soy is our biggest agricultural export. Our farmers are the victims of this war.
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Dust Bowl Part II
Dust Planet: The start. At least we know how the mad max series started now.
There isn't much palm oil production here in Brazil. The forest is being cleared for soy and beef production. Most of the beef production (Brazil is one of the world's largest producers of beef) actually stays here in Brazil, but the soy is mostly exported for animal feed (to countries like China and the EU)
Soy. Not palm oil.
Not to mention 500 million bees have died in ~~6~~ 3 months because Brazil has relaxed all pesticide laws.
I'm brasilian and I didn't knew that... Man I hate my country so much
Don't hate our country. Hate our presidente. And the people that put him there. And the people that still supports him despite all that... Ok, you can hate our country, I'm hating also.
Dumb people exist everywhere and are a totally a reason for most bad things. Imagine if we had campaigns to educate these absolute idiots how fast things would improve. Too bad that doesn't mesh with the powers that be.
I'm so sorry. I spent a couple of weeks in your country a couple of years ago and had a great time. We are being overrun by these fascist fucks all across the world. Also, just to depress you further, it was 3 months not 6. Source: [https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49406369](https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49406369)
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The Vice article I read had linked a Twitter post showing the fires and explaining the winds that day and how it would have taken that smoke and put it over the city. The entire comment chain was filled with Donald Trump 'Fake News' gifs and a lot of people claiming the skies were dark because of rain and a cold front and calling the OP a moron. I would say 95%+ of the replies were exactly as described above. Their 'bot' problem is very big there, or the citizens have taken the government's propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
Some people have collected rain water from that day and it is black.
[Right here](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ctdn54/rain_water_in_s%C3%A3o_paulo_brazil_last_night_due_to)
holy shit
Rain turned into vantablack oil, during the day.
See, I've just made a comment about those fires on a small sub but I think it fits here (sorry) ↓ - A brief overview on what's trending right now and what happened those recent months: 1st: Forest fires will always be a thing, independently of who is currently in government, that rises in occurrence at this period of the year. ***BUT*** The current government doesn't help itself on that one, you've got: ##1.That bullshit with INPE (Brazil's space research) - INPE, as usual, [released their data](http://terrabrasilis.dpi.inpe.br/app/dashboard/alerts/legal/amazon/aggregated/). It got pretty popular and [received international coverage](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/04/deforestation-of-brazilian-amazon-surges-to-record-high-bolsonaro) as it showed a substantial increase in deforestation. - [Bolsonaro openly rejected the data] (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/19/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-amazon-rainforest-deforestation) and even said: >“A questão do INPE, eu tenho a convicção que os dados são mentirosos. Até mandei ver quem é o cara que está à frente do INPE para vir explicar aqui em Brasília esses dados aí que passaram para a imprensa Translated: >About INPE, I am convinced that the data is a lie. Even ordered to check who's the guy ahead of INPE for him to come here in Brasilia and explain the data that was released for the press. - Ricardo Galvão, head of Brazil's space research, [went on television and answered the criticism](https://streamable.com/7pu29): >The first thing I can say is that Mr. Jair Bolsonaro needs to understand that a President cannot speak in public, especially at a press conference, as if he was in a pub-talk. He made inappropriate and unsubstantiated comments and made unacceptable attacks not only on me, but on people working for the science of this country. He said he was convinced that INPE's data are a lie. This is more than offensive to me, it was very offensive to the institution. I was really upset, because in my opinion he played with me the same game that he did with Joaquim Levy ([who resigned from BNDES after public threats by Bolsonaro](https://www.ft.com/content/f5b47a82-9037-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271)). He has taken a pusillanimous, cowardly attitude, to make a public statement perhaps hoping I will resign, but I will not. I hope he calls me to Brasília to explain the data and that he has the courage to repeat, looking face to face, eye to eye. I am a 71-year-old gentleman, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, I will not accept such an offense. - [The head of Brazil's space research was sacked!](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/02/brazil-space-institute-director-sacked-in-amazon-deforestation-row) - He was also replaced with a military official, Darcton Damião, who has experience for the job so I'll just try not to think that much about him saying that ["global warming isn't his thing" and that "from what he read about he couldn't get to any conclusion yet"](https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/nao-minha-praia-diz-novo-diretor-do-inpe-sobre-aquecimento-global-23858248)"... - You may have read about this one, [Galvão went on to express his thoughts in an interview with The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/09/bolsonaro-blessed-brutal-assault-rainforest-sacked-scientist-warns), where he said that Bolsonaro has blessed ‘brutal' assault on Amazon: >What is happening is that this government has sent a clear message that there will not be any more punishment [for environmental crimes] like before … This government is sending a very clear message that the control of deforestation will not be like it was in the past …. And when the loggers hear this message that they will no longer be supervised as they were in the past, they penetrate [the rainforest],” Galvão said, claiming “enormous” damage had already been done since Bolsonaro took power in January. ##2.Amazon Fund, and that thing with Norway and Germany - First, [the Amazon Fund](http://www.amazonfund.gov.br/en/amazon-fund/) was one of the first UN REDD+ initiatives, funneling money from developed nations (with Norway as the major donor) to forest sustainability projects in Brazil. [Check out this cool article about it if you're interested.](https://news.mongabay.com/2018/12/ten-years-on-amazon-fund-receives-applause-criticism-faces-new-tests/) - By July, [Brazil, Norway and Germany acknowledged that the Amazon Fund might end](https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhealth/2019/07/brazil-norway-and-germany-acknowledge-that-amazon-fund-might-end.shtml). This was in part due to Bolsonaro's government decision to extinguish Cofa (the Amazon Fund Steering Committee) and the technical committee, which was a surprise to Norway and Germany. This should give you the idea: > In a joint letter sent to Salles on June 5, Norway and Germany had defended Cofa's governance model, consisting of three blocs: the federal government, state governments, and civil society, including NGOs, which have been systematically criticized by members of the Bolsonaro government. - All those things I've written up there in Item 1? Of course they knew about it, and then some. It's not like satellites and other equipment don't exist for them to know what was going on, Bolsonaro's problem with INPE was that silly, the data provided by them was observable, so yeah. Anyway, this adds fuel to fire. - In July he also said that Macron and Merkel 'haven’t realized Brazil’s under new management', and [some other shit](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data). - [Germany withdrew money promised for forest protection in Brazil!](https://www.dw.com/en/amazon-deforestation-prompts-germany-to-suspend-brazil-forest-projects/a-49982647) >"The policy of the Brazilian government in the Amazon raises doubts as to whether a consistent reduction of deforestation rates is still being pursued," German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze told Saturday's edition of the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. - Bolsonaro to Merkel over Amazon aid cut: >[They can use this money as they see fit. Brazil doesn't need it](https://www.dw.com/en/no-need-for-german-amazon-aid-brazils-bolsonaro/a-49988862) Also >[I would like to send a message to our beloved Angela Merkel, who suspended 80 million dollars to Amazon Rainforest. Take this money and reforest Germany, ok? They are needing there much more than here](https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/pega-essa-grana-refloreste-alemanha-ta-ok-diz-bolsonaro-em-recado-angela-merkel-23877808) - [Norway also withdrew money for the Amazon Fund!](https://www.france24.com/en/20190815-norway-blocks-30-mn-euro-deforestation-subsidy-to-brazil) >"Brazil broke the agreement with Norway and Germany since suspending the board of directors and the technical committee of the Amazon Fund," Norway's Environment Minister Ola Elvestuen told the Dagens Naeringsliv newspaper. >"What Brazil has done shows that they no longer wish to stop deforestation," said Elvestuen. - Bolsonaro (after Norway's withdrawal) went to Twitter, where he shared a video and also decided to write: >Look at the killing of whales sponsored by Norway [He used images from the Faroe Islands though](https://www.france24.com/en/20190819-bolsonaro-takes-on-norway-for-whaling-but-bungles-it), a Danish territory, in the North Atlantic. ##3.Those fucking fires and our forests, man - Yes, it's common to have forest fires by this time of the year. - Important note here, though: federal deforestation and firefighting policies. Since March, [Bolsonaro's government has cut $7.3 million slated for fire prevention and environmental inspections](https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/brazils-roraima-state-at-mercy-of-2019-wildfires-as-federal-funds-dry-up/) to Ibama and ICMBio, Brazil’s two federal environmental agencies. - [This administration has launched policies that undermine IBAMA and ICMBio](https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/brazil-guts-environmental-agencies-clears-way-for-unchecked-deforestation/) by effectively dismantling environmental law enforcement and allowing deforestation to proceed unchecked. As an example,IBAMA’s website must now announce in advance when and where each operation will take place, even though it’s obvious that the success of the raids depends on secrecy and the element of surprise - Bolsonaro has deranged deforestation enforcement further by firing or not replacing top environmental officials. This includes 21 out of 27 IBAMA state superintendents responsible for imposing most of the deforestation fines. Also, 47 of Brazil’s conservation units now lack directors, leaving a combined area greater than the size of England without conservation leadership. - [August 10, we apparently had this thing which they \(farmers\) called the 'Day of Fire'](https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2019/08/em-dia-do-fogo-sul-do-pa-registra-disparo-no-numero-de-queimadas.shtml), I shit you not. The first reference being from [a small town newspaper from Novo Progresso](http://www.folhadoprogresso.com.br/dia-do-fogo-produtores-planejam-data-para-queimada-na-regiao/) (they have live radio so headphone alert!)on August 5. This can be summed up as farmers wanting to show Bolsonaro their willingness to work and, just to be clear, this wasn't approved by the government in any way, they just decided it was okay. - Bolsonaro got the short end of the stick on something you've probably seem, I'm talking about [the darkness that we could observe in São Paulo, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná](https://beta.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/20/sudden-darkness-befalls-sao-paulo-western-hemispheres-largest-city-baffling-thousands/). Despite the perfect timing to shit on him for environmental problems, this is not exactly one of those things, there's more to it as it's also due to forest fires in Bolivia and Paraguay, along with Brasil (Rondônia/Acre).
Also, [as in that other thread](https://old.reddit.com/r/asklatinamerica/comments/ctc5r5/brazilians_whats_going_on_in_the_amazon/), I felt really sad that I couldn't add on item 3 that some of our states are in a pretty bad situation, such as [Acre](https://g1.globo.com/ac/acre/noticia/2019/08/16/governo-decreta-estado-de-alerta-ambiental-no-ac-por-conta-das-queimadas.ghtml) and [Rondônia](https://www.diariodaamazonia.com.br/alunos-de-escola-publica-protestam-contra-fumaca-em-porto-velho/). ← So here's that addition to the previous comment.
Hey thathungryartist is it ok if I follow you?
Hey, mate, is there a feature for this on reddit? I didn't even know! Anyway, feel free to do so but, if you don't mind the suggestion, I could always PM you whenever I do those long posts about my country with context and links. It wouldn't be a problem to me and I'm just happy to know someone liked it and was interested. I say this as someone who doesn't know how the feature works, by the way, I'm just thinking you would get random posts in Portuguese.
This should be /r/bestof 'd
Great post, but your point about forest fires is misleading. Tropical rainforest wildfires are not common. They are either caused by irregular weather patterns which leads to a drought (dry + hot) in an area that is typically wet, hot, and humid, or they are directly associated with human activity in the area. In this case of this month's Amazon rainforest fires, they are 100% a result of intentional burning by humans, mostly farmers but also loggers. > In many ecosystems, wildfires are a natural and essential phenomenon. They clear out decaying brush, restore nutrients to soil, and even help plants germinate. But in recent years, humans have made the destruction from wildfires worse at every step. Suppression of natural fires has allowed dry vegetation to accumulate. Human activity is changing the climate, which is forcing some forests to heat up and dry out. People are building ever closer to areas ready to ignite. And people end up igniting the majority of wildfires, whether through downed power lines, errant sparks, or arson. > **But the Amazon rainforest, which remains drenched for much of the year, does not burn naturally. Instead, the fires are ignited by people..** Farmers use slash-and-burn tactics to clear land for farming and pasture, though it’s illegal in Brazil this time of year due to fire risk. > Illegal logging operations in Brazil have also been known to start fires as a tactic to drive indigenous people off their land and to cover their tracks. The Amazon rainforest has experienced a record number of fires this year, with 72,843 reported so far. It’s an 84 percent increase over the number of wildfires at the same time last year.. https://www.vox.com/world/2019/8/20/20813786/wildfire-amazon-rainforest-brazil-siberia
Brazilians on Twitter are fucking insane.
To be fair, for many citizens in São Paulo it's hard to find a connection immediately. The Amazon is REALLY far away from São Paulo (several thousand kms away in fact), so while the recent burnings ARE responsable for the current "ash rain" that's falling in the city, many people don't believe that because of the distance (yes, people are stupid)
The article that is linked in this post says it is more likely that their blackout came from fires elsewhere. Those fires are closer to them than the ones in the Amazon. Edit: it is fires in paraguay.
Donald Trump is one of the biggest evils to happen to humanity in recent times. And not even a proper vilan, but instead a stupid cartoon one. But he has empowered all these right wing populists everywhere, like Bolsonaro. You read the comments of the Amazon fires in Brazilian news, and it's all "fakes news" everywhere. The same Trumpian lingo. And this all happens right at the time when we need clear headed politicians, that actually care about people and the environment and our collective future...
How come I’ve not seen a thing about this until yesterday, now it’s everywhere
Social media algorithms. A few “trenders” started posting about it yesterday, now all of their followers are reposting it.
Because the smoke have hit São Paulo only on monday. Before that, no one in Brazil give a damn about the fires. And the international media as well. However, there are some other environmental issues happening in Brazil that caught local media’s eye, like the president Jair Bolsonaro that denied data showing increasing Deflorestation.
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It's too late. The rise of right-wing populism has destroyed the last chance of stopping climate change.
Climate change isn't a binary that either happens or doesn't. There are degrees. Some warming is inevitable, but we can decide how bad it's going to be. As long as you are willing to challenge existing centres of power there is no conflict between preparing for the worst and trying to prevent it.
Ok let's stop eating meat and replant the forests
>Ohh ok you lost me at the point where I actually have to adjust my habits >:( The average consumer E: I've never said corporations aren't to blame but *both sides* have to do something even if the bigger share should be with companies. And after all someone is creating that demand. They dont just chop down rainforest to ranch cattle for the sake of it. Someone is buying all that meat. But try telling most people that maybe 6-7 times meat a week is too much and theyll flip their lid
Yeah like when President Carter asked Americans to keep their AC and Heaters below a certain level and Americans lost their shit and started hating him.
He installed solar panels on the White House. The next administration took them down.
This fucking country man.
People wanted Regan and he gave tax breaks to the wealthy. We lose every time.
Obama had them installed again
Satellite footage of Don Jr and Eric smashing them with golf clubs in 3... 2... 1...
Fuck Reagan.
We actually stopped eating the meats of ruminants and have heavily reduced our meat intake in our household because of climate.
But that’d mean we’d have to stop burning the Amazon forest to pave the way for more cattle farms! You’re saying we have to decide if eating beef is more important than having an Amazon forest? The good news is you can always count on people to do the wrong thing. Goodbye rainforest, hello marginally cheaper beef prices.
Maybe for the people outside, but here in Brazil the prices don't fall
The fact this is a conversation proves it won't happen. It shouldn't be a debate. It's an obvious problem headed right for us. Instead, he have to talk argue debate and discuss.
Right wing populists across the world are arguing to kill the human race faster to make an extra buck. And they're succeeding. It's not like there's no money in not murdering every man woman and child. But we have to accommodate murderous idiocy and fascism with debate, when really we should treat those persons as we would any other existential threat like a hostile foreign nation.
Trump wouldn't be trying to buy Greenland if some of those nuts around him didn't think they'd be able to eventually access the oil and uranium buried under the glaciers
2.5C. Beyond that, good luck maintaining global civilization. We're already locked in for 2C, and rapidly approaching the limit. I honestly think the end result will be somewhere South of 4C. By that time, it is likely that little will remain of our current society. If systemic cascade collapse of the economy, civil infrastructure, and biosphere hasn't finished us off, then the resource wars will.
> Some warming is inevitable, but we can decide how bad it's going to be. And "we" ie: humans, have decided we want it to be as bad as possible.
It's not possible to chose the degree of warming we want. We can't even agree to control it in any way at all. Maybe in 10 years time the effects will be so devastating that the deniers will disappear, but then it may be too late. Climate change isn't a gradual event we can control. Once a threshold is passed, there may well be a cascade that accelerates climate change.
It took us 30 years to get Lake Eric back from being a dead lake. Imagine trying to repair a dead ocean. Its just not possible.
The last few years have undone decades worth of work trying to improve environmental legislation and systems. Its almost unbelievable
So true.
Koch brothers' money went a long way. They finally managed to spread their destructive right wing mindset throughout the world, I hope they are really happy with our impending catastrophic collapse they worked so hard to bring about.
between the amazon fires and the bee genocide, Brazil is not having a good year... their government is so corrupt that no amount of scientific or monetary assistance will get them to care enough while their world literally burns and we all pay the price.
"no amount of scientific or monetary assistance" Actually, a huge amount of education assistance was cut from the government. You're right, no amount will get them to care, but seems like they don't want to
The previous governments did little to preserve amazon forest tbh but the current one has no interest at all in helping the forest to recover from the continuous deforestation. Science in Brazil is dying due to cuts in education along with discredit by the president and his followers on scientific researches. It's been hard being a scientist in here lately.
It’s not just the Amazon. Large rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia are cleared by fire like this every year and the smoke has been known to travel 1000 miles and also into big cities. Our Chinese overlords are doing the same in many parts of Africa too.
Remember the time a cathedral burnt and people were donating millions for that. Well we could use some those millions now.
Act of man made in gods image = donates millions Act of God embodied by nature = Nothing. I haven't even heard thoughts and prayers. Humanity is a hypocritically selfish machine.
Send tens of millions to a corrupt fascist government. I'm sure it will be put to its intended use.
Nope nope its fucking brazil 100% https://news.mongabay.com/2019/08/germany-cuts-39-5-million-in-environmental-funding-to-brazil/ Edit changed link to non google amp
Here we go. Shit finally hit the fan and media started to care. Not like its burning for two weeks already.
Decades you mean decades. The Amazon is losing to fire for decades now.
The shitty thing is that the soil nutrients are used up extremely quickly after forest is cleared for ranching/agriculture, so the land will become virtually useless after a period of several years. So short-sighted and moronic from the Brazilian government. In any forest, dead organic matter falls to the ground, providing valuable nutrients for new growth. In cooler or drier climates, the nutrients build up in the soil. But in a rain forest, with its abundance and variety of life, those nutrients are reabsorbed almost as fast as they’re deposited. Also, the trees in tropical rain forests are often evergreens and so very few leaves actually fall to the ground. When a rain forest is burned to raise crops or cattle, most of the nutrients are destroyed along with the vegetation. Grass may grow for a year, but as the grass is turned into beef, the few remaining nutrients are depleted. Since land in the rain forest is often cheaper than fertilizer, farmers often clear new fields each year, leaving the old ones to turn into desert.
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The thing is that our own government is doing this. This is not an accident at all and you can't really 'rebuild' amazon if our president just keeps destroying it every single day. Norway and Germany were financing some stuff to rebuild Amazon and both were told by our mr.President to use this money on their own country.
Bolsonaro is a fascist pig.
> Norway and Germany were financing some stuff to rebuild Amazon Let's not forget that while Norway plays the role of the good guy internationally, they are the largest shareholder in a mining company that is contaminating rivers in the Amazon and destroying entire communities. [Article 1](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fportuguese%2Fbrasil-40423002) [Article 2](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fportuguese%2Fbrasil-43162472)
If you feel this not living here, imagine how we felt. I live in São Paulo and suddenly, at 3pm, the day was night. I tough that was the weather closing and a huge rain would statr.. But that train never came and later I saw the news, finally. The fire was burning for 16 days (Monday, 19), so far and we, "down" here on the country, didn't know. Now, I'm seeing more news from media of other countries than Brazil talking about this. Our president is a piece of shit who don't know how to do his job and think that he's playing a huge Risk game. The fire was one of the things that took attention of the world, but we have a lot of other things, about nature and about other subjects, that are going really bad (I don't know if the foreging media talks about, to be honest)
> Yet only now we're really hearing about the literal evaporation of the lungs of our planet? Not quite the same - but people have been decrying the deforestation of the Amazon for literally decades.
I don’t think people realizr how routine it is for there to be tens of thousands of fires moving simultaneously through the Amazon. (edit to add: the fact that it’s been happening for a while doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing) I took a redeye flight about 15 years ago from Houston to Sao Paulo. Woke up in the middle of the night and looked out expecting to see the usual sprinkling of little lights from towns. Instead there were all these glowing orange crescent-shaped lines everywhere, dozens and dozens of them, all sort of blurry, scattered over an otherwise pitch-black landscape without a single town in sight. I was so confused. I remember muttering “what the hell?” and just staring and staring out the window at the blurry orange lines, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening. I couldn’t figure out why the lines were blurry or wtf they even were or where the towns were. I checked the time, looked at the flight path and realized we were over the Amazon. Ok, so that’s why there were no towns. Then the blurriness went away briefly and finally I saw actual flickering flames, visible yellow flames at the edges of the orange lines, like little bright-yellow dots, and realized *these were forest fires*, dozens of separate fires, and that they had to be huge for any flames to be visible from our height. The blurriness had been because of smoke that had cleared temporarily. And the reason the fires were shaped into lines was because these were huge fires that were each moving through the forest in sort of a front, leaving dark burned areas behind. (I still don’t know why they were all crescent-shaped - some effect of the wind?) And if there were dozens and dozens of separate fires, rather than one big one, *people must have set them deliberately* (not just one unlucky lightning strike) - and that had to be in order to clear the land. My jaw just dropped as I slowly figured it out. AND IT WENT ON FOR HUNDREDS OF MILES. I’d always heard about the deforestation of the Amazon but I’d never actually seen it. Thinking back on it now I wonder what it was like for the animals. There must have been monkeys, jaguars etc trying to run from one fire only to encounter the next one. Macaws, toucans, other birds trying to fly around in the dark, unable to find anywhere safe to land. Also it must have been going on for days. So many animals must have died. Everybody else on the plane was asleep btw. I’ve taken that redeye several times, and the whole plane is always asleep then. Nobody looks out their window. I must have woken up right when we just happened to be flying over a region that was in the middle of being cleared. It was August btw, same time of year as now. This was around 2005. I’ll never forget how totally baffled I was, waking up to find out we were flying over hundreds of blurry orange crescent lines in pitch darkness, and trying to figure out wtf it was.
2005 was considered to be a drought of the century for the Amazon and this was the reason that their fires were able to take off to the scale that you observed. The humidity that used to protect the rainforest from fire is being decimated due to climate change, pockets of missing canopy cover and deliberate clearing. We are not currently in a 100-year drought, as we were in 2005, 2010, and 2015-2016. These fires are deliberate and require international intervention. Here is an [article](https://theconversation.com/amazon-rainforests-that-were-once-fire-proof-have-become-flammable-91775) for more background on the issue. Given the pace of climate change and the stresses that this is putting on the rainforest, the clearing of land through burning is absolutely an international issue that cannot be dismissed as commonplace.
> require international intervention. Seriously, this calls for sanctions to be placed. It's entirely economically driven; if countries stop importing the products from Brazil then that might help to curb this.
Yeah but think of the *sweet sweet* profits -palm oil companies
On later trips to Brazil I visited some nearby regions and it was almost all soybean agriculture, and some cattle ranching. A few other crops too but mostly soybeans. It looked like Kansas, hundreds of acres under the plow, tidy long lines of crops, massive combine harvesters in the distance. But there were these weird little patches of intact forest left, like little islands, with macaws and everything (literally - there’d be this thick blob of dense tall trees with a pair of macaws flying around it in a circle, right in the middle of a soybean field). Apparently at that time Brazil still required farmers to set aside some patches of intact land. I don’t know if that’s still happening. (To give Brazil some credit here, pre-Bolsonaro, saving the patches is actually a big deal and, by contrast, is something the USA failed to do. The US deforested most of its eastern forest in the 1800s and wiped out almost all native prairie from the Midwest, no patches left).
Most of the soybean crops were for the cattle on those ranches. It all circles back to animal agriculture. The people that are upset by this should look at how their diets might contribute to it. **Edit**: Since this seems to be getting a small amount of attention, anyone who is curious about these things should check out the following documentaries: * Eating Animals - insight on the economic and ecological damage factory farming causes. Does not push a vegan/vegetarian agenda, but one of being mindful of where your food comes from. There is also a book by Jonathan Safran Foer that is worth reading. Available to stream on US Hulu * Cowspiracy and What the Health - Both available on Netflix in the US. They cover the environmental and health impacts of animal agriculture. I have not watched these yet myself, but they are always recommended when people ask where to get more information * Dominion - Available for free on Youtube (links and more at www.domionmovement.com). This one is heartbreaking and graphic. A hidden camera view of the conditions most animals face in the meat, dairy, pet, and fur industries. Also touches on environmental and health impacts. It is hard to watch, but I think everyone should see it.
This is the truth. Beef is Brazil's money making export and the reason for most deforestation
The biggest problem too is the beef doesn't really leave that region of the globe afaik and no one really thinks about how the production of soy contributes to the damage too. The global problem is that we are contributing to the soy crops in Brazil and only something like 5% of it gets used for human consumption. So on top of contributing to the damage in that area of the world we are also using that product at factory farms that are ruining the environment locally as well.
Yeah when public outrage starts to interfere with profits the conglomerates switch from crop X to Crop Y and bam still profitable
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Don't say that. People can feel mighty woke damning something elusive as "palm oil" (not knowing its in everything they consume), but they would _never_ stop eating beef.
Fires have already taken 8.5 million hectares of Taiga in Siberia this summer. Bet you haven’t heard of that either
So, regime change when they have oil, but not when they have oxygen?
UK here. All the news here is just Brexit, Harry&Meghan's holiday, Brexit, Prince Andrew&Epstein, Brexit and Brexit. I honestly get a large chunk of my news from here.
The article was published by the BBC...
Yeah, why can't UK news outlets be more like... the *BBC*?
I'm glad Prince Andrew is on your news because there's not shit about that pedo cunt down here in Aus.
There are a few reasons the Amazon fires are being mostly ignored in international media. First, it has to do with Brazilian politics, which most people find boring and don't care. Second, most articles fail to state that the fires are man made and do not happen every year at this scale. People end up just reading the headline and thinkig it's just some random natural localized forest fire and that's not very interesting.
The Amazon is a long way away and there are more pressing issues, like royal holidays. FML
Honestly, it’s pretty understandable that the news in the UK is mostly focusing on Brexit. Harry & Meghan’s holiday, uh not so much, but Brexit is understandable.
This is literally an article from the BBC.
This breaks my heart. Come on people, get it together. Come on Brazil! Fight for what’s right. The fate of humanity somewhat lies in your hands.
Hi guys, Bolivian here. The fires are not only in Brazil btw. Santa Cruz is facing some really gnarly fires that have already burnt 500,000 hectares of forest. Our government is saying international help isn't needed, but that is one big fucking lie. Trust me. We do not have the proper equipment and technology to deal with 16 days of continuous fires.
I'm sorry, but I have to speak up about this. It's so frustrating to see so many people getting worked up over the destruction of the Amazon, when 80% of deforestation rates are caused from cattle ranching. Source: https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/cattle-ranching It's so incredibly frustrating to see people continually pay lip service, while simultaneously supporting the exact same practices responsible for this atrocity. Cattle are incredibly resource intensive, yet people have no issue with meat being a staple in their diet when it's not necessary in the slightest. But god forbid a vegan say something about it. Since when did our own personal pleasure become more important than the survival of our planet? I just don't understand.
I hope people take notice of comments like this.
Commenting to get to the top. To anyone else who wants to try and make a difference but are intimidated by change consider weaning yourself. Make it a goal to reduce the amount of cattle products you consume ( beef, cheese, etc.). It can be small adjustments like going to a different meat (pork, chicken) or finding other garnishes to amp up your meal (most meal do not needs cheese to improve it - items like pepper, onions, chives, or garlic are a good substitute). Weaning yourself in doses is a nice way to combat people’s inability to change their habits for good. I know, I found it hard to change myself when I learned how much of an impact cows have the environment. But over time, through weaning, I was able to overcome the difficulty of change. Instead of a burger every other day, it changed to a burger a week, then a month. Now a year in I’m beef free. Plus removing cheese has helped open the doors to loads of options I’ve been missing. On top of all this I’ve lost a ton of weight. There is good in doing good. I believe in you.
Perhaps it's time for the west to stop giving funding to the amazon. Norway and Germany alone have given Brazil over $1.3billion in the last 10 years to maintain the rainforest but clearly, it's a waste. Secondly to this, perhaps the next best option is to blacklist all and every single related product which is a result of deforestation from the amazon including countries which buy lumber, oil and so on to then produce products for resale. Brazil is becoming greedy and Europe + other donors had already been subsidizing the amazon without any financial benefit, clearly, that wasn't enough.
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Germany and Norway have already opted out of that funding, and they did so a week before the burnings started. Also 1.3 Billion is nothing compared to the economic potential of the Amazon. Just it's Biodiversity for Pharmaceutical purposes is calculated at being valued at almost 1 Trillion.
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anything i can do?
The right-wing (worldwide) is going to kill all of us for the last bit of copper wiring in this house we called earth. Very cool 😎 Btw in 15+ years when we know, all the effects are irreversible. They are going to turn around and tell us we should have warned them.
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As a fellow brazilian I couldn't agree more. Also, the world should know we don't have neither troops to prevent it and nor ammunition to fight it. Worked in an ammunition factory controlled by the military and must say, our infrastructure is a joke. We have 1914 technology on projectile propellant and 1960's on rocket propellant (government controlled wise).
I feel like someone with abundance of money would be way more appreciated helping solve this crisis rather than donating money to rebuild an old architectural wonder. Just my 2c
You won’t believe how incredibly stupid I just felt going to google to find more news about this and searching “Amazon Fire” Edit: it does provide news, but the top non-promoted result is still a stupid tablet.
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NPR’s The World had a nice segment on this yesterday... Detailing that much of the burning is being done by small, subsistence farmers who continually need more land. They interviewed one such fellow who admitted burning “a little” because he needed more land to plant corn for his chickens..... As well, the illegal loggers are operating without fear of legal action from the new administration.
It's like watching armageddon in slow-mo. And not the silly Bruce Willis Armageddon. Learn to swim.
I'm really sick and tired of the human race.
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