Amazon fires: Record number burning in Brazil rainforest

Gonna give my 2 cents, bear in mind I&#x27;m in Brazil and am involved in projects related to the Amazon forest.<p>My problem with all this are some things:<p>* One problem I have is that during the last years Amazon savagery was going uncontrollable, no one cared, especially BBC, now that a president was elected that is not aligned with their point of view was elected, this became a front news issue.<p>* Assuming this is all true (and bear in mind, it isn&#x27;t always) that fire was in Brazil&#x27;s frontier, not just Brazil, the article forgot that part.<p>* One more point is: the supposed German and Norway money to &quot;help maintain the forest&quot;, if you need to learn anything from investigative journalism, is to follow the money. Norway had a mining operation in the middle of Amazon[0] - the thing they are supposed to prevent! Funny enough, that mining rig polluted all the area [1] and they settled down not paying the locals, that are still protesting. I really wonder if that Amazon fund was really to support and protect our forest or to pay off NGOs to ignore what they were doing over there. Bonus: this all happened in the previous &quot;good&quot; government administration.<p>I really worry about the forest and was in Sao Paulo when that happened two days ago, but I really suspect the politics around it.<p>[0] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;the-world-protests-as-amazon-forests-are-opened-to-mining-83034" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;the-world-protests-as-amazon-fore...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tnp.no&#x2F;norway&#x2F;panorama&#x2F;toxic-waste-from-norwegian-hydro-amazon-water-brazil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tnp.no&#x2F;norway&#x2F;panorama&#x2F;toxic-waste-from-norwegia...</a>

The sad part of reading news like this is the feeling of paralysis and helplessness of watching it all unfold.<p>There are no actionable calls to action or advice laid out in articles like these.<p>Awareness is good though. Perhaps it inspires people to work directly on solving nature&#x27;s greatest problems. A friend of mine made a GitHub curated list about tech companies working in this space.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nglgzz&#x2F;awesome-clean-tech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nglgzz&#x2F;awesome-clean-tech</a>

Brasil needs to be heavily sanctioned by the international community, I&#x27;m talking Cuba-level stuff if we want to even have a chance at stopping the rise above 2 degrees, we only have 12 years which means that it&#x27;s already probably too late.<p>More worrying is the rise of populism in the world supported by fake news, ignorance and social media that led to this.<p>How did someone as ignorant as Bolsonaro ever managed to get elected as president of a democratic country, and get away with some of the things he says?

How about the rest of the world buy the rainforest and put it in a trust? It could then be dealt with like Antarctica - an area that isn&#x27;t a country.<p>Same applies with say the DRC and other rainforest areas.

If we truly care about nature then Brazil should be made one of the most politically and economically stable countries in the world by the powers of the world.<p>If that seems like too much effort to give up our own resources to protect the environment then leading world powers should re-evaluate whether its in humanities best interest to have few stable places of living that don&#x27;t come at the cost of the environment to deal with poverty and suffering.<p>If you or your country is not stable, the last thing you will be concerned about is the environmental impact on the world.

It took me a few good seconds to realize that the title is not about Amazon burning cash or something, shows how entrenched in our lives Amazon (the company) is.

If environmental disasters are enough pretext for questioning sovereignty, shall we compile a list, together with the territory to be subtracted? I suggest with start with North America. I&#x27;ll go first:<p>- Deepwater Horizon platform; Gulf of Mexico, 2010.

For some reason I&#x27;ve thought about the other Amazon. Even São Paulo didn&#x27;t help the title to ring a bell.

This hits at one ideological conundrum that I have been grappling with for a while.<p>All major developed nations did so on the back of dirty energy, exploiting resources and with huge climate change implications.<p>Now that the smaller developing nations are finally capable of doing so themselves, they are being discouraged by the same developed powers. The developed powers did the same, but got away with it because there was no oversight. I don&#x27;t see why these underdeveloped nations are now being expected to take the moral high ground.<p>We wouldn&#x27;t need the Amazon as much, if we weren&#x27;t pumping as many pollutants into our air and water supplies.<p>Plenty of species went extinct when the now developed powers expanded with reckless abandon. Now that Brazil is doing the same, the outrage seems hypocritical.<p>Some may say that the Amazon is special and not a resource that Brazil can singularly exploit, when it has global implications. But, the same has been true of fossil rich nations that have pumped cheap gas into the market indiscriminately, while they all individually became billionaires.<p>This whole argument extended to new developing economies like India and Central Africa at large.<p>Just to be clear I am not advocating for the deforestation of the Amazon. It can be seen as a right wing talking point, but I myself am completely at my wits end and do not have a retort to the argument.

Is anyone surprised? It&#x27;s easy to be upset over this but most readers here live relatively privileged lives. The poor farmer lighting a fire is doing his best to improve his life by clearing more land.<p>I don&#x27;t know to improve the situation but I feel like we also need to have empathy and understanding.

How much would one need to pay per square kilometer rainforrest for keeping it to be competitive against steak&#x2F;soy-farming?

Please stop.<p>It is not the fault of the current government. Burning happens every year in the Amazon, and everywhere across the world.<p>The leftist party is using international media to alarm against the current government.<p>There are also investigations being carried out on these burnings, as there are indications that several are criminals and were executed by NGOs in this region. Those are the same who have lost benefits (money) in recent weeks.<p>Yes, it is the responsibility of the current government to intervene, hold responsible and take steps to prevent this from occurring or diminishing its impact in the future. It is worth remembering that this government is only 8 months old.<p>People behave as if previous governments were constantly extinguishing fire and that in the last 16 days, &quot;by the current government&quot;, the water has run out and started to set fire to everything.<p>The problem of Amazonian care comes from decades of neglect, and this government is only 8 months old. There should be no external intervention. Other countries (first world or not, there are no excuses) should reforest as much as they can for the global good and not just point the finger at this region (important, of course).<p>NGOs in Brazil are almost totally corrupt, they are cancer here in Brazil. As well as much of politics.<p>Many forget or do not know that former President Lula [1] assumed in interviews that his government lied about important statistical data, such as hunger and misery in Brazil to impact abroad and then present the true numbers as the savior of this country. Pure manipulation.<p>The current government is revisiting all research departments through a thorough process to check all numbers that were presented as true and many are questionable.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M5bOtqmvJHE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M5bOtqmvJHE</a> (in Portuguese only, sorry)