First by ice, then by fire. The Amazon forest fires — spread across three countries, but largely in Brazil — have inspired the same sort of “wrong apocalypticism” as Greenland’s early high ice melt did two months ago.
Greenland will melt in 150 years. Alarming enough, but not tomorrow, as was portrayed. The Amazon is burning, but not all of it. This year it’s happening faster, earlier, but — as this NASA graph shows — not vastly out of line with the shape of earlier burns.
With the Bolsonaro government’s wilful confusion of the event, a contradictory politics is emerging. The Amazon forest burns every year. But it burns more substantially now because of slash-and-burn land-clearing techniques, for the expansion of cattle ranching.
This process was slowed somewhat during the Lula/Dilma Rousseff years of Workers’ Party (PT) presidency, but was never discontinued. Burning-out is also being done by mining interests, newly emboldened by a pro “development” agenda. Under the reactionary/proto-fascist Bolsonaro government, the Amazon has been thoroughly reopened, and land clearing is celebrated as a turn back to prosperity and independence.
The Bolsonaro government’s low-yield, high-damage agriculture is partly a product of interlocking short-term interests; but it is also a declaration of domination. In Brazil, a country whose European elite have sought to distinguish themselves from a postcolonial populace far more mixed-race than in postcolonial Anglo societies, slash ‘n’ burn is the reimposition of the Christian vision of expansion and destiny.
The PT solution of mixed and multiple use, with some regard to indigenous peoples, is abhorrent to such because it acknowledges the country as a hybrid entity, of multiple peoples, who can move towards a model of commercial sustainability. The full horror of where we are at is that the new practices Bolsonaro has rejected would have been the sort of thing advocated by first-world bodies in the great post-war aid era, keen to lace former colonies into global commodity circuits. Now, the most efficient way of drawing Brazil into such is to wilfully champion low-yield practices doing long-term damage to the region’s capacity to produce commercially.
The global political culture war has now spread to every corner of rationality. Agriscience is rendered as suspect as meteorology or vaccination.
Bolsonaro’s taunting of global leaders is part of that. The viciousness of the conflict in Brazil is supercharged by its history as the birthplace of left urban guerrilla warfare, as led by the communist guerrilla Marighella from the mid-’60s onwards. That tactic brutally targeted the European elite that Bolsonaro and his family is part of. For the Bolsonaro elite, unions are communists, greens are communists; NGOs, first peoples etc. Hence the global disjuncture when Bolsonaro arrived on the scene.
Trying to assimilate leaders such as Bolsonaro or the Philippines’ Duterte to someone like Donald Trump — a product of cheap carbs and reality TV — only goes so far. The global South’s populists are continuing a political war they never saw as over; one which many in the West have forgotten or never learnt about.
So the whole thing got a lot more complicated when the year-on-year fire spike, combined with Bolsonaro’s “impudence”, occasioned talk of global intervention. How? What? Occupy the entire Amazon rainforest?
Well, if the whole place was being torched in one hit, you’d say yes, of course. But it’s not, as we’ve seen. It’s a process which has gone in the wrong direction, but it can only be corrected through complex and difficult global political action.
The calls for intervention and sanction against Brazil played straight into the hands of a different sort of global right — one willing to acknowledge the exploitation of centuries of imperialism, and thus positioning itself to defend Bolsonaro’s reversion. Essentially it’s the old third-world nationalist position repurposed for a renewed global capitalism.
Leaving aside the slightly Python-esque turn of such politics — “rise up and kill the lungs of the planet” — the hypocrisy of the West has to be acknowledged. Brazil is being targeted because it’s on the production side of the production/consumption split. Had Australia made the G7 it would have been a bit embarrassing: we are clearing land at a phenomenal rate and destroying the world’s treasure, the Great Barrier Reef. The forest cleared is necessary but not iconic; the reef is iconic, but not essential. The Amazon forest is both, so we get away with it.
So, once again, bad reporting on environmental crises is setting us up to do bad politics. This incorrect apocalypticism is the mirror of denialism — designed to get clicks, sales and memberships. It feeds anti-democratic politics, elitist disdain, technocratic affiliation, while also disabling and disempowering with a sense of absolute powerlessness.
To protest the capitalist nihilism of Bolsonaro and his enablers is one thing; but habitat destruction in the global South can only be justly averted by mega-deals in which technology and services is transferred to the South as payment for taking habitat out of lower-paying production. That’s not something the Bolsonaro government would be interested in, but the Brazilian people might be.
Ultimately, we will have to get beyond the global carve-up of the European nation-state, and put key global heritage into the hands of global trusteeships. But who would doubt that the reef and western Tasmania would not be among the first candidates, given what we’ve done to them?
Ah, the world ’19 — a long way from Brasil ’66. Please enjoy the music while imagining an urban uprising against encroaching fascism.
I feared this would happen – the moment the press starts to use the “…source of 20% of the world’s oxygen” claim, conservative corners would latch onto the subjectivity of such a statement and attempt to discredit ALL geographical and ecological sciences.
We’ve seen this before with the Great Barrier Reef, southern Australian bushfires, retreating glaciers and now burning rainforest. There’s always an example where it’s happened before, possibly naturally or by indigenous people, but that’s got nothing on the scale and severity we’re watching today. But for as long as there was some uncertainty around a phenomenon, there will be someone using it as an excuse to turn the other way.
And they’re all happening at once.
Have Bolsonaro’s mates/sponsors burned off enough of the rainforest, for the moment, to satisfy their “needs” that intervention will be initiated?
[“Environment?”
“Mas que nada!”]
Sergio’s “Fool on the HIll”? Which one?
The music is a classic, thanks, Rundle. While listening we can ponder why 21st century civilisation deliberately shits in its own nest.
On the other hand there is minister Susan Ley who was completely relaxed when delivering a damning report on the future of the Barrier Reef. So convincing was she that the report has been largely ignored by our brilliant meeja.
Brazil has received much attention in relation to the wildfires and purposely lit fires in the Amazon Basin. President Bolsonaro has extreme right wing views which prior to the fires was drawing much attention. In the news we are told about individual trouble spots; the aggregate of all those trouble spots does not get much of a mention. With wildfires and man caused fires alone, they create a scary picture. Over the last years extremely large fires have been experienced in Siberia, Alaska, Northern Territories of Canada, California, Europe, Africa, Australia, and even currently Greenland. Reporting in the Australian media generally about these other International fire events has been rather meagre.
A week or so ago the Washington Post analysed temperature increase in various USA centres, they found the some centres when reflecting on temperature found some places where temperature had increased 2 C above what had been recorded when temperature had first begun to be recorded. When taking more of an aggregate measure of Earth, temperature have been recorded on the boundary of what life forms can cope with in a number of centres.
When glaciers, ice sheets, ice volume, ice extent, and permafrost are taken into account; the aggregate once again is of great concern. The same applies to coral reefs.
While Guy acknowledges that climate change is serious, I believe he underscores the seriousness of the matter.
There is no doubt there have been times when the media over-amplifies a public threat in order to sell more newspapers. However there have been times when the media mistakenly downplays a threat.
In 2009, geophysicists were asked about the risk of an earthquake striking the town of L’Aquila in Italy. They assessed that the risks from an earthquake were less than the risks of an evacuation, and advised accordingly. Somewhere along the line the message reached the public as not to worry about it. Nature rolled the dice and delivered an earthquake that killed 309 people. Anyone who works with probabilities would shrug, saying well, sometimes it happens. However in 2012 a court convicted them of manslaughter for giving (the media) falsely reassuring advice.
Should the media have been brought to task for misinterpreting expert advice? Although journalists are more aware of the impact on their readership than the bookish scientists, they are not experts in disaster either. What was missing was accessible expert advice that assesses disaster risk as it affects the community.