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The Amazon Inferno
The Amazon Inferno
One of the lasting highlights of my teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1991-1992 was my travel to Brazil in January 1992 for a conference on climate change. This was a rehearsal for the June 1992 Earth Summit on Climate Change in Rio.
My conference took place in Fortaleza, a beautiful town in the state of Ceara in the northeast of Brazil. The conference passed quickly with meaningless speeches while the conference was besieged by indigenous people pleading unsuccessfully for a hearing.
However, I enjoyed a tour of the semi-arid countryside of Ceara. I sensed more than dryness and desert. I saw fragments of the Brazilian Atlantic forest. These moist woodlands are full of golden tall trees, marshes teeming with life, bleeding streams carrying away the red soil. Yet perpetual danger follows the trees, plants and animals. The loggers who devastated the Atlantic forest for more than 500 years keep coming, leaving a trail of plunder after them.
The asphalt road of our tour sliced through a flat region of small trees, bushes, goats and cattle grazing ranchland, and immense cashew plantations, producing Ceara’s number one cash crop.
We stopped in Caninde, a rural town celebrating St Francis, the ecology saint of the Catholic Church. Once in the St. Francis Cathedral, my eyes were immediately glued to banners.
The message in these colorful cloth banners was not what one would see in a church in North America. Here the burning issue was not hell or paradise or the ten commandments but liberation—the liberation of peasants from oppression. One banner said that the organization of the workers was terribly important for their emancipation; and another proclaimed that the concentration of wealth was the root of evil.
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Save The World By First Saving Yourself
Save The World By First Saving Yourself
We each have a role to play in how the world recovers from the coming crisis
Ripped from today’s headlines:
- Negative Interest Rates Are Coming And They Are Downright Terrifying (Yahoo! Finance)
- Earth’s Lungs Are Burning: Amazon Rainforest Which Contributes 20% Of Planet’s Oxygen Is On Fire
- What’s in our water? Report warns of growing ‘invisible’ crisis of pollution (The Guardian)
- Plants are going extinct up to 350 times faster than the historical norm
From news reports like these, it’s understandable to think that our future looks bleak.
At this point we can only ride out the consequences as the systems we depend on collapse and then ebb away — exposing that the structure of our modern way of life is really a just an edifice built of sand.
That may be true. But not necessarily.
I’m here with some good news today. There remains a multitude of options that each of us can and should do to prepare for what lies ahead. And in so doing, we can help to avert the worst of it, as well.
But only if enough of us try. Critical mass is key here.
Yes, the world is busy collapsing around us. That’s true.
But collapse is a process, not an event. It can be ameliorated and even reversed, depending on the actions we decide to take from here.
And there’s still time left to change our fate. Not much, mind you. But enough to matter.
The good news is that more and more people are heeding the call and taking action. The bad news is that too many still aren’t.
And the worse news is that the many entrenched powers of the status quo are working against our future best interests, as they desperately cling to old notions of advantage, wealth, and privilege.
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More Wildfires Are Burning In Angola & Congo Than Brazil
More Wildfires Are Burning In Angola & Congo Than Brazil
Thanks to a concerted effort by American social media ‘influencers’, everybody and their grandmother is now aware of the fact that wildfires – many of which were allegedly started illegally by farmers seeking to clear out more land for farming or pasture – are tearing through the Amazon.
What many don’t realize is that the wildfires in the ‘lungs of the Earth’ – as French President Emmanuel Macron described the Amazon – actually aren’t that uncommon. In fact, they’re a natural part of the rainforest’s process of self-restoration. In total, this year, fires are up by 83% compared with last year.
And while the rest of the world uses the fires as an excuse to slam Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his environmental policies (some have accused him of tacitly condoning the farmers who set the fires), Bloomberg reports that Brazil is actually third in the world in wildfires over the last 48 hours, citing data from the MODIS satellite analyzed by Weather Source.
Weather Source recorded 6,902 fires in Angola over the past 48 hours, 3,395 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2,127 in Brazil.
Like in the Amazon and in California, wildfires aren’t all that uncommon in Central Africa.
As for the total number of active wildfires, they’re also nowhere near some of the highs recorded in recent years. According to NASA, more than 67,000 fires were reported in a one-week period in June last year, most of which were started by farmers.
Over the past two days, roughly 16,500 wildfires were recorded in the top 10 countries.
Actually, as far as wildfires go, 2019 isn’t out of the ordinary in any meaningful sense.
But we’re sure the Instagram influencer set will soon clarify all of this in a series of sponsored posts putting the Amazon wildfires in context…right?
Ecuador vs. Chevron, By Way of Canada
Ecuador vs. Chevron, By Way of Canada
In the latest twist to a 22-year-old legal saga, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled on September 4th that Ecuadorian villagers can seek to enforce an Ecuadorian legal judgment in Canada for $9.5 billion against Chevron Corporation for polluting the Amazon rainforest.
The plaintiffs were successful in arguing that since Chevron owns at least $15 billion worth of assets in Canada – including Newfoundland offshore oil fields, major investment in the Alberta tar sands, an oil refinery in B.C., natural gas holdings, and other assets – they can pursue the case in Ontario courts. In the unanimous 7-0 ruling, the Canadian Supreme Court sided with the villagers’ lawyers, agreeing that the province of Ontario has jurisdiction to recognize the $9.5 billion judgment obtained in 2011 by the villagers in an Ecuadorean court. [1]
Chevron Corp. had appealed to the Supreme Court in the hopes of overturning a lower-court decision that said the villagers could pursue their case in Ontario courts.
In the Supreme Court case, California-based multinational Chevron Corp. argued that its Canadian assets don’t belong to the parent company, but to a subsidiary called Chevron Canada Ltd. But the high court rejected the company’s arguments. Justice Clement Gascon ruled that Chevron Canada’s “bricks-and-mortar business in Ontario and its significant relationship with Chevron” is enough to establish jurisdiction for the case. [2]
The ruling does not mean that the Ecuadorian villagers can now seize Chevron’s Canadian assets. It only means that the case can go forward at a subsequent trial court in Ontario. As Justice Gascon wrote, “A finding of jurisdiction does nothing more than afford the plaintiffs the opportunity to seek recognition and enforcement.”
Nonetheless, the villagers and their lawyers believe the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada “has set an important milestone” [3] in a case that has been called “the trial of the century.”
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Growing threat to Amazon’s crucial carbon sink
Growing threat to Amazon’s crucial carbon sink
Massive new study shows that pressures on the Amazon rainforest mean it can no longer be relied on to soak up more CO2 from the atmosphere than it puts out.
LONDON, 19 March, 2015 − The Amazon rainforest, for so long one of the vital “green lungs” of the planet, is losing its capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, according to new research.
Two decades ago, the forest drew down a peak of two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year from the atmosphere. Now, according to a massive new study in Nature journal by more than 90 scientists, the rate of withdrawal has fallen to around half that total.
Fossil fuel emissions from Latin American countries are now running at more than a billion tonnes of CO2. So the region is putting more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than it is taking out.
The finding is ominous. The Amazon rainforest has always been a big item in the climate modellers’ carbon budget − the calculation of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels burned, set against the natural absorption of the same trace gases by the biosphere.
Unique research
The implication now is that the forest is no longer a carbon “sink” that that can be relied upon to take up a predictable proportion of fossil fuel emissions.
The conclusion is the outcome of a unique international research network’s 30-year study of 189,000 individual trees in 321 plots of forest dotted across six million square kilometres in eight South American countries. And it has revealed a huge surge in the rate of tree deaths across the Amazon basin.
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