[Image: Another Angry Voice.]
Jair Bolsonaro seems determined to turn his enormous nation into a desert – a dustbowl incapable of supporting life.
That’s what will happen if the Amazon rainforest is allowed to disappear, you see. The soil on which it stands is not rich enough to sustain farm crops for more than one or two plantings at the most. After that, the people of Brazil will be left in the dust.
That’s science.
Mr Bolsonaro seems to be motivated by something else. Greed? It makes no sense.
He can’t make money by burning the forest. Once it is gone, his people will be doomed. And there should be no aid from other countries because they will have brought it down on themselves – and on the rest of us.
I have wondered whether this is a blackmail play – trying to get us to pay him to keep the forest from harm.
But then he would not have gone ahead and started burning it – or allowing it to be burned.
It makes no sense. It is the action of a loon.
So, while I agree with everything Tom Clark of Another Angry Voice states below, I think there is more to it.
I’m absolutely sick of people saying that the “Amazon is burning” as if it’s some kind of unfortunate accident.
Massive swathes of the Amazon are being deliberately burned in a massive land grab by ranchers and loggers emboldened by far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental diatribes and racist rhetoric against the indigenous people and minorities who live there.
This is what happens when extreme-right racist untranationalists cheat their way into power.
For more detail on Mr Bolsonaro’s plans, see this article.
The strange thing is, there won’t be any military intervention by the nations of the West.
It seems that, if fossil fuel isn’t involved, the United States, the UK and the other so-called “great” democracies don’t care.
We certainly don’t care, it seems, about an environmental calamity being committed in front of our noses, despite having declared that the world is in a climate emergency. What hypocrisy.