The Amazon is Burning at a Record Rate!

The “lungs of the planet” are burning.

The Amazon Rainforest is burning at a record rate. The fires are so big that you can see the smoke from NASA space satellites. On Monday, the sky turned black over the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil and meteorologists found that the smoke filling the sky there was from fires thousands of kilometers away.

The Amazon is one of the most important physical features on the planet, as key to our continued survival as the polar ice caps or the great oceans. Its vast sea of trees breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen, creating as much as a fifth of the planet’s supply. Read that again — it accounts for every fifth breath you take. If we burn down the forest, you make it impossible to deal with climate change. This is why the Amazon, which covers 2.1 million square miles, is often referred to as the “lungs of the planet”: The forest produces 20 percent of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere.

This year so far, scientists have recorded more than 74,000 fires in Brazil. That’s nearly double 2018’s total of about 40,000 fires. The surge marks an 83 percent increase in wildfires over the same period of 2018, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research reported. The largest state in Brazil, Amazonas, declared a state of emergency on Monday. Already, 2019 has the highest number of fires observed in a single year since researchers began keeping track in 2013.

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover. The month of July set a new record for the most deforestation ever in the Amazon in a single month. The Amazon shrunk by 519 square miles (1,345 square kilometers). That’s more than twice the area of Tokyo.

In his first seven months in power, Bolsonaro, who was elected with strong support from agribusiness and mining interests, has moved rapidly to erode government agencies responsible for forest protection. Jair Bolsonaro who won the presidency last year amidst rampant corruption and nationalism, encouraged ranchers and loggers to “open up” the Amazon, and the flames are the natural result, as they burn the forest to create new pasture land for cattle or fields to grow soy. When challenged, he’s insisted that environmentalists must be setting the fires to make him look bad.

Brazil controls a lion’s share of the Amazon. However, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has indicated that protecting the rainforest is not one of his top priorities. Bolsonaro supports development projects like a highway and hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.

His administration has also cut down on the seizing of illegally harvested timber. In 2018 (under the previous administration), 883,000 cubic feet of illegal timber was seized. As of May 15, Bolsonaro’s government agencies had seized only 1,410 cubic feet, Pacific Standard reported.

What’s more, between January and May, Bolsonaro’s government lowered the number of fines it levied for illegal deforestation and mining (down 34 percent from the same period in 2018) and decreased its monitoring of illegal activity in the rainforest.

When we cut down the Amazon, we are messing with the future of the entire planet.