SEPTEMBER 7 2019 LISTENER 25

B

lue-winged butterflies drift by. Insects screech high

in the canopy like a chorus of transistor radios. The

close, hot embrace of the forest is suffocatingly

beautiful. At the base of a towering castanha tree,

S, a woman in her forties, is sobbing.

S had been responding to a simple question

about her feelings towards the forest. This great

green thing we’re standing in called the Amazon.

She cries as she imagines what might happen here: red-dust roads,

bulldozers and chains, humped cattle.

“I don’t like it,” says S. “I don’t even like to talk about it,

because when we talk about death, it’s not good. Each tree they

cut, everything they do, hurts us.”

Two bored teenage boys are out in front, slashing with machetes.

We move haltingly along a path that is continuously reclaimed

by the Amazon biome. Selva dura, as S calls it: hard jungle. It’s

hard to be in, but also hard to be away from.

S has just left her home for the city to work for a non-

governmental organisation (NGO) that aims to protect her people.

We’re not using her full name or that of others to avoid any

possibility of retribution. Things are heating up here.

The Amazon, once thought saved, is under threat again. For

15 years, rates of deforestation fell, then stabilised in tandem

with the blood pressure of environmentalists. Under Brazil’s new

president, Jair Bolsonaro, it is spiking again, setting off alarm bells

throughout the ecological community.

In the past two weeks, a burning Amazon has been blazing

across social media. In the first eight months of the year, 75,000

forest fires were recorded in Brazil, an 84% increase on last year.

The Government has sent 44,000 troops to battle the flames.

At the recent G7 summit in Biarritz, France, world leaders

pledged US$20 million ($31 million) to fight the fires, an amount

dismissed as “chump change” by environmental campaigners.

Bolsonaro has wasted no time in courting controversy,

blaming the fires on environmental NGOs such as the one S

works for. He has no evidence, he told the media, just a feeling.

Environmentalists say the President is trying to conceal policies

that have led to the expansion of cattle ranching, seen by many

as the root cause of the deforestation and fires.

For those of us in far-flung parts of the world, such as New

Zealand, the Amazon tends to be an abstract but crucial element in

the climate-change equation. S understands its global significance,

the cooling effect it has on the entire planet. But she has an even

more immediate concern. This forest is her home. One-fifth of

the Amazon is already gone. The latest data has it disappearing

at the rate of three rugby fields every minute.

UNDISCOVERED TREASURE

We’re heading to a 500-year-old grove of brazil nut trees with

The Amazon, once thought saved,

is under threat again. In the first

eight months of this year, 75,000

forest fires were recorded in Brazil,

an 84% increase on last year.

Destruction: an

aerial view of a

forest fire near the

city of Candeias do

Jamari in the state

of Rondônia.