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“The trees were burning all around us. We had to turn around because it was too hot to continue”

Posted on 10 November 2015

“Instead of thick jungle… The smoke is so thick. The trees were burning all around us. We had to turn around because it was too hot to continue. We stopped next to a huge swathe of land that was scorched black. The trees had been cut and stacked up in piles like a dozen funeral pyres.”

This might sound like a story about Indonesia, where fires this year have resulted in Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions exceeding those of the entire U.S. economy.

But it’s not a story about Indonesia. It’s from a report by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro for NPR from the state of Rondônia in Brazil:

The report includes this short statement from Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, during a visit by Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel:

We have made a huge effort and we have reduced by 83% illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

And Merkel said,

“We are very satisfied that there have been very ambitious developments concerning the stopping of deforestation.”

We know this story. Brazil has reduced deforestation over the past decade by something like 80%. It’s received US$1 billion from Norway in results-based payments.

“But that’s not the whole story,” Garcia-Navarro says. Although the rate of deforestation has gone down, Brazil still lost about 5,000 square kilometres of forest in 2014. And this year it’s higher than last year. Over the past 20 years, the Amazon has lost 763,000 square kilometres of forest.

Garcia-Navarro spoke to Antonio Nobre. He’s a visiting scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and a senior researcher at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA). Last year, he published a report titled “The Future Climate of Amazonia“, in which he argued for “a war effort” to reverse past and expected future damage to the rainforests in the Amazon. He says that slowing deforestation is not enough. It has to be reversed.

Nobre points out that even areas that appear forested in satellite images have often been degraded by illegal loggers.

Rondônia’s environmental police recently lost their only helicopter in budget cuts. The people trying to stop deforestation in Rondônia tell NPR that deforestation is “out of control”.
 

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2 thoughts on ““The trees were burning all around us. We had to turn around because it was too hot to continue””

  1. Mr Greer Hart, senior says:
    11 November 2015 at 2:02 am

    I am just an ordinary person from Scotland, who taught Economics and Accountancy to working class young people. What horrified me in doing so, was that no part of the syllabuses contained any instruction to show the environmental cost of economic growth, and the supply of raw materials. They also did not reveal the number of tribal people and other communities, destroyed to make way for the extraction of such materials for the rest of the developed world.
    Now, we have many groups sounding the alarm over the destruction of areas of great biological importance, and the effects on the world climate. However, many awakened ethical people scream impotenly over this vile wasting of the Earth and its life forms. Many send donations to buy pockets of rainforest and sign petitions to save tribes faced with extinction from the logger and palm oil planter, and get murdered if they resist.

    The truth is, that the fate of the Earth and mankind, is in the hands of a huge international gangster way of doing things, with the world’s banks, governments, corporations, and whatever else is part of the greedy and vile Elite that supplies the whole wants of the rampant consumer. An end point has to inevitably come, when the last Elephant has been shot and last fish caught, along with the final tree and butterfly looking for the last flower. What will those of the over-populated planet do then? Not one of their failed economic theories or religions will have an answer. None of this need happen, if governments start being composed of those who have the solutions, to bringing this world back into focus, and have the courage and power to do so. Nothing justifies the cruelty and destruction we have to suffer in today’s world, at the hands of the wrong people fishing the seas; resourcing timber; providing crops; sourcing minerals; supplying energy; running our education systems, and the many other parts of the stranglehold that has lead to this dysfunctional world.

  2. Chris Lang says:
    11 November 2015 at 6:28 pm

    There’s another recent broadcast from Lourdes Garcia-Navarro about illegal logging in Rondônia here:

    Deep In The Amazon, An Unseen Battle Over The Most Valuable Trees

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