It is pretty hard to know how big an area you had to burn to shroud this hemisphere’s largest megacity, Sao Paulo, about 1,500 kilometres from the Amazon, in enough smoke to completely darken its skies. However, we do have some numbers on fires in Brazil (over  87,000 ) and Amazonia (close to 45,000 and climbing). The area  that burned all over Amazonia since the beginning of 2019 nudges up to over 4 million hectares (Brazil) and another 2 million in Bolivia – and it is not done yet.  We know that the number of fires was up 90% from the previous year  thanks to Brazil’s world class remote sensing Institute for Spatial Studies  (INPE) whose physicist director Dr.  Ricardo Galvão was fired for reporting  this to Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro. Other major South American cities such as Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and the large soybean entrepot of Porto Velho were also wheezing through darkness at noon with the unbreathable air, the explosion in hospital visits and  newly-asthmatic, choking children.

This will be more or less the state of things until the heavier rains come at the end of the year.  The dramatic  Amazon fires images were coming in a year of the hottest summer ever recorded, when Paris vied with Death Valley for the hottest spot on the planet for a few days (111 degrees Fahrenheit), Fairbanks, Alaska basked in 90 degree heat and Siberian fires blazed in the arctic while glaciers simply dissolved at unprecedented rates. The images of the vast burnings, a human arson on a more or less unthinkable scale, were dramatically visible from space, from drones and from distressing ground photos which made the heat feel palpable, the apocalypse now. Forest fire smoke, C02 and the DNA of the most complex systems on the planet became mere ash, a new kind of urban pollution. The immolated ecosystems swirled into the atmosphere to further bake more greenhouse gases into the sky, reducing its plants and animals to their constituent chemicals in the claggy dust and the charred remains  of a world perhaps now gone forever.

The ghastly images soon triggered a geopolitical outcry. Bolsonaro, a climate “sceptic”, and  his Minister for the Exterior Ernesto Araujo and US Secretary of State as well as US president Trump, are all climate change deniers. They suddenly found that at the 2019 G7 meeting in France that Amazon burning had leapt, irritatingly, into an agenda item. Given the global climate summit in New York was to take place few weeks afterward,in September, Bolsonaro vaulted into action with his usual rebarbative comments. First, he refused the monies offered by the EU (22 million euros, a risible sum given the scale) because he felt that French president Emmanuel Macron had insulted him. Amazonian states on the other hand, scrambled for direct deposit into their coffers in order to pay for the firefighters who were essentially cutting fire breaks and fuel for planes making symbolic water drops. Bolsonaro was willing to take funds from the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson, happy to send in the troops (44,000 to show his Amazon love and military bona fides) and preened at the support of the US president. (Bolsonaro’s son is now ambassador to the US, further consolidating the nepotistic trend of “family econo-diplomacy” masquerading as international statesmanship. Donald Trump struck a special note of solidarity with the Brazilian leader by opening  up  US rainforests, the Tsongas forests of Alaska, to unregulated cutting. A bit later, the smirking image of the fleshy secretaries of state, Ernesto Araujo and Mike Pompeo agreed on a 100 million dollar deal to “protect  biodiversity” by the private sector and to create business opportunities in the most remote and inaccessible areas of Amazonia, for which read mining  and timber plunder in protected areas, traditional holdings and Indigenous reserves.

The Bolsonaro faction began the “blame campaign’s for the largescale destruction almost at once. The playbook deployed some of the usual tropes. Bolsonaro naturally accused the international press for the reputational hit on Brazil’s global standing for biased reporting by misrepresenting the process of deforestation  as destruction rather than the gloss of Brazilian development. Next, with laser-like focus, many varieties of international conspiracy were invoked and revolved around environmentalists. There were the “subversive” international NGOs who were allegedly setting the fires and then filming the ensuing holocaust in order to make the Bolsonaro regime look bad. This, Bolsonaro argued, is because Germany and Norway froze their 87 million Euros for the Amazon Fund. This fund allocated monies for projects to reduce deforestation: more monitoring of clearing, help with titling, eco certification, agroforestry experiments, payment for land demarcation and kindred projects, many directed by NGOs and social movements. It could be understood as a broadly defined payment for environmental services and promoted non deforestation-based development programmes. Germany and Norway froze the fund because of the lack of more general progress and increasing diffidence by Brazil on controlling clearing. Environmental NGOs, especially Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund could very soon be banned from Brazil.

This was the starting point for several other rants  by Bolsonaro and his allies, about  how inhibiting Amazonian deforestation masked a panoply of more sinister geopolitical strategies including a desire to limit the import of cheap Brazilian agricultural goods into Europe by backing out of the free trade agreement MERCOSUR on specious environmental grounds. In a more ominous register (and zombie nostrum revived from the earlier military time), inhibiting deforestation was meant to forever condemn Brazil to underdevelopment by thwarting its agro-industrial ranchers and soy farmers from taking their rightful position as Amazonian territorial masters. Another popular trope, again a zombie repeat from the previous dictatorship time, was simply that by locking up resources in parks and protected areas, when the resources of other places ran out, Amazonian reserves would provide a pretext for foreign invasion or international plunder. As the days and the controversy wore on the issues of territoriality and sovereignty became pivotal.

“ Amazonia is ours”, bellowed Bolsonaro while articulating  a view popular in military circles that environmentalists use indigenous people as stooges to threaten Brazilian sovereignty and the Christian Brazilian way of life by asserting indigenous autonomy. (Indigenous autonomy is inscribed in the 1988 constitution.) The idea is that with autonomy, these native “nations” could become platforms for a kind of internal invasion, a sort of “eco-foco” to update the revolutionary terminology of Che Guevara. “They (Indians) do not have lobbyists and do not even speak Portuguese. How is it that indigenous people have ended up with so much of our land?” asked Bolsonaro. Funding for Brazil’s own NGOs many of whom work with indigenous and traditional peoples has been cut off, and international funders are now threatened with supporting “subversion” and are facing expulsion and even possible criminal charges. Bolsonaro’s son, who enjoys the same nepotistic perks as members of the Trump family, would argue in the Brazilian congress that the US and Europe had in fact developed by plundering their resources, so who were they to tell Brazil what to do? In point of fact, imperialism, innovation and industrialisation have had more to do with US and European development than domestic forest plunder.

In the US, the National Forest system was established in 1891 by President William Henry Harrison, and the institutions for managing these were signed into law in 1905 by Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and American politician and forester Gifford Pinchot. The United States and Europe have more forest now than they had in the  early nineteenth century more than 90% is native forests. A similar statistic prevails in Europe. Bolsonaro and his entourage, not informed about the status of European forests, urged the G7 to take their cash, and not exactly shove it, but use it to reforest their own terrains. US natural resource development had been very wasteful; it was stanched by the emergence of a regulatory and protective legal apparatus and the economic structural shift away from a “liquidation economy” like that which currently prevails in Amazonia.  A similar set of ideas and approaches informed the regulatory apparatus that had evolved over the previous thirty years in Brazil and had successfully dropped deforestation by 84% in the decade from 2004 to 2014.

Environmental institutions are severely and severally under threat with the Trump regime, which has rolled back or is in the process of rolling back more than 85 major environmental initiatives (car mileage, clean energy, endangered species act, drilling in the arctic wildlife reserves and so on). This is an environmental approach that finds its twin in Bolsonaro’s policies. So much so that the environmental minister of Brazil, Ricardo Salles, was a speaker at the headquarters of the US Environmental Protection Agency at the behest of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an outfit headed up by climate denier Myron Ebell, the éminence grise who was the architect for the demolition approach to the US EPA as transition director for the agency  for the Trump administration.
         
Salles hardly needs tutoring in how to ruin an environmental agency. Shortly after taking the reins the Ministry of Environment he attacked his EPA, IBAMA, (the Brazilian Institute for the Environment). He summarily dismissed 27 of the 29 regional agency heads, replacing them with military men, slashed the budget by more than 24 % (a budget still reeling from previous cuts), fired many of the IBAMA field people and prohibited them from damaging or disabling deforestation equipment (such as tractors), which is a necessary step for stopping clearing once the IBAMA people left the site. Further, IBAMA was thwarted from prosecuting those they had fined for illegal clearing. Operations on the ground were down by some 60%. InBIO, the organisation that managed protected areas emitted virtually no citations for illegal clearing this year even though the extent was clearly visible on remote sensing images. In 2019, a heartfelt letter from Amazonian IBAMA employees described a rising pattern of terror against them, with their offices in flames, their trucks destroyed and the local police force, who in earlier days had protected them as they went on their missions, now declining to help. This was now coupled to presidential vituperation. The budget has been so deeply cut there is barely gas for the trucks that remain, with high attrition and deep demoralisation in the organisations. Letters signed by IBAMA employees who remain, lamented the loss of their life’s work – forest protection – incinerated in the uncontrolled fires, as they shifted from protectors of forests to impotent observers of  unrelenting destruction.

As an expression of further pique and disdain for environmental advocacy, responsibility and Brazil’s scientific community, Bolsonaro completely defunded the Brazilian equivalent of the National Science Foundation thus making the functioning of Brazil’s distinguished university system and the situation of its battalions of top ranked scientists highly precarious. They Universities themselves were confronting a more than 30% decline in their operating budgets—close to 10 billion reais. Accustomed to a science-inflected development policy for Amazonia – indeed that has been its hallmark for the last 30 years, and a position supported in the 20198 Leticia Pact on environmental control of Amazonian destruction. Brazil’ s academic analysts found themselves largely shut out of decisions, and the few  meetings they attended were crammed with obedient military men. Student training and research languished with fellowships cut off and classes cancelled. Meanwhile, the new military coterie inhabiting  the climate negotiations staff had to be informed that Brazil was hosting a climate summit. Brazil later cancelled, of course, but it was an episode that was emblematic of degree of cluelessness of the inheritors of what had been one of the jewels in the crown of Brazilian diplomacy.
         
Meanwhile, on 11 September 2019, Ernesto Araujo at a speech at the American conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which also marinates in denial, rejected the idea that the Amazon was burning at all. The Heritage Foundation has enjoyed the generous patronage of the oil magnates, the Koch brothers, who have also been funders of concerted programmes of climate change denial, as Naomi Oreskes has so decisively explained in her book, Merchants of Doubt. Amid the barrage of invective and conspiracy, the question of who actually was clearing and why, was not touched upon.

What indeed has been triggering deforestation?

During Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential election campaign, the Brazilian politician advocated amnesty for deforesters and timber thieves. He vowed to open up indigenous and traditional people’s lands to mining and to curtail their rights over the land even though these are inscribed in the 1988 constitution. He would shut down Brazil’s environmental ministry, relax environmental law enforcement and licensing, and back out of the Paris climate accord. Moreover, international NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, would be banned from the country and Funai, the indigenous agency would cease to be autonomous and come under the aegis of the land ministry. Not one inch of protected areas, indigenous lands, or kilombos (former slave refuges lands) areas would be demarcated on his watch. To bolster his position, he marshalled the usual racist tropes:  Blacks were described as feckless, and indigenes as backward, so why should they hold so much land. Bolsonaro did not fully actualise all his positions, because some of the Brazilian agroindustrial elite such Blairo Maggi, the world’s largest soy producer, fretted in an interview with Valor, Brazil’s equivalent of The Wall Street Journal, that backing out of the Paris accord could backfire and affect market share in more environmentally concerned places like the EU and greener companies where deforestation free commodity chains were increasingly important.

What was the meaning or value of stewardship if you believed in the end times, as Brazil’s Evangelical influencers (Bolsonaro is one) rose in the top policy strata? The general slogan deployed by his political supporters is “Bibles, beef and bullets” and this  more or less sums up his coalitions: fundamentalist Christians, agro-industry and the military. Brazil’s agro-elites were perfectly willing to burn up more than 40,000 species of plants to make a habitat for just one – soy – and to immolate a world of more than 150,000 different kinds of animals (an underestimate), to make space only another species, the cow. This would move our world from the Anthropocene – the age of Man – to what biologist E.O. Wilson has called  the Eremocene, the age of loneliness, as we preside over the sixth extinction and a loss of more than a million species. As one adage has it, we are more likely to see the end of the world before we see the end of capitalism.

Bolsonaro decriminalised land grabbing and that is a great deal of what is going on now. The tried and true method capture with fraud and force is through clearing as a means of claiming. There are enormous speculative gains to be made by selling land, and the cattle system is famously unproductive and serves more as a means of ‘place holding’ in the creation of an asset by privatising public resources. Since it takes about five years before the land can be worked for mechanised soy, pasture land can be sold at enormous profit in the expanding frontier, especially in light of the massive infrastructure plans for the region. Not enforcing licensing or even reviewing them – a drop of more than 60% from previous years – and arguing that cattle lands created from protected areas no longer have conservation characteristics thus should not be protected and duly transferred to the clearer essentially eliminated deforestation in protected areas as an environmental crime, which it had been. Along with presidential rhetoric, this kind of amnesty provides positive incentives for clearing lands. Other illegal deforestation occurred on Forest Code legal reserves on landowner property. (The forest code indicates what proportion of property the owner must keep in natural vegetation, and these include riverbanks, slopes and other kinds of forest areas.) To the extent that even if IBAMA knew about the clearing and fire, it would not be able to act was the case for 10 August “Day of Burning” on protected areas near the highly contested road BR 163. This was a place where previously president Lula da Silva and Marina da Silva had declared protected areas and extractive reserves in order to buffer what had been basically a fire corridor for land speculators which had exploded in conflict. In the image of the fires below the area of BR163 on the day of burning is the largest concentrated fire on the map. Deforestation is now infused with a new sense of impunity. Those who had in a previous time been responsible for controlling these cataclysms, stood, like the rest of us, gazing helplessly on.
     The clearing process is attended by a great deal of violence, because these forests are not empty. They have people who live in them and use them. Human Rights Watch analysed Amazonian deforestation and the degree to which it has been outsourced  to “Forest Mafias” as a new innovation in the agro-industrial complex. In a manner similar to farm management services, land owners can now contract these mafias for ‘social clearing’, a limpieza is the Portuguese word to run local farmers and natives off the land, haul out the timber, cut and burn what remains and reconfigure ideologically it as the noble incarnation of the “march to the West”, Brazil’s version of the US’ Manifest Destiny. The manifest destiny had within it the idea of a future. The operant language is simply: Amazon is ours---with or without a future.