We are not the only country cursed with a leader who believes a pig satisfied is the apex of life’s meaning.
The daytime skies of Sao Paulo have turned Mordor-ish black as deliberately set forest fires create a smoke column that resembles the British Columbia fires of last year — or the Siberian mega fires this year. earther.gizmodo.com/...
The vibe is reminiscent of last year, when smoke from wildfires did the exact same thing in British Columbia. But in some ways, the Brazilian situation is more ominous. After all, the fires in British Columbia weren’t inspired by a fascist president looking to open the forest up for business.
Brazil’s blazes are a whole other story. Bolsonaro ran on a campaign platform that was pro-big business, anti-LGBTQ, and straight up racist. He promised to open the Amazon to mining, fossil fuel exploitation, timber, and agriculture while kicking indigenous groups off their land. From the moment he took office in January, he has done just that.
Farmers took him at his word and literally celebrated the creation of a “day of fire” as they set the forests on fire to clear land for agriculture
The irony of our situation is that at the precise time in human history when our climate/ecologic situation is at its direst, when we are in the balance of that old Ben Franklin quote “"we must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately" we see instead the rise of the men who can see only the world as an exploitable market
Burning down the Amazon is a bit like getting that first lung cancer diagnosis and chain smoking your way back to your home- there is a hell of a lot of CO2 that these planetary “lungs” breathe in
The rainforest is key to combatting climate change, sucking up 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually or a quarter of all carbon absorbed by forests globally. Yet climate change has contributed to drying the region out, weakening the so-called lungs of our planet. Fires like the ones currently burning can even cause parts of the forest to become a net emitter of carbon dioxide as all those decades of stored carbon goes up in smoke, creating a nasty feedback loop.
If you ever believed that a system that is based on man as an individual acting solely in his own economic self interest is the way forward, I invite you to reexamine your views….