It’s still burning. It’s not your fault if you don’t know. The media stops covering things after about a week. And guess what, it’s been a month.
They’ve placed a temporary, two-month ban on burning for agricultural purposes. Who knows how long that will last based on the financial cuts to Brazil’s national environmental agency. According to an article from ABC News, only about 80% of deforestation is illegal there.
It’s not just an entire biosphere burning either, cultures are being destroyed too. There are nearly one million indigenous people, speaking 200 or more languages, dying in that burning rainforest. Their culture is burning up into the big cloud of smoke that everyone is ignoring because it is somehow irrelevant to the media. This is their home and it’s burning.
There’s something else too. It isn’t the only one burning. Bolivia is fighting fires nearly as big and it’s gone completely under the radar. And often the outbreak there causes so many fires that the job of extinguishing them is taken up by ill-equipped and inexperienced volunteers. Three people even died fighting fires in the Chiquitano forest last week.
Across the world, wildfires in Indonesia are spreading too- creating thick, black smoke, which affected air travel, sickened thousands, and closed schools. According to a New York Times article from September 17th, around 80% of those fires were caused by an agricultural technique used by farmers around the world called slash and burn. This technique flattens the land and allows people to farm in places that would regularly prevent it- dense vegetation, low nutrient soil, and in one case, indigenous land.
We need to bring the attention back.
Get on twitter, snapchat, whatever, I don’t care- I just need you to realize that just because it isn’t showing up on your instagram feed anymore, doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. Forests are burning. Emissions are rising. Indigenous culture is vanishing. People are dying.
Do something about it.
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Here are some links to help get you started
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