The city of Sao Paulo in Brazil fell into darkness just after 3pm on Monday.
Sunset wasn’t due for hours.
The image that emerged of a dark intersection, cars with their headlights beaming, and street lights radiating looked apocalyptic.
According to the BBC, heavy smoke travelling from the burning Amazon rainforest had likely blocked the sun, leading to a citywide blackout.
When the story became world news, there was just one problem.
We did not know the Amazon was burning. There had been no front page reports or photographs or hashtags.
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When Notre Dame burned for 15 hours in April of this year, the story dominated world news. Ancient relics were saved, while the Cathedral’s wooden spire was engulfed by flames.
For three weeks the Amazon has burned. The single largest tropical rainforest in the world, responsible for 20 per cent of the clean air we breathe. It’s been long referred to as the “lungs of our planet“.
If the Amazon burns, the world burns. The carbon stores within that rainforest serve to slow down the pace of global warming.
As trees and animals are engulfed in more than 73,000 fires, the smoke can be seen from space.
NASA has captured images in the last week of a smoke layer spanning more than 3.2 million square kilometres. That’s the equivalent of more than one-third of Australia.
It’s understood that three football fields of rainforest are being lost every minute.
Brazil’s right-wing President, Jair Bolsonaro, has been heavily criticised for his (lack of) environmental policies, which have seen greater privileges afforded to loggers, miners and farmers, who are contributing to the destruction of the Amazon.
He was quoted by Reuters News as saying in response to the fires, “I used to be called Captain Chainsaw. Now I am Nero, setting the Amazon aflame.”
The Amazon Fire, a tablet computer developed by Amazon, is dominating search engines, in place of the information users are looking for.
“I honestly can’t think of a more fitting way for this, the final summer of the decade, to end,” read one tweet.
“The Amazon is burning now, and if you Google “Amazon fire” you get ten pages of ads for Jeff Besos’ f*cking tablet.”
In the last few hours, the hashtag #PrayforAmazonia has begun to trend, with many sharing images and videos of the destruction.
In stark contrast, the ashes had not yet settled on the 4th arrondissement of Paris when President Emmanuel Macron addressed the nation.
“I tell you solemnly tonight: We will rebuild this cathedral,” he said, standing outside the Notre Dame Cathedral.
The fire still burned as Macron said, “Notre Dame of Paris is our history. The epicentre of our lives. It’s the many books, the paintings, those that belong to all French men and French women, even those who’ve never come.”
We watched as Parisians covered their mouths in horror, as they felt a piece of themselves burn.
That same horror, for a Cathedral that could be rebuilt, with beams and wood and stained glass windows, needs to be applied to a rainforest that won’t be so easy to put back together.
Top Comments
What I find rather interesting is your point about the ‘Amazon Fire’ tablet. So you Google for ‘Amazon Fire’ and bang, there’s the tablet. Is your first instinct really to give up and write an angry report on how this will make it out “final summer”? I did some research myself and you are correct that upon Googling ‘Amazon Fire’ you get results for the tablet. BUT if you had a cognitive system you could figure out that if you were to Google ‘Amazon FOREST fire’ you get what your actually looking for. Now, if it takes a 15 year old to tell you that I’m not too sure what your doing on this site. You can’t blame a company for advertising a product and then finding that product when you search for it. If you really did care about finding information on the Amazon burning you would try Google something that would actually help instead of writing this. While I understand that the ‘Amazon Fire’ was not your main point, I found it was extremely unnecessary, especially when it can be so easily solved. I could go on about all your other points, but frankly that would take too long. My main point here is to just use your brain instead of instantly diminishing something for doing its job.
So what's the deal here then?
I'm gonna say it straight up and admit my ignorance - I do not know enough about the Brazilan Government, corruption, the land-owners, native land rights, illegal burning to create space for crops or some such thing to have anything of value to say.
Is there a chance this may be an opportunity to raise these issues here instead of burning=bad
The deal is; Land is more valuable when it is cleared - livestock, development etc. It appears that most land owners want a return, which sucks. They’re reaching for the easy options.
We need to shift the value generation from distraction to regeneration.
I’d love an NGO to step in here. Buying land solely for regeneration purposes.
Maybe the ‘the 4 Ocean’ of land reclamation.