BRAZIL — The “lungs of the earth” have been on fire for three weeks. Some people don’t know it’s happening, and many don’t understand how it affects the world.
Sixty percent of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, lies in Brazil. It holds 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen and is home to 20 percent of the world’s plant species, many of which can’t be found anywhere else, according to an Associated Press story posted by the Washington Post.
The trees in the Amazon store carbon absorbed in the atmosphere, each year taking in as much as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, said AP. The billions of trees also release water vapor that form a thick mist over the rainforest canopy, which rises into the clouds and produces rain, affecting weather patterns and agriculture across several countries.
Did I mention the hundreds of thousands of exotic animals that call the Amazon their home? Or the hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who live in the rainforest” and whose sole legacy it is to protect it?
“With every hectare (2.5-acres) burned, we could be losing a plant or animal species that we didn’t even know about,” said Andre Guimaraes, director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, according to AP.
Samantha Cerqueira, 26, is a Peabody resident whose parents were born in Brazil. She is on a trip to her family’s homeland, staying in Rio De Janeiro. While she is not near Brasilia or São Paulo, where most of the fires are causing the effect, she said the inferno is taking an emotional toll on residents across the country.
“This is an unfortunate effect of a long living corrupt government,” she told The Item. “I don’t think any of them thought it would ever come to this point. The Amazon means to the people of Brazil what it should mean to the rest of the world: oxygen, nature, wildlife. But what people don’t understand is that the Amazon is all that Brazil has, as a third world country with economic problems that have lasted decades. My uncle said that he would rather Brazil stay poor than to ever lose the Amazon. It just goes to show how important it is to them.”
As reported by AP/The Washington Post, Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, which monitors deforestation, recorded more than 76,700 wildfires across the country in 2019, with a little more than half, or 40,340, happening in the Amazon region. That is an 85 percent increase in wildfires compared to last year.
Paulo Moutinho, co-founder of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, told AP last week “it is very difficult to have natural fires in the Amazon; it happens but the majority come from the hand of humans.”
Moutinho has worked in the Amazon for three decades, according to AP. He said most of the fires there are set to clear land for farming, ranching, or logging and once caught, they can easily get out of control.
“Unfortunately we have politicians who value money over quality of life or longevity,” said Cerqueira. “They want to make more money to allow for farming, which is a big source of income for the country. A corrupt government is just that, corrupt. They don’t care about the well being of the people. They haven’t for as long as my parents can remember.”
A second AP article reported rainforest fires have ignited a bitter dispute about who is to blame “during the tenure of a leader (Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro) who has described Brazil’s rainforest protections as an obstacle to economic development and who traded Twitter jabs on Thursday with France’s president (Emmanuel Macron) over the fires.”
Bolsonaro took office in January.
AP also reported, citing several Brazilian media sources, that federal prosecutors in Brazil’s Amazon region have launched investigations of the increasing deforestation. They plan to investigate possible negligence by the national government in the enforcement of environmental codes.
“It’s seriously one of the last natural sources of life that we have,” said Cerqueira. “If you aren’t worried, there’s a problem.”
