The Amazon is burning. The climate is changing. And we're doing nothing to stop it
Soaring in a Cessna
above the Amazon canopy isn't meant to sting your eyes with
smoke, soak your shirt with sweat, and cause your pilot to climb frantically
just to get visibility back. Yet the fires raging over the past fortnight
conjured what you're never meant to witness: this is what the end of the world
looks like.
A week spent driving
around or flying over the vastness of South America's largest blessing, leaves
you stunned at how much damage has been done, and how fast. Is the Amazon edging towards its tipping point? When the moist
forest canopy becomes so dry, and the savannah spreads, that fires propagate
and expand in a vicious circle? Like much of climate science, we can only get
learned warnings and then watch as reality often exceeds our initially modest
concerns. It seems we don't understand the planet well enough to be guessing at
the timetable for our own extinction.
I didn't ever think I
would watch the Amazon burn in my lifetime, but now fear it's just the start of
the end. My editors asked me to write about what I thought at the end of the
reporting. I'm used to miserable topics, but this is pretty dark.
Something extremely
bad is happening very fast. And while it is often entirely Brazil's fault --
with the populist policies of its President Jair Bolsonaro fueling destruction that was
cautiously limited by his predecessors, and farmers running riot, torching
fields to clear land in the pursuit of cash -- it is also not really their
fault at all. The soy they grow, the
beef they farm, the wood they log, and everything else they tear from the
Amazon, aren't all used in Brazil. We buy them: Europe and central Asia about
19%, China 22%, North America 14%, according to the World Bank.
Developed economies got that
way through using up their own resources, and those of their colonies. So their
diktats to Brazil as it develops, might better involve alternatives to
deforestation -- other ways to make money -- than lectures. We could also stop
buying their stuff too. But the truth is, we
don't want to. You wouldn't actually want to stop having a smartphone so you
can "like" Leonardo DiCaprio's post about the Komodo dragon, even
though it uses metals mined appallingly. I didn't refuse the stewardess' offer
of a 200ml cup of water despite it coming in foil-sealed plastic, with another
plastic cup containing ice; the plane I am in is hot, and I am thirsty... read more:
