Legendary rainforest

As of September 29, Brazil’s Bolsonaro government has fired the civilian-run National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which has monitored the Amazon rainforest for the past three decades. INPE is being replaced (drumroll please) by the Brazilian military as the new watchdog over the world-famous rainforest. Voila, worldwide concerns about deforestation are… ah… indeterminate, vague, unspecified.

All along, the spectacularly bountiful rainforest has increasingly come under heavy attack and definitively at risk of turning into a degraded savannah. A warning put forward by world-renowned Amazonian scientist Carlos Nobre, as two powerfully destructive assaults are simultaneously underway: (1) global warming is pounding the rainforest repeatedly every 5 years, ever since 1998, with severe droughts lumberingly reinforced by (2) massive deforestation (cutting down and burning trees) for commercial logging, farming, and mineral exploitation.

Right before the eyes of the world the most legendary rainforest on the planet goes up in smoke.

Brazil’s vice president Hamilton Mourão, a retired general, announced, as of September 29th, creation of a new agency with “full authority over Amazon deforestation and fire monitory satellite alerts.” As mentioned above, the new agency is now in charge of collecting and analyzing scientific data for 60 percent of South America’s rainforest.

A telltale indicator to this sudden change of guard took place almost one year ago when science minister Marcos Pontes fired the former chief of the INPE agency Ricardo Galvão, August of 2019, over a public disagreement with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro on the validity of data about deforestation. According to Bolsonaro, the data had been altered to attack his government. In response, Galvão labeled the president “a coward.”

In response to Galvão’s release, Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at INPE, informed Eos news that “deforestation under Bolsonaro is exploding.” He already “had done a tremendous amount of damage in the environmental area just in 7 months… things are falling apart very quickly.”

Carlos Nobre, who worked at INPE for 35 years and who is currently senior researcher at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo indignantly commented: “If deforestation exceeds 20-25 percent of the Amazon, calculations indicate the region will turn into a degraded savannah,” Ibid.

Along those lines, according to INPE data, since 1970: “Forest cover as a percent of pre-1970 cover” equals 82.7 percent.

Excerpted from: ‘Kiss the Amazon Rainforest Goodbye’

Counterpunch.org