The 7,000 square miles of rainforest which have vanished in Brazil’s 75,000 forest fires so far this year represent a doubling of the area destroyed last year. The resulting conflagrations have been so intense that satellite tracking by the European Union has revealed smoke trails extending all the way to São Paulo, nearly 2,000 miles away. Brazil has suffered worse fires in recent memory, but these latest ones are particularly alarming because they are due to rapacious deforestation, much of it illegal, which has been used to clear the way for cattle farming and soy production. The Amazon Environmental Research Institute estimates that current clearance rates are nearly three times what they were last year – a terrifying prospect given that further destruction is inevitable under the Bolsonaro administration.
Facing a global climate emergency, President Bolsonaro has responded by accusing his critics – which include President Macron of France and German Chancellor Angela Merkel – of using the fires for “personal political gains” and interfering in “an internal matter” with a “sensationalist tone.” The Brazilian Environment Ministry even announced that it would redirect foreign funding for anti-deforestation projects to help cattle and soybean farmers, prompting Germany and Norway to cut tens of millions of dollars in aid. As tensions grew, Bolsonaro claimed that his government lacked adequate resources to fight the fires and then asserted – without evidence – that there was a “very strong” indication that NGOs were starting fires because they had been defunded by his administration.
If Bolsonaro’s strange mix of personal hypersensitivity and extractivist contempt seem familiar that is because they mirror similar tendencies in his North American counterpart. A recent report by The Wilderness Society estimates that if US companies develop the public lands and waters leased out by the Trump administration, they will release into the atmosphere between 850 million and 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon. For context, the second number is greater than all the carbon emitted which the European Union produces annually.
Somehow, such potentially disastrous developments have failed to rouse American voters from their apathy. Earlier this week, at almost the same time that Bernie Sanders announced an ambitious $16 trillion plan to combat global heating, the Democratic National Committee panel voted (17 to 8) against holding a primary debate that focused solely on the issue. Although polls indicate strong support within the party for bold responses to climate change, nationally the issue ranks just 17th of out of 29 among major political concerns for registered voters.
What will historians make of the fact that as the rest of the world woke up to the urgency of manmade climate change, the issue got just a single question in America’s 2016 presidential debates? Or that it seemed fated to remain equally marginal in the subsequent election?
One insightful answer appears in a Pulitzer-prize winning novel by the American author Richard Powers. “The Overstory” is a sweeping fiction that follows the stories of nine Americans as they confront the devastation of their country’s old-growth forests. One of the book’s main themes is that trees keep sending us messages – chemically, physically, symbolically – that we keep managing to ignore. After describing the extraordinary interconnectedness of a forest, and our unconscionable tendency to reduce it to a mere resource, Powers reaches the sobering conclusion that facts cannot move public awareness on the issue fast enough and that only a change in our collective cultural narratives has any chance of doing so. As one of the novel’s main characters – a man who eventually becomes, in despair, an eco-terrorist – considers this maddening prospect, Powers writes: “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what [the activist] wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.”
As you read these words, the evidence of our folly is etched across nearly two thousand miles of the Brazilian sky. The forest’s message could not be clearer. The only real question is whether we are paying attention.
