Bolsonaro: "Deforestation And Fires Will Never End. It's Cultural"

[hatrack]

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro shrugged off a government report that deforestation in the Amazon reached an 11-year high on his watch, saying Wednesday he expects the destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest to continue. “Deforestation and fires will never end,” the pro-development president told reporters in Brasilia. “It’s cultural.”

The comments were quickly condemned by environmentalists, who fear that the Amazon is approaching a tipping point at which large swaths of the rainforest will be irrevocably lost. “About 90 percent of the destruction of the forest occurs illegally,” said Marcio Astrini, public policy coordinator at Greenpeace Brazil. “Therefore, the only cultural aspect of deforestation in the Amazon is the culture of forest crime, which the government does not seem to want to confront.”

The Brazilian Amazon lost 3,769 square miles of rainforest between August 2018 and July 2019, Brazil’s National Space Research Institute reported this week, an area almost 1½ times the size of Delaware. That was up 30 percent from the previous year. Brazil’s deforestation rate spiked in the 1990s but began to drop as the country’s environmental protection agency, called IBAMA for its initials in Portuguese, cracked down on illegal logging and mining. The rate began climbing again in 2012; the increase has accelerated under Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro campaigned for president last year on promises to open up the Amazon to more agriculture and mining; he took office in January pledging to end IBAMA’s “industry of fines.”

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his has been a year of environmental catastrophes for the country. In January, a tailings dam at an iron ore mine collapsed, burying hundreds of people under toxic waste. In August, 25,000 fires spread throughout the Amazon, a nine-year high. Since September, a mysterious oil spill has sullied hundreds of miles of pristine beaches along the country’s northeast coast. And this month, fires ravaged the country’s wetlands, destroying 50,000 hectares of vegetation. Still, IBAMA issued its lowest number of fines from January through September since 2000, and 22 percent less than last year, according to news site Poder360.

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https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/11/brazils-bolsonaro-calls-amazon-deforestation-cultural-says-it-will-never-end.html

[Laffy Kat]

1. Not cultural, corporate. nt

[Blues Heron]

2. sounds like a death cult

[SamKnause]

3. When there are no more forests to burn it will end.

Many things will come to an end.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Culture is the behavior of human beings. Few things are more mutable.

Concerned, informed humans who could afford to do so would stop it immediately. Only those whose greater concern is for profit encourage deforestation, while the concerned poor cannot afford to fight back -- which would often place their lives at risk, as well.

To stop deforestation, you have to stop greed, ignorance, and indifference first. Those aren't culture, those are character flaws.