84 Time September 23, 2019
Throughout the industry, accountability is scarce.
The Brazilian company JBS, a global leader in beef
production, has been fined millions of dollars for buy-
ing cattle from farms under embargo. American agri-
businesses Bunge and Cargill are among the largest
players in the export of 14.9 million tons of soy from
the Amazon annually, used primarily as a livestock
feed. They have also been fined millions for sourc-
ing soy from off-limits areas.
For at least some working in the Amazon, the envi-
ronment is simply irrelevant. “We came here to open
up this region, so now let’s leave it? It’s not logical, is
it?” asks Gonçalves, the slaughterhouse owner. “We
came here to deforest, to clean,” he adds. “In the next
100 years, the Amazon will all be open. It’s a matter
of time, right?”
Yet the consequences are now becoming appar-
ent even to some of Bolsonaro’s supporters in União
Bandeirantes. Oliveira, the rancher, says the stream
at the bottom of his land has dried up. On the eastern
edge of the Amazon, shrubland has emerged. And in
deforested areas in the south, temperatures rose at
more than double the global average.
wiTh Tens of billions of trees already gone,
the region is warming fast. Droughts and floods
are more common, and the dry season has grown
by six days per decade since 1980. Trees play a cru-
cial role in putting water back into the atmosphere,
and their absence means less rainfall and higher
temperatures.
Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy, leading au-
thorities on the Amazon and climate change, believe
all of it—deforestation, the fires lit by ranchers that
spread hundreds of meters through forest, and the
impact of global temperature rises—might soon push
the rain forest past its tipping point. Current projec-
tions by the U.N. show the earth heading for heating
of up to 5°C this century—far higher than the 2°C
assumed by Nobre’s research. If that happens, that
forest will be lost forever. “In 10 or 20 years, we will
make a final diagnosis,” says Nobre. “If this process
continues, it becomes irreversible.”
The forces set in play in the Amazon could have
serious global consequences. The forest stores up to
120 billion metric tons of carbon, equivalent to al-
most 12 years of global emissions at current rates. If
cleared, much of that will go into the atmosphere.
That alone could push the global climate beyond
safe limits.
The Amazon tipping point could also lead to a
cascade of other potential climate tipping points.
Forest dieback is strongly interconnected with other
phenomena such as the melting of the Greenland ice
sheet, which would cause sea levels to rise, and the
degradation of frozen soil in the Arctic known as the
permafrost, which would release greenhouse gases
held in the ice as well as long-dormant diseases.
Scientists believe that these changes combined could
result in runaway global warming that humans would
find impossible to reverse.To Avoid The worsT-cAse scenArio, the heart
of the Amazon must be spared. Although 19.8% of
the 1.5 million sq. mi. of the Brazilian rain forest has
been conquered, mostly along its south and east,
swaths of the west and center remain intact. But that
might soon change. From the vanquished terrain of
Rondônia, a decaying highway roves north into the
forest. The BR-319 bisects the Purus-Madeira basin,
one of the most preserved parts of the forest, where
wildlife such as nocturnal two-toed sloths, woolly
monkeys and teju lizards live undisturbed. The
military inaugurated the highway in 1973 to connect
Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia, with Manaus,Karipuna
reserve
100 MILES
161 KMRealidadeBRAZIL
319
União
Bandeirantes