The Amazon Rainforest, home to the world’s most diverse flora and fauna, covers an area of 5.5 million square kilometers. It is said to be responsible for more than 20% of the total oxygen production on planet earth – dubbing it the “lungs” of the earth.
More than half of the Amazon Rainforest is in Brazil with parts of it extending into Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana.
As of the last 17 days (since the 4th of August), the exponential surge of fires in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil has been cause for international alarm.
So who’s responsible? It is no secret that Brazil’s new far – right president, a former military leader, Jair Bolsonaro, is pro-industrialist.
You want the indigenous people to carry on like prehistoric men with no access to technology, science, information, and the wonders of modernity. Indigenous people want to work, they want to produce and they can’t. They live isolated in their areas like cavemen. What most of the foreign press do to Brazil and against these human beings is a crime. – President Jair Bolsonaro. – July 2019.
Since his assumption of office in January 2019, there has been widespread circulations on social and other media of indigenous complaints and outcries over the treatment meted out to them under this new government. Jair Bolsonaro has relaxed conversation laws aimed at protecting the rainforests and given the logging and mining industries more control over indigenous lands.
We understand the importance of the Amazon for the world – but the Amazon is ours. There will not be any more of that sort of policy that we saw in the past that was terrible for everyone. Jair Bolsonaro – July 2019.
So what does President Bolsonaro have to say about the rampant forest fires that even blacked out parts of the skies of Sao Paulo in August 2019? The President came on air to accuse Non Governmental Organizations of trying to sabotage his government by setting fires to the forest.
We preserve more [rainforest] than anyone. No country in the world has the moral right to talk about the Amazon. You destroyed your own ecosystems. – Jair Bolsonaro – July 2019.
As of July 2nd, 2019, it was reported by satellite data that, an area of Amazon Rainforest roughly the size of a football pitch is being cleared every single minute.
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