Everyone has probably heard the fierce campaigns to save the Amazon Rain Forest, but what does that really mean? What steps can we take to protect something that is so exponentially invaluable to the planet? The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world and takes up more than half of Brazil. In just 2019 alone, there have been more than 80,000 fires, the most ever recorded by the country’s National Institute for Space Research.
The raging fires were started by unnatural causes. Brazil’s current president, Jair Bolsonaro, has permitted there to be mining, logging and agriculture. Why would Bolsonaro allow for these industries to potentially destroy the precious land which he himself inhabits? Why wouldn’t Bolsonaro instead fight tirelessly to preserve the beautiful and rare environment? The answer is simple: money.
Brazil’s economy has been sluggish for half a decade. With the election of Bolsonaro, he promised to drastically decrease the amount of green regulation in the country. One way he planned to achieve this goal was by shrinking the protected section of the Amazon Rain Forest, which amounts for about half of the area. In January Bolsonaro tweeted, “ More than 15% of the national territory is demarcated as indigenous land and quilombolas. Less than a million people live in these truly isolated places of Brazil, exploited and manipulated by NGOs, together we will integrate these citizens and value all Brazillians.”
What Bolsonaro is really after are the gold, aluminum, and oil deposits that are in the Amazon. This may have not caused deforestation in the Amazon but surely there has been everlasting effects from it. Wood from the forest is cut for charcoal to fuel pig iron plants that can result in deforestation. The fires were ignited by farmers using slash-and-burn techniques to help put nutrients in the soil for crops.
When Bolsonaro took office last year, the rate of the fires have excelled. He won the election by campaigning on how to exploit the rainforest and won the endorsement of the country’s agricultural lobby. Bolsonaro has encouraged tree-clearing activities since he became president. They reduced its enforcement of how the environmental laws were.
The Amazon burning down is a big factor for climate change. According to senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and professor of environmental science at George Mason University, “The Amazon forest holds something like 90 billion tons of carbon, and if it ends up in the atmosphere it’s not a good thing.” What could happen if this carbon is released? The planet would increase in temperature even more, thus perpetuating the Greenhouse Effect.
Unfortunately, there are slaves cutting down the rain forest. In 2006 a group of Cabrini faculty had the opportunity to go to the Amazon to experience what the slavery there was like. Professor Jerry Zurek, of Cabrini University, traveled to Brazil in 2006. Slaves are cutting down the trees so that wealthy landowners can make the area into big plantation farms.
All the free oxygen in the air is produced by plants and most importantly trees that causes photosynthesis.
The French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Aug. 22 that “the Amazon rainforest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire.”
