The Amazon Burns !

 The biggest patch of rain forest left in the world is the Amazon in Brazil - and its burning !  Year after year, the people living on its perimeter seek to turn more of it into farming land or pasture to graze their cattle.  At last count there were 74,000 individual fires burning and the smoke haze could be seen from space.

This amazing tropical rain forest has been described as " the lungs of the world "  and millions have been contributed by other countries in an effort to save it.  For a long time this money bought helicopters to get police to illegal logging camps where the loggers would be arrested and the camp and its equipment destroyed.

All that changed when Brazil had an election and populist President Jair Bolsonaro won office. He viewed the Amazon through very different eyes and efforts to evict the loggers and farmers trying to clear agricultural land lapsed.  In a short period of time fires were burning across the length and breadth of this proclaimed tree sanctuary.

What horrifies some conservationists is that the Amazon still contain some tribes that have not yet encountered the citizens of this twenty-first century.  They go naked and hunt for their living and they live deep in the rain forest beyond the reach of exploration parties.

It is expected that they will have gained no immunity to the many diseases that run rampant in our society and there is every chance that contact will decimate their numbers, as happened when Europeans first landed on other foreign shores.

Laws were put in place to prevent accidental contact with these tribes but they too have lapsed.  It is President Bolsonaro's view that the Amazon is a commercial treasure that should not be denied to Brazilians as a way of improving their standard of living.  Where it has been cleared it delivers prime agricultural land and the cut trees deliver valuable lumber.

Bonsonaro is confident that this area of Brazil is probably rich in a number of mineral deposits, and he has mentioned gold, uranium and tin as the likely national benefits.  Unfortunately, that will not be proven until the Amazon is destroyed and at the present rate of progress it will be gone long before mid century.

It is hard to predict how that will affect world weather, but the absorption of carbon dioxide by the trees and its replacement with oxygen will certainly increase world warming, just at a time when efforts to hold world temperature below 2 degrees is becoming critical.

Now it depends if the rest of the world can do a deal with Bonsonaro.   Clearly, the Amazon is Brazilian property and saving it probably rests on negotiating a trade benefit that provides adequate compensation !