Amazon Burning, When You Can’t See the Trees for the Smoke

[Opinion piece, all views my own]

As a dual British-Brazilian national living in London, it was always the cause of much frustration that the rare times Brazil graced the British news it was usually for something related to gang violence, natural disasters or corruption. In keeping with making the news for all the wrong reasons, it has been difficult to miss how Brazil has found its way back onto centre stage in the world’s media, this time for the disastrous conflagration of the Amazon rainforest.

As an avid reader of the news and follower of social media both here in Brazil and internationally, it has been interesting to see how reactions to this crisis have differed, especially as the crisis has reverberated around the world.

The first thing to note is that the surging rates of deforestation and fires were making headlines and influencing Instagram posts here much earlier than they were internationally, disproving any suggestion that people in Brazil are somehow apathetic or disinterested in the plight of the Amazon.

Whilst the escalating fires and the blackened sky in S?o Paulo shone a light on the issue, the contempt that Bolsonaro and his Environment Minister have shown for the environment and how they have been systematically trying to dismantle environmental protections have been simmering issues since his election. A key difference is that whereas previous environmental news had mainly involved words that caused outrage but were often proved to be hyperbolic (such as making the Agriculture Ministry responsible for indigenous rights – blocked by the supreme court), this time the consequences of their words being made clear in graphic detail. It became clear that the words of a President mouthing off on Twitter could not be treated as mere noise, whilst the actual work of government focused on pushing through pragmatic economic reforms. It was in a similar vein that the implications of Bolsonaro’s proclamation that “police officers who shoot criminals dead should be decorated with medals” was made real in April when a car carrying a family of five to a baby-shower was peppered with 80 bullets on a misplaced suspicion that it harboured a drug trafficker.

From a western perspective, the preservation of the Amazon can be a relatively non-contentious belief to have, here however it fell firmly predictably into the left-right culture war narrative.

Checking out a protest to support the Amazon that was taking place on Ipanema beach on Sunday, it was despairing to see a giant inflatable balloon of former President Lula, currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for his involvement in the Lava Jato corruption scandals, with a “Free Lula” banner. Lula, whilst considerably ‘greener’ than Bolsonaro in his attitudes to the environment was no saint on the matter and involving him felt like a shameless attempt of the left in Brazil to piggy-back onto the broadly supported environmental movement and use it as a party-political stick to beat the administration with. It was also counterproductive as it elicited a defensive reaction from his supporters who had staged a competing rally in support of him on next-door Copacabana. It was equally dispiriting to see wealthy teenagers shouting pro-Bolsonaro slogans at the protest with their hands mimicking his signature gesture of a handgun, blissfully insulated from the heavy-handed gun violence this rhetoric has legitimised in poorer parts of the city.

Unfortunately, the international reaction to the Amazon fires have served to heighten this sense of defensiveness regarding Brazil’s sovereign right to exploit its resources as it pleases, even amongst people that are not die-hard Bolsonaro fans. When a friend in Rio received a public post on Facebook from a distant French contact of hers asking, “what on earth is going on in your country?!,” no amount of concern for the Amazon was going to stop her feeling patronised and aggrieved. It has been frustrating to see as the crisis spread how local and international condemnation (and in many cases simple virtue-signalling) has fed the defensive mentality, making it easier for Bolsonaro supporters to agree that the fires were started by left-wing activists or that as the specific photo used by Macron and others to decry the fires was taken over a decade ago, that the story is somehow ‘fake news’.

The standard response from Brazilians keen to assert their right to exploit (or not) the Amazon as they see fit is that most other countries chopped down most of their forests as they industrialised. Leaving aside arguments about national sovereignty, a fact that gets perennially overlooked, especially considering the current destruction, is how much Brazil has protected its environment historically.

Natural parks and other areas of conservation, including indigenous territories account for almost 30% of Brazil’s national territory, a percentage that is far higher than other large countries (see chart, source: Embrapa). Additionally, it can rarely be said that this land is unproductive such as deserts like Death Valley or parts of the Australian Outback are, which constitute large chunks of their respective countries’ protected land. A Brazilian representative of the environment agency told an illuminating story; when talking to a counterpart in the US, he asked whether they worry about land invasions in their national parks. The ‘invaders’, his counterpart complained about, were weekend dirt-bikers.

In addition to this, Brazilian farms across the country are required by law to leave a set percentage of their land ‘in a natural state’ which is, (or at least was until recently), monitored and enforced. There are very few other countries on earth that have a policy to set aside so much productive land. Encouragingly a recent motion to remove this restriction was raised in congress by one of Bolsonaro’s sons and was roundly voted down.

It is sad how this reputation is being hacked away like the trees themselves through Bolsonaro’s words and actions. Worse still is how there is no clear policy of how to exploit the land legally but rather a corrosive process of chipping away at institutions and enforcement agencies that allow a relatively small number of illegal loggers, farmers and miners to wreak havoc.

What leads me to hope is how many sensible people within the administration and outside it are making the case for protecting the Amazon. The Minister for Agriculture and others, as well as the heads of agricultural and timber industries and lobby groups have made statements in favour of greater enforcement against deforestation. They argue that Brazilian agriculture stands to lose far more from punitive trade restrictions than is stands to gain from being able to expand further into rainforests; productivity growth in the sector was fastest, whilst deforestation declined in the last fifteen years.

There is a real missed opportunity that a smart, confident government in Brazil and international policy makers, more interested in concrete solutions than virtue-signalling, could agree on a substantial funding package and the sharing of responsibility that could be used to improve the lives of residents in the Amazon region, whilst preserving the forest. Frankly the ￡10m/$20m figures being offered by the UK and French governments are a drop in the ocean and more symbolic considering the scale of the issue and that over €1bn was raised to help rebuild Notre-Dame in Paris.

I like to think that Brazil’s political institutions, when combined with effective international action, could mitigate the worst impulses of an unfit president (whose views on most issues are stuck in the 70’s of Brazil’s military dictatorship) into acting in the interests of both his country and the planet.

However, the more opponents try to use the Amazon to score political points here or internationally, the more it descends into the divisive us-vs-them battle that the likes of Bolsonaro and Trump relish. With Brazil only slowly emerging from the worst recession in its history and memories of what led them there so fresh the end result of any such battle is that the right wins and the Amazon burns.