Out of the 5.50 million square kilometres making up the ecosystems and biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest, 60 percent is located in Brazil; it then expands into Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana, and our own Guyana. Many of us in the GTA, born and nurtured in Guyana, and now visitors back home, have set foot in, and explored parts of this tremendous rainforest, and have breathed in deeply its fresh air.
Sad to say, the magnitude of the fires now searing the lungs of the world no longer affords breaths of fresh air. The Amazon plays a crucial role in regulating global climate: its positive effects ripple across many regions; it produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen. It is understandable that smoke from its numerous conflagrations is making breathing difficult for thousands. Last week reports from a heavily-affected north-western state, Rondonia, indicated residents were under a blanket of thick smoke.
Late last month a count of multiple sites burning in this vast rainforest expanse stood between 74,000-76,000 fires; statistically, the number of fires was 85 percent more than this time last year. Extending the metaphor of the organism with the Amazon representative of our planet’s lungs, preliminary data provided by the National Space Research Institute in Brazil have revealed a startling haemorrhage – that between January 1 and August 1 this year, a total of 9,250 square kilometres of forest has been lost, compared to 7,537 square kilometres for all of 2018.
It is understandable why the rest of the world is justifiably concerned. Such was the growing worry over the escalation in burning, and the apparent apathy by the Brazilian government led by its President Jair Bolsonaro, that global anxieties were heightened, and so was highlighted by the majority of G7 leaders, which included Canada, that met in France late last month.
It took the intervention of French President Emmanuel Macron, and not the initiative of Bolsonaro, to put the focus on staunching the widening Amazonia wound. Remarkably, Bolsonaro chose to fiddle with politics while the Amazon burned. In fact, he seemed displeased at what was a genuine offer of international support by the G7 nations.
In today’s electronic world, where social media is now deployed by a few heads of state as an instrument of governmental action impacting on and significantly changing the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Bolsonaro tweeted, among other things that included ad hominem insults, that Macron’s intent was sensationalist, a coloniser’s reflexivity, and for political gain.
Such an oblique response was no surprise. In past occasions, Bolsonaro has been reported as not being eco-friendly. He criticised Brazil’s environmental regulations and law enforcement agencies before his ascension to the presidency; while on the campaign trail he promised to scale down environmental laws, making it easier for loggers, and ranchers and miners, to commodify the Amazon for non-sustainable, extractive monetary gain.
Bolsonaro has also revealed further thinking along narrow, economic lines with indications to carve out a highway through the Amazon, to eliminate Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment, and an intention to bar entry to non-governmental organisations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.
It should not have taken global intervention to push the Brazilian government into mobilising its army to combat the fires tearing through Amazonia’s rainforests. A responsible response should have been containment of the consuming conflagration, not fanning the flames of vexation and personal ego.
The critical situation affecting the Amazon, particularly given its concatenative effects on ecosystems and biodiversity on farther fields in our world, called for an immediacy of corrective measures, not displays of egoism, and a woeful absence of statesmanship.
It is good we spoke out with global, collective voices through G7 leaders; the Amazon touches us all – whether we are breathing in its wholesome air elsewhere in the world, or in our own Guyanese homeland.