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AROUND THE REGION

MiCHAeL FOX

Amazon in Flames (Interview) Brazilian ecologist Dr. Bernardo M. Flores sheds light on the long-term

ecological fallout of devastating Amazon fires and cuts through rhetoric

to pinpoint the real threats to the rainforest under President Bolsonaro.

T he world watched in horror in August as blazes stretched across the Amazon region, ripping fiery gashes into once pristine jungle.

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro did nothing for nearly two weeks. When he finally announced in a national address that he was sending 44,000 troops to battle the flames, Brazilians across the country banged pots and pans in disgust.

As of late August, 84 percent more fires had burned across Brazil than the previous year. The majority were started by loggers, landowners, and illegal land grabbers, empowered by the Bolsonaro government and its policies, which have gutted environmental agencies and promoted Amazon development and deforestation.

A decade ago, Brazil reined in soaring Amazon deforestation after then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva implemented a series of landmark measures, including monitoring, fines, and other controls. The reforms were such a success that Brazil hit its 2020 goal of reducing deforestation-related green- house gas emissions three years ahead of schedule.

Those days are over. Deforestation is now at a 10-year high, rising 190 percent in the July to Sep- tember period compared to the same months last year, according to data from Brazil’s National Insti- tute for Space Research (INPE).

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s government is pursuing plans for large-scale development in the region, according to documents and audio leaked to inves- tigative outlet The Intercept. The plan, known as

the Baron of Rio Branco Project, “would exploit resources,” reported The Intercept’s Tatiana Dias, “build large-scale bridges, dams, and highways; and attract non-Indigenous citizens to settle the northern region, the sparsely populated Brazilian hinterlands. Each project would inevitably create ripple waves of secondary deforestation and disrupt local com- munities.” The projects would impact 27 Indigenous communities and protected areas.

The plans are reminiscent of development in the Amazon under the 1964-1985 military dictator- ship, which killed 8,350 Indigenous people as it built highways and opened up the rainforest in the name of occupying the Amazon before foreign inter- ests stole it.

Bolsonaro has promoted the same idea, accusing other countries of foreign intervention for raising alarm over Amazon destruction. In particular, he singled out France, whose president Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Bolsonaro’s slow response to the August fires. Bolsonaro also blamed, without evidence, international environmental NGOs for starting the blazes as retaliation against his govern- ment for rolling back government funding. He is not alone in this belief.

Bolsonaro’s secretary of institutional security, retired general Augusto Heleno, who was military commander of the Amazon from 2007 to 2009, said in June that he believed there was a strategy “to preserve Brazil’s environment so it could later be

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exploited by foreigners,” with the help of NGOs “knowingly in the service of foreign governments.”

Bolsonaro’s secretary of strategic affairs, Maynard Marques de Santa Rosa, has also claimed that Brazil may be facing a threat of foreign invasion by China at its border with Suriname.

To grapple with the ecological impacts of the fires and Bolsonaro’s Amazon development plans, I spoke with Dr. Bernardo M. Flores, who has studied the Amazon since 2006. He teaches ecological resil- ience at the University of Campinas, in São Paulo. His current research investigates how savannas may expand in tropical South America as a result of cli- mate change and human activities, such as Amazon deforestation. His previous studies focused on the resilience of ecological systems in the Amazon basin and how floodplain forests that cover 14 percent of the Amazon basin could become more flamma- ble and fragile with climate change, exposing the Amazon to wildfires in its core areas and thus poten- tially acting as an Achilles heel of the system.

The following interview is an excerpt from a series of conversations with Dr. Flores in September 2019.

Michael Fox: The Amazon Fires were at the top of the headlines in August. From an ecological standpoint, what is at stake? How devastating are the fires?

Bernardo M. Flores: Because 2019 is not a drought year in the Amazon region, these fires are mainly limited to deforested areas, and not wildfires pene- trating standing forest. In years of extreme drought, such as in 2015 and 2016, wildfires spread across vast areas of the Amazon, opening forest structures and making them vulnerable to other fires. Both pro- cesses of deforestation and wildfires may favor the expansion of fire-prone vegetation and increase the risk of runaway forest loss.

The fires we see this year are mostly in controlled areas, illegally deforested, and will contribute to degrading the ecosystem through soil erosion and seed bank destruction. If these areas are abandoned, forests may regrow, but they will follow different

paths than they would normally. Different tree spe- cies will colonize, resulting in forests that function differently. For instance, forests growing in former pastures store less carbon than forests that are only cleared without fire in the long run.

So what is at stake is basically the expansion of degraded Amazonian ecosystems, which will provide less services for society, such as climate regulation and carbon storage, as well as water and food provision.

MF: Your focus is ecological resilience. The Amazon is one of the most important biomes on the planet. What is the capacity of the region to withstand the attack on its ecosystem?

BMF: The Amazon forest has persisted for mil- lions of years, even in moments when the climate was drier. Now, as humans clear, log, and burn the forest, at massive scales, not only at the borders of the basin, but along roads in its interior, the system gradually loses resilience, or in other words, its ability to persist with similar functioning and inter- actions. Initially, the Amazon forest is exposed to numerous disturbances and nonetheless can over- come them. The problem is that at a certain point, the stress reaches a level known as a tipping point, in which the system is no longer capable of absorbing these impacts, and it shifts into an alternative state, often assumed to be a savanna. Currently, these landscapes have invasive exotic grasses that domi- nate, and therefore what replaces the forest cannot be considered a true savanna, but instead a degraded open vegetation state.

Moreover, at broader scales, feedbacks between the forest and rainfall become weaker with defor- estation. This causes rainfall to decline in other parts of the Amazon basin, pushing them beyond the tipping point, leading to a systemic collapse. This happens because the whole system is interconnected through interactions.

There is a recent article from Thomas Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre called “Amazon Tipping Point.” They propose that to maintain a safe operating space of

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the Amazon, we need to keep deforestation below 20 percent, because once it passes this 20 percent or 25 percent, the areas that have been deforested produce less rainfall, and this lower rainfall means that there will be more fires and more deforestation, and then these feedbacks can become stronger. So it’s extremely important to be precautious in this case. Once you pass this point of no return the forest can accelerate into a savanna and this will completely alter the functioning of the ecosystem with, of course, disastrous consequences not only for Brazil, but for societies in other countries also.

MF: People talk about the Amazon as a thermostat for the world, in maintaining climate balance and staving off global warming. Why is that?

BMF: The forest regulates climate. Not only region- ally, but also the global climate system. In a highly cited paper last year [“Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” by Will Steffen et al.], they argue that the loss of the Amazon forest could trigger a domino effect, pushing the planet into a hot house state, which would be much warmer, much more inhospitable than today.

This is because the Amazon is connected to many other subsystems of the Earth—for instance, the permafrost and the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Either one of these components is called a tipping element of the Earth system. If you lose one of them, you can trigger a domino effect. And basically, the Amazon is one very important component. This is the main reason why the world is putting pressure on Brazil. The future of the Amazon is determinant for the well-being of all humanity.

So this implies that other nations have the right to demand that Brazil govern the Amazon properly. This doesn’t threaten the sovereignty of Brazil. It only means that we must cooperate and negotiate with other nations to protect our ecosystems and find a common path with these other countries toward global sustainability. I think that is more a matter of responsibility than a threat.

MF: Bolsonaro, of course, disagrees with this sentiment. He has expressed belief in the deeply ingrained Brazilian myth that other countries want to invade and steal the Amazon’s riches. This was used during the dictatorship to open the region for development. Bolsonaro is now planning to do the same. Where does this myth come from?

BMF: This is an old idea. Maybe it started with the rubber boom. In the 19th century, Brazil was export- ing latex from the rubber tree. And this was the main export from Brazil at the time, contributing to eco- nomic growth. And in the beginning of the 20th century, the rubber tree was planted in Southeast Asia, starting in Malaysia. It became highly compet- itive, and it led to the collapse of economic activity in Brazil. So this may have contributed to creating a common paranoia of foreign intervention in Brazil. Still today, some people believe that countries want to invade and steal Brazil’s natural resources. This doesn’t make sense any more.

Bolsonaro exploits this fear among his supporters, who hold this view more strongly than most people in Brazil. For example, he has said many times that NGOs are aligned with other countries that want to exploit Amazonian resources and deceive local people. We know that it’s obviously the opposite. We know that most NGOs acting on social and environ- mental issues in Brazil have been fundamental. They provide support for people and societies in remote areas, covering some of the things that the state and its public policies don’t reach. These NGOs have con- tributed enormously to enhancing governance in the Amazon, and that is why Bolsonaro tries to under- mine the NGOs and maintain this distorted view of the role of NGOs among his voters.

the future of the Amazon is determinant for the well-being of all humanity.

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MF: Talk about the Bolsonaro government. What are your biggest concerns about the direction his government is headed in the Amazon?

BMF: The government is weakening and destroying governance mechanisms developed for the Amazon over recent decades, such as the detection of defor- estation via satellite through the National Institute for Space Research, INPE, and the protected area system, environmental control agencies and FUNAI, the government entity charged with protecting Indigenous rights and land.

Bolsonaro also has said many times that he is interested in extracting minerals in the Amazon region. These minerals have been mapped and it has been well known for decades already that many of these minerals are on Indigenous lands. And this may be why he has been weakening Indigenous pol- icies in the region. He wants to reduce the capacity

that Indigenous people have to the rights on their lands and also undermine the support in these areas from the state, environmental control agencies, and Indigenous agencies.

And it’s not only Indigenous rights and NGOs. The Bolsonaro government has been systematically destroying basically every mechanism there is in Brazil that enhances environmental governance. Today, the international environmental interest in the Amazon is not about stealing the Amazon’s abundance, it is mainly related to supporting the ecosystem, because we know that the Amazon rain- forest stores a huge amount of carbon. So it has a critical role in controlling global warming. If you lose the forest, you will accelerate global warming. If you maintain the forest you can help control and reduce global warming. The longer it takes to restore governance the closer we get to the tipping point.

A protester carries a sign reading “Amazon yes, Bolsonaro no” during a demonstration in Rio de Janeiro in August 2019.

(MÍDIA NINJA/FLICKR)

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MF: Some foreign observers have reflected that perhaps Brazil simply does not have the means to take care of the Amazon. Is there anything to back up this claim?

BMF: Th e whole idea that Brazil is not capable of taking care of its ecosystems is wrong. Th at’s easy to see if you look at post-2004, when deforestation in Brazil was at its highest rates. From then on, when Marina Silva was the minister of the environment, the Brazilian government started implementing new ways of monitoring deforestation by space, increas- ing INPE’s capacity to monitor using the highest technology and also environmental control agen- cies going into the fi eld and giving fi nes. All of this worked very well and deforestations rates went down until around 2014, when because of political inter- ests it started going up again. Th is is all related to governance.

We have this variation from one year to another, which has to do with El Niño in the Pacific and Atlantic oscillations. Climatic variability increases forest fi res that are out of control, and this increases the degradation in later years and forest loss. But the most important thing is governance, and Brazil has shown that it’s perfectly capable of governing its ecosystems. It’s just a matter of political interest, and now we have elected a president who wants to weaken our governance. Brazilians and citizens from other nations have to put pressure so that eventu- ally we will have a new government that will start to recover what we had before. nn

Michael Fox is an independent multimedia journalist based in Brazil and a former editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas. More of his work can be found at his website, www.mfox.us.

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