Revisiting the Amazon Fires
18 months ago the Amazon was burning. An unprecedented number of wildfires were threatening “the earth’s lungs” with irreversible damage, and it thus fell on the global community to make sure that we forcefully protected the source of 20% of the world’s oxygen from an inept government happy to watch it all burn.
Except, no, none of that was true really. We got it wrong. And all our righteous rebukes actually made what was happening quite a bit worse.
Where did those fires come from? What put them out? What’s happened since? How concerned should we be today? What’s our role in this? How can we help?
These are important questions with more or less knowable answers, where said knowledge can empower us to push for the sorts of actions that might actually turn around a situation that is indeed dire and verging on irreversibility.
But before we can get to what’s true, we have to reckon with what isn’t true, and with how this particular set of untruths got so far around the world with so little resistance.
(As a meta-point, I very much believe in the consensus position on CO2-caused climate change. But even skeptics on that subject should read on, as the ecological crisis here goes way beyond just carbon.)
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The Skinny Version
(The main story in bullet form, followed by more detailed commentary.)
Chunks of the Amazon rainforest are chopped down and then burned every year to make room for various types of farmland (largely cattle pasture), because doing so is often the difference between a working-class life and meaningful wealth
While this type of deforestation dropped significantly in the mid 2000s, that was more due to sticks than carrots, which left a large population increasingly angry at being “robbed” of their right to develop “their” land as they saw fit
As tends to happen, a class of politicians arose to ride this grievance to political victory, promising to effectively open the rainforest for business again
In Brazil this reversal gained momentum in 2016 under Michel Temer, and was widely expected to get much worse under new president Jair Bolsonaro in 2019
Deforestation did indeed jump up after Bolsonaro’s January election, where large controlled fires were expected to follow months later as the felled trees dried out and prime burning season began (mid-August through the end of October)
Some premature and wrongly-interpreted data about early-season fires caused a global alarm, where the main narrative from politicians and celebrities was that the rainforest itself was on fire (it wasn’t), that these fires were unprecedented and spreading quickly (they weren’t), and that this all had something do with climate change (true, though in a reverse way)
While the Amazon isn’t a meaningful source of human oxygen, deforestation is putting it in serious risk of turning from rainforest into savanna, which would have catastrophic effects on water and food supplies across the Americas
Convincing locals to not deforest more will largely require us opening our wallets far, far more than we ever have
While many individual journalists understand all this well enough, and some wrote very informed pieces about it, journalism as a whole largely failed to displace the simplistic/wrong narratives here, mostly because the bulk of articles were either (i) too quickly and cheaply produced to be meaningful, (ii) too short to give enough context, (iii) too long to be read / easily parsed
The explanatory burden was thus largely left to non-journalists (YouTubers, bloggers, etc) to help people get to a meaningful place of “aha yes now I get it, and now I understand what I can do to help” — and this didn’t go all that well
This isn’t a great system in general, and we could replace it with a much better one if we embraced that the problem is real, costly, and not improving on its own
The Decoder Ring
Here is a quote I ask you to really think about as you read through:
For us, deforestation is a synonym for progress, as much as this might shock people. … Acre doesn’t have minerals. It has no potential for tourism. What it does have is some of the best land in Brazil. But this land has one problem: it’s covered in forest.
Now, a companion consideration (for developed-world readers at least): when faced with our own choices between getting rich by freely consuming natural resources and forgoing wealth by not doing that, not only did we choose money every time, we’re still doing it. It’s not that we don’t understand the consequences. We just like being rich.
As a general rule, people prefer more wealth than less. And often enough the surest path to wealth involves doing some violence to the environment. And, sure, sometimes the environment being destroyed is more important than others. But this will matter more to the already-rich than the not-rich, as the latter largely see themselves as copying the rich people’s playbook. So when we say “we’ve all done too much burning already, and anyway you happen to live near the off-limits woods, so we’re not going to let you use your land the way you want”, how do we expect that to go for us?
As a related point, consider land ownership. Many indigenous groups would say they own much of the rainforest, and various treaties would agree. But again ranchers and developers are following our example here, not our late moralizing. We didn’t let indigenous ownership rights stop us much, and neither are they. While we now say things like “ah but we regret what we did”, they’re more than a bit suspicious that we’d actually make different choices if we went back in time. And they’re probably right.
So this is roughly the crisis we’re facing. While the Amazon wasn’t and isn’t burning with wildfires, it is being torn down, and if this carries on then ruin will follow. And not just massive carbon release. It’s much darker than that. We have maybe a decade to convince locals to switch from cutting to planting. Maybe less. Maybe far less.
But we won’t convince them unless we ground our approach in a full sense of how they perceive the problem. Thus the need to get our facts right.
The Importance of Mythbusting
(Note: I’m plagiarizing some bits of what follows from a piece that I wrote on Quora in August 2019, which I cross-posted on Medium. Also note that I’m going to narrowly focus on Brazil, which has control over 60-65% of the Amazon. My working assumption is that neighbouring countries are subject to similar dynamics.)
Anyway, it was that opening tweet that really set off the myth machine:
Macron was and is the French president, and has advisors to explain this to him. Yet he didn’t bother with that before tweeting, or perhaps since. (Also, said photo was taken by a photographer who died in 2003. As it turns out, nearly all of the photos that trended during #actfortheamazon were both old and not actually of the Amazon.)
But it wasn’t just Macron! It was Trudeau, and Merkel, and even the Pope!
Here’s an astronaut even:
It’s a little hard to understand why so many (including a bunch of popular science communicators!?) made this mistake. The very incorrect 20% figure aside, this is…not how any of this works?
The gist of how it does work:
Carbon dioxide and oxygen roughly cancel out in the great circle of life (forests give off small oxygen surpluses in certain stages, then mostly take it back later)
The big exception is when biomass gets buried underground before this exchange can finish (thus becoming fossil fuels rich in carbon), which doesn’t happen much now, but did happen over very long periods of the earth’s history
This massive amount of buried biomass / carbon (and the corresponding surplus in atmospheric oxygen) became a major condition for life as it exists today
This is why digging up that biomass and burning it is causing problems (i.e., it upsets the equilibrium that most life on earth is adjusted to)
But not all problems are equal: even though we’re already facing doomsday scenarios from the released carbon, we could burn 100% of the above-ground biomass on earth and oxygen levels would still be totally fine for us
Anyway, there were no major Amazon wildfires in 2019, and all the oxygen stuff was a total red herring. (While kinda-wildfires can happen in unusually dry conditions, they generally only burn at a ground level because of the humidity. And sometimes this undergrowth maintenance is good, if/when controlled. It’s a contextual thing.)
Also, the number of planned / controlled fires in 2019 was actually…pretty normal?
There are two main sources for fire counts: NASA and INPE (Brazil’s NASA)
Those numbers can diverge substantially in places, and I’ve found it difficult to find clear answers as to why
While INPE’s 2019 YTD numbers were trending a bit high as August wore on, they looked a lot less alarming when compared to 2016 instead of 2018
In contrast, NASA’s numbers actually showed 2019 as being behind 2016
(While NASA, or at least their data arm GFED, then revised these numbers upward by ~25% a few days later, most journalists would have seen the above)
Only a third or so of these fires were actually in Amazonia (the rest being in less sensitive areas), and virtually all were controlled (if still illegal)
There isn’t usually much correlation between fires prior to mid-August and annual totals anyway (see for yourself here and here and here)
2019 totals came in behind both 2015 and 2017 (while some claim this is only true because Bolsonaro eventually sent the military in, I’d counter with: i) his efforts were largely theatrical, ii) 2020 numbers were very similar)
So while I suppose one could make an argument like “we knew roughly how much forest-clearing happened earlier in the year, so we could guesstimate how much burning was going to be required to torch all the felled trees and brush”:
That’s more a question of total biomass burned than the number of unique fires required (as lots of the burning is concentrated)
None of the fires were meaningful wildfires, nor likely to become so
These fire counts were/are mostly of unrelated fires not near the rainforest
This is all a substantially different story than what most were presented with
And this matters. Because when the world came at Bolsonaro with an exaggerated / misinformed narrative, he weaponized it against them:
In a tweet Thursday, Bolsonaro accused Macron of using the “internal issue of Brazil and other Amazonian countries” for personal political gain. He also alleged his French counterpart had used sensationalism and fake photographs to call attention to the problem.
“The Brazilian Government remains open to dialogue, based on objective data and mutual respect,” Bolsonaro added. “The French President’s suggestion that Amazonian issues be discussed at the G-7 without the participation of the countries of the region evokes a misplaced colonialist mindset in the 21st century.”
Remember the larger game here: we’re fighting for the hearts and minds of a relatively poor part of the Brazilian population that loves Bolsonaro. If we want to convince them to stop deforesting the Amazon, we have to pitch them a deal that they like more than his. And this is going to require a high level of trust. So what we can’t do is come at their king and miss — especially to such a gross extent. Our response was a gift to him, and he’s still making excellent use of it.
Anyway, let’s move on to past programs and how they set up so many in the Amazon to be receptive to Bolsonaro and his open-for-business rhetoric.
What Has and Hasn’t Worked
While I’m certainly not an expert here, nearly all the academic coverage I went through told a similar story.
Here’s a representative / insightful paper from 2014, from which I draw four morals:
Official measures only get carried out when there’s political will behind them, and political will tends to shift with the economy. If people feel like they’re falling behind, they’ll vote for their own prosperity, official measures be damned.
While hiring people with guns to protect the forest may work for a while, it’s ultimately a band-aid. New leaders will be voted in (federally and locally) who’ll tell those with the guns to look the other way, and so on. Long-term solutions require us to meaningfully assist with local needs (e.g., investing, partnering, etc).
If groups like Greenpeace successfully vilify those trying in good faith to make incremental progress, that will scare off partners that the Amazon needs.
We need more carrots and less sticks, where those carrots have to feed all major stakeholders (industry, landholders, locals, all tiers of governments, indigenous communities, etc).
In contrast, we have how things have actually gone. Take the much-ballyhooed Amazon Fund:
One country (Norway) funded ~93% of it
It’s only disbursed ~$500m USD, over like a decade
Some 60% of that money went to government agencies
This isn’t to say Norway doesn’t deserve praise (they do), or that the fund was meaningless (it certainly wasn’t). That money helped support things like monitoring and awareness and various forms of community support. That’s all meaningful.
Even so:
We need to be spending something like 100x that per year (while some estimates call for lower figures, I’m partial to this paper’s argument that long-term costs need to more closely resemble the amount of revenue that we’re asking Brazilians to forgo, else we’re back to resentment that politicians will easily exploit)
This money has to spread way further (in the same way that incomes from deforestation do)
And if we don’t commit to this sort of spending?
Carbon emissions aside, the rainforest is vulnerable to something called dieback, which is basically a death spiral that turns rainforest into savanna (fewer trees > less rain > less fire protection > fewer trees, and so on)
Thanks to evapotranspiration, the Amazon rainforest is responsible for rain patterns across most of the Americas (from Argentina up to the American midwest), which means that Amazon dieback would disrupt/destroy water and food supplies across much of the western hemisphere
Put another way, if dieback goes too far (again setting aside the massive warming consequences of releasing all that carbon), we’re going to unleash an ecological and economic catastrophe across an area covering nearly a billion people.
How close are we to this doomsday? While the dieback literature covers a lot of variance as far as where the tipping point may be, the consensus is something like:
The death spiral may get irreversible (on human timescales at least) at something like 20-25% forest loss from the 1960s baseline, where we’re already at ~18%
There’s less a single tipping point so much as a series of tipping points, each successively worse, some of which we’ve already triggered (that we can probably reverse if we start serious net reforestation today)
Though clear-cutting for ranching/farming is the largest culprit, lots of other human activities are causing deforestation and canopy degradation, where the consequences of the latter could also hasten dieback
So basically we can still fight off doom here. But we have to do so quickly, and intelligently. And we can’t rely on short-term fixes anymore.
We need to massively scale the amount of wealth-transfer from developed to developing economies so that they can match our progress without having to resort to copying our old playbooks (i.e., “let’s just burn all the fuels”)
We need to massively scale (and improve) our influence campaigns so that we can win over the sort of people who will otherwise vote for Bolsonaro and company
Naturally, both these things depend on us making some serious adjustments.
The first? How we consume the news.
Where Journalism Won, and Failed
I think a number of media folks did cover this story well, and deserve sincere praise for it. See good examples here and here and here and here and here.
Even so:
Two of those were op-eds
The only consistently good outlet here was/is Mongabay, which Alexa ranks 26,371st for global popularity
Virtually all outlets were guilty of pushing bad/short/rushed takes in the early days of the 2019 “crisis” (where said takes got most of the eyeballs, where said takes furthered misinformation more than any kind of useful clarity)
The best longform journalism was/is too dense and long (this was ~7,500 words) and isn’t accessible to those without time luxuries (by comparison, this piece is ~45% that length, and has both short paragraphs and a full summary intro)
This leaves the burden to non-journalists (YouTubers, bloggers, etc) to translate the best available work into a form that the average person will find useful
While this maybe-kinda works for some audiences, most older adults rely on major outlets and don’t watch much YouTube, and anyway very few content creators have structures that really reward deep/careful/thoughtful work
(Take this from Hank Green, which was to his usual standard, but which also repeated the oxygen myth, even in the correction, because “good enough” is how the business works, where most never even get nearly as close as Hank)
I’ve gone more into the explanatory crisis here and here, with a proposed solution in section v here. But the gist is that:
Most journalists (and other professional explainers) are trapped in bad models
Those models won’t get reformed until we demand it
We won’t demand it until we grasp the scale of the problem
Documenting the scale of the problem is a lonely business most days
But consider the consequences here: if we don’t act soon in an unprecedented way (i.e., by voting to give away far more money to developing nations than will feel fair or comfortable), some level of catastrophe will follow. That’s just the path we’re on.
If we don’t argue the premise, we need to ask what we’ve actually done since 2019 in a collective sense to move towards that kind of a solution? Are we any closer? Will the current type of coverage get us there in time? Where is change going to come from?
These questions should give us pause.
Anyway, let’s close with a parting thought about approach.
One Step Towards Jesus
The great rule of conversion is that we either move obstinate people one step at a time or we don’t move them at all, else we move them backward.
Now apply this to our messaging towards Bolsonaro supporters. Many of them are climate change deniers. Many view the indigenous populations in the rainforest as outgroups standing in the way of their progress. How can we get them them onside?
Well, we know that lots have families that they love, and that in many cases they’re doing what they’re doing to build familial wealth. So we don’t have to get them all the way to full outgroup empathy to make progress. We can start with preaching the relatively simple science of less rainforest > less rain > less water > major fucking problems for the little ones they love. We don’t even have to get into the carbon debate early on. We just need to start where they’re at, working one gate at a time.
When we get one gate down, the next is easier. And if we start from their professed beliefs and values (without false attacks or hostile engagement), we build trust. They love their families and claim to love Jesus. Ok, great, that’s a lot to work with.
What we can’t do is:
Demand that they get all the way to some progressive position in a single leap
Accuse them of bad motives (even where we believe their actions are bad in some more enlightened context, where that enlightenment is a function of privilege)
Give Bolsonaro and those like him free ammo by spreading misinformation and rattling our sabers and telling people to step aside for us
There’s a lot that the many excellent NGOs and activists can do here, with our help. Many areas can be reforested now. The wildfires that do happen can be stopped. Existing cattle pasture can be renewed so as to negate more clear-cutting. People can be persuaded into other diets and forms of work. The apocalypse can be held at bay.
But before we can make that frontline work easier, we have to stop making it harder. And the first step there is spreading awareness about what is happening, and why.
Hopefully this helps a few people some small amount to that end.
As this newsletter is very expensive to create, I ask well-off readers who believe in the mission to consider a $5/mo subscription so that we can scale the project. Though as a one-off, I think it’d be fitting to donate 100% of proceeds from this edition to Earth Innovation, whose publications on this topic I’ve found helpful and whose work I find inspiring.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/amazon-rainforest-deforestation-crisis/article37722932/
This is another good longform take that covers a few things I skipped over here for length:
- Brazil's historical anxiety about settling the Amazon so as to ensure it could preserve its borders/claims
- The ways in which the government is able to undermine its own enforcement arms (e.g., paying agencies to issue fines, then just never collecting on them)
- How easy it is for ranchers and loggers to get around official restrictions / conservation measures if they feel like it (again much easier when the government isn't taking enforcement seriously from the top down)
- The issue of land titling and how it factors in (which from my reading seems super complex and varied by region/province)
- How selective logging is often the beachhead that leads to larger deforestation efforts (and how degradation from selective logging and mining etc is causing its own class of massive problems)
I also like the line of graffiti that the reporter found: "When the law ignores reality, reality takes revenge on the law." I feel like that cuts to the heart of it from a local POV.
Hmm - not sure why anyone mentioned carbon sequestration or oxygen production, neither of them are a significant issue related to the tropical rain forests. Instead it is major loss of biodiversity,
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/23/5775