“Not one inch of the Amazon will be granted to Indigenous people,” Jair Bolsonaro, 2019
During his 2018 presidential campaign, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro promised to develop the Amazon rainforest for mining, cattle ranching, and agriculture. Bolsonaro plans to build a massive hydropower station in the Amazon, the fourth largest in the world.
President Bolsonaro, known as “The Trump of the Tropics” is a former army captain. On his first day, he started rolling back environmental regulations and property rights, a sad reminder of Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 2004, Luiz Lula da Silva (Lula), Brazil’s president 2003 – 2010, passed regulations to stop deforestation of the Amazon, and protect the Indigenous people who live in the rainforest. Lula, in 2018, was sent to jail with a 10-year sentence to keep him from office.
Bolsonaro destroys the Amazon tropical rainforest
These Amazon fires were purposefully set for deforestation but quickly turned into wildfires. The Amazon fires are burning in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. A change in the winds has caused the fires in the Amazon to intensify and spread. The amount of fires in the Amazon is already more than 80% higher than in 2018, and the fire season is just beginning.
The Amazon, which spans 2.12 million square miles, sucks up about a quarter of the 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon that global forests absorb each year.
Based on global annual emissions rates, the Amazon rainforest stores a cumulative total of about a decade’s worth of carbon. If the Amazon wildfires continue, the rainforest will not only stop sucking up carbon, but the deforestation would release all the carbon stored in the soil. Ten-years-worth of carbon would be released!
Trumps destroys national forests and public lands
People start 90 percent of wildfires, only 10 percent are due to natural causes.
Global warming is the root cause of the new megafires. Reducing the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels would be the logical way to reduce megafires. Pretending white people rule the earth and believing in profits before people, is at the heart of illogical policies and actions. Truth must be told when the planet is on fire.
USFS timber sales, a significant part of their budget, are called prescribed fires. “A scientific prescription for each fire, prepared in advance, describes its objectives, fuels, size, the precise environmental conditions under which it will burn, and conditions under which it may be suppressed,” says USFS. However, when the wind blows the fires run wild. Logging for profit is the real purpose.
After the 2018 California wildfires, Trump signed an executive order on December 21, 2018, increasing logging of federal lands by 25 percent, 200,000 truckloads per year, disguised as fire protection.
In May 2019, U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) re-introduced in the House of Representatives his deforestation bill, now called “The Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2019.” He gets an “A” for effort and an “F” for trying to deceive the U.S. Congress who will soon vote on his bill.
Goats are better than fire. According to the Sierra Club, the demand for grazing goats is growing like wildfire. Goats are nature’s forest cleaners, removing invasive plants. “Rent a goat” is a profitable operation.
Rise up
Please contact U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) at (501) 609 – 9796 and ask him to reconsider his deforestation bill.
This is a global emergency. Please call your lawmakers. The U.S. Tropical Forest Conservation Act of 1998, says, “It is the established policy of the United States to support and seek protection of tropical forests around the world.” In 2010, the U.S. signed an agreement converting $21 million of Brazilian debt into tropical conservation.
Dr. Leonardo Boff, a leading Brazilian ecologist and a global conservation leader, says the Amazon rainforest is not a collection of trees, but a complex energy system where the trees are feeding the soil. Without trees, the soil will erode, and the rainforest will be gone forever.
Reliable information is our best weapon. Please read Leonardo Boff’s online blog, and Andy Kerr’s Oregon online blog.
Dr. Luis Contreras
I called the Hot Springs office of US Congressman Bruce Westerman. Waiting to hear from his DC policy staff.
Will anything change? It has to change … there is no plan B
“Stop thinning the forests” is a great source of information on how and why the US Forest Service are sellin our National Forest to the logging industry:
It is our hope individuals using this website will see past the rhetoric that is being used by the Forest Service and the timber industry to convince the public that thinning will keep our homes and forests safe and healthy. It is clear that catastrophic fires are caused by climatic conditions and, as the weather changes and droughts sweep over the west, there is little we can do to stop fires. Perhaps taking a serious look at climate change and human behaviors that accelerate change, along with the insatiable desire to log our forests, would be a more effective way to address the situation.
http://stopthinningforests.org/
450,000-tree clearcut — SF Bay Area
USFS “vegetation management” plan is only the latest to advocate killing thousands of healthy, global cooling trees.
http://treespiritproject.com/sfbayclearcut/
USFS wants more timber sales … Is Trump trying to beat Bolsonaro?
Here is how
“Expanded logging easier under proposed US Forest Service plan”
The proposed new rule would stretch across 80 million acres and all 20 national forests here in California, including the Central Coast’s Los Padres National Forest.
It would dramatically increase the size of logging in forest thinning projects that bypass environmental review and public comment, making it easier to harvest timber and bulldoze forest roads in places like Mendocino, Tahoe, Los Padres and Lassen national forests.
https://www.kcbx.org/post/expanded-logging-easier-under-proposed-us-forest-service-plan#stream/0
The Fire – Industrial complex has failed. Andy Kerr explains,
“Wildfire suppression is a losing strategy that costs taxpayers lots of money, especially since Congress isn’t providing critical oversight of the Forest Service’s firefighting budget. What’s needed is a federal wildfire policy that’s based in science.
Fortunately, there is Tania Schoennagel, PhD, a wildfire scientist at the University of Colorado–Boulder whose research “addresses the causes and consequences of western forest disturbances.” Her peer-reviewed science, based on actual evidence, is speaking truth to power—to the fire-industrial complex (private industry, bureaucratic entities, and legislative funders), which sees logging and firefighting as the only tools to fix wrongly identified problems.”
Kerr has an awesome blog, please join, learn, and call Congressman Westerman. He has the power to save the forests.
http://www.andykerr.net/kerr-public-lands-blog/2019/8/23/speaking-truth-to-the-fire-industrial-complex/
Here is what Leonardo Boff says about the Amazon rainforest, a place he has protected for over 40 years.
“The Amazon rainforest is not a collection but a whole fragile community, the home of 900,000 indigenous people living in separate tribes for thousands of years, unique wildlife and vegetation and trees with shallow roots spreading on the soil, interconnected with vines and plants. The Amazon rainforest is priceless and irreplaceable.”
You can join his blog and learn about ethics, philosophy, and ecology. His 80th anniversary was celebrated with a letter from Pope Francis.
https://leonardoboff.wordpress.com/2019/08/19/the-amazon-neither-savage-nor-the-worlds-lungs-or-granary/
Here is a strong opinion on the Amazon rainforest destruction
“The Amazon fires are more dangerous than WMD’s”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/amazon-fires-show-limits-sovereignty/596779/
One person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.
Do you agree?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/amazon-fires-show-limits-sovereignty/596779/
You may be surprised (or disgusted) to know how much USFS timber sales cost taxpayers. The report below shows the destruction of the Tongass rainforest would cost taxpayers $500 million!
A Mad-Trump tax increase would at least save the rainforest. But honesty is not the GOP way
Why then would the Forest Service sell timber, you may ask?
FS has two pockets, one for the sales revenues and the other for expenses. FS sells timber at low prices to “Big Timber” and pays contractor high prices to build forest roads and clear the ground for the loggers.
Keeping the accounts separate, USFS reports timber sales revenue and hide the expenses. The losses justify a larger budget for the next year!
In Federal parlance this is called the China Tariffs accounting process. Trump gets angry at China, bad people taking US jobs, imposes 25 percent import tariffs paid by US companies, and tells his adoring followers the US is destroying the China economy with $hundreds of Billions in tariffs.
https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/upcoming-tongass-timber-sales-will-cost-taxpayers/
Bolsonaro is no different from our own mad leader:
Trump pushes to allow new logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Rain Forest.
“The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects. Trump has taken a personal interest in “forest management,” a term he told a group of lawmakers last year he has “redefined” since taking office.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/trump-pushes-to-allow-new-logging-in-alaskas-tongass-national-forest/2019/08/27/b4ca78d6-c832-11e9-be05-f76ac4ec618c_story.html/