On July 17, 2020, satellite data from Brazil's space agency showed that deforestation in Brazil's Amazon was accelerating. "Nearly 3,000 square miles of tree coverage were lost in the 11 months that ended June 30 .That is a 64% increase from the year-earlier period, when 1,772 square miles of forest were destroyed."[1] The deforestation in 2020 was "likely to exceed 2019's total of 3,900 square miles by a 'wide margin," according to a senior scientist at the space agency.[2] Under normal circumstances, which the Wall Street assumed, we would consider the government's claim that not enough troops were available to patrol enough of Brazil's massive Amazon jungle to even slow the acceleration. According to Ricardo Salles, the environment minister, the government wanted to "attract foreign investors to fund sustainable economic development in the jungle."[3] That is to say, the matter boils down to (international) political economy.
However, the circumstances were not normal. I am not referring to the coronavirus pandemic still ravaging globally, though the refusals of a significant proportion of people to wear masks indoors and on public transportation coupled with the lack of will, competence, knowledge, or ideological inclination to even to enforce the relevant laws, especially in Arizona, reflect the same mindset as that which does not take climate change seriously by electorates and governments around the world.
Just a week earlier, the World Meteorological Organization had announced that the global temperature-increase threshold set in the Paris Accord of 1.5C (2.7F) over preindustrial levels could occur before 2024.[4] At this level, the impact of the accelerating deforestation means less CO2 being absorbed by vegetation such as trees, and thus more of the gas being left in the atmosphere. Just as the case of governments of Florida, Texas, and Arizona lifting economic restrictions too early in May, 2020 only to have skyrocketing cases of coronavirus in June and July, governments were also failing in not only not reducing carbon emissions, but also permitting them to continue to increase such that the threshold global temperature could come sooner rather than latter. Given the priorities given the lack of political will over economic and political expediency, we could expect other, more dangerous, thresholds whether in terms of pandemics or climate.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the mentality that heads in the opposite direction from that which leads to the species' viability that Nature's own instruments for constraining and even eliminating such a species were really beginning to kick in by 2020. Whether the Brazilian government was quietly looking the other way as illegal deforestation was occurring or that government could not supply enough military troops to protect the massive jungle is a question that pales in comparison to the observation that the deforestation itself came at the expense of reduced carbon in the atmosphere. The fact that continued deforestation rather than increasing forestation was happening--that humans living in Brazil (or the world) werte not up to the task of stopping the trend--evinces a weakness in our species that may finally render us extinct by Nature's means, which we cannot necessarily control. As with any overpopulated species, Nature's tools are disease, starvation, and war, according to Malthius. It seems that the refusal of humans to adequately protect ourselves (and societies) even in the midst of a raging pandemic and increasingly urgent climate change may have already doomed our species. It is also possible, though not probably, that the species' ineptitude in protecting itself will be countered by technological innovation. Yet even so, making things worse rather than better does not render our species particularly attractive, at least to Nature.
1. Paulo Thevisani, "Brazil's Forest Losses Quicken," The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2020.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Associated Press, "UN Report Predicts the World Could Surpass Dangerous Warming Theshold by 2024," NY Post, July 9, 2020.
