Team of firefighters responds to forest fire.
Since early August, international concern has been raised over recent fires in the Amazon rainforest, especially in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro’s pro-business administration. Despite the severity of the situation, however, experts say it is not wholly unique, and is theoretically manageable.
However, during the fires’ coverage and international reception, significant roadblocks have been created towards long-term sustainability measures. These take the form of unproductive and incomplete scientific, media, and political rhetoric, both in Brazil and worldwide. The overcirculation of slightly misleading claims by environmentalists unwittingly enables the circulation of counterproductive claims from climate denialists that detract from the impact of the real situation. The result is further polarization within the media and subsequent polarization in politics, both Brazilian and international.
The situation seemed clear and direct at first: that the Amazon, the “lungs of the world” said to produce 20% of the world’s oxygen, was burning at a rate that was 80% higher than the rates of the same month of the previous year, a rate and scale only seen twice before in the past twenty thousand years. However, experts in Amazonian ecology and conservation claim that some of these statements are misleading.
This is not to say that the dangers of Amazonian deforestation are not real. The Amazon does store about 25% of the world’s carbon in its vegetation, which, when burned, could release vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Additionally, the way that the forest absorbs moisture and heat energy has a huge impact on maintaining global climate patterns — if the Amazon is lost, according to ecologist Dan Nepstad in an interview for NPR, “it’s going to change the way air and energy move around the planet, and that means our climate will change.” The Amazon also houses an enormous portion of the world’s biodiversity and crucial indigenous knowledge of potential keystone species. To say it is worth protecting is an understatement.
Extensive deforestation data collected by INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research; DETER, its Real Time System for Detection of Deforestation; and NASA all confirm that while deforestation rates are not as severe today than they were in the early 2000s, they are incredibly high: more forest has been cleared this summer than in the past three years combined, the number of fires this year has increased by 80% from the same time frame last year, and rates of brush-clearing fires are increasing from previous years in this past decade.
Unfortunately, however, such details were not sufficiently communicated. Reductionist reporting led to misinterpretations, lack of deference to reliable data, and wide international divisions in the media, all of which harm the very real, pressing cause.
Broad, sweeping, and often unfounded soundbites constantly circulated in the media coverage of the Amazon fires: take, for example, the “lungs of the world” claim. Media outlets frequently stated that the Amazon produces 20% of the world’s oxygen, and a reduction in forest cover would mean a depletion of the world’s oxygen levels. However, thinking about the Amazon as a producer of oxygen, according to Amazon experts, is based on false statistics. The Amazon consumes about as much oxygen via decomposition of organic material as it produces via photosynthesis, resulting in a negligible net gain of oxygen.
Similar disputes on the data on the extent of the fires have also circulated. Michael Shellenberger, a columnist for Forbes, points out that media outlets such as CNN and the New York Times did indeed deliver the message of the rainforest burning in apocalyptic tones, and that the fires this year are not the worst the forest has ever seen. But this attitude poses a big problem for the preservation of the Amazon region itself.
But columnists such as Shellenberger downplay the importance of Amazon preservation simply because of a few faulty statistics — that this year’s fires are marginally not as severe as they were in the early 2000s, that the “lungs of the world” assumption isn’t completely accurate. Thus, the environmentalist message proclaims that the Amazon is burning at apocalyptic, never-foreseen levels that will endanger the world’s oxygen supply; this message unintentionally provides a straw man for completely unsubstantiated climate denialist claims that the Amazon is not in danger and is not important, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
The fires are caused by unsustainable deforestation practices that could expose larger areas of the Amazon to scrub expansion and deforestation of areas that never see fire, according to Dan Nepstad. And these crises need to be managed. But divisive media messages skew the focus on unfounded arguments, giving undue power to the alt-right and affecting the fires’ political handling.
Recent interactions between the French president Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro at the G7 summit reflect these emerging divisions well.
On the side of Macron and the international community concerned about the future of the Amazon, the unequivocal denouncement of Brazil’s agricultural sector has inflamed the very rhetoric that allowed Bolsonaro, a far-right champion of business expansion and Brazilian nationalism, to become elected by crucial groups of farmers and miners, the very demographic that conservation leaders are currently trying to reach.
Since the G7 summit and widespread international condemnation of Brazil’s administration, mining, logging, and agricultural sectors, Bolsonaro has been quick to label Macron and other countries offering to help the Amazon as neo-imperialist, even going so far as to reject a multi-million-dollar aid offer from Macron to help fight the fires, after Twitter spats between the two.
Bolsonaro has also taken the opportunity to label data found by INPE as “lies,” after firing the head of the INPE in August without apparent rationale, in response to the questionable accuracy of some of the less-important circulated statistics. This further weakens the ability of INPE to deliver data and put forward conservation practices.
Perhaps the most disturbing development is evidenced by a recent deal signed between the US and Brazil intended to open the Amazon for development. This reflects an attitude that development within the Amazon is the only way to sustain it economically. However, if these trends of support for Bolsonaro’s destructive practices continue within Brazil’s agricultural groups and international pro-business groups, sustainable job creation, communication between conservationists and Amazonian communities to prevent degradation and stabilize local economies are severely impeded, instead giving way to further destruction and encroachment by unsustainable industrial and agricultural developers.
Reasonable management of the Amazon to continue slowing deforestation is conceivable. But a deadly combination of flawed rhetoric from several spheres — the circulation of faulty claims about the Amazon itself, and the use of those faulty claims to empower climate deniers and Bolsonaro’s base — has made internal political support for sustainability greatly polarized, and made action to protect the Amazon long-term through informed planning extremely difficult.
Flickr/Intermountain Region US Forest Service