From The Economist - August 3 - 2019
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Deathwatch
Brazil has the power to save Earth's greatest rainforest— or destroy it
Although its cradle is the sparsely wooded savannah, humankind has long looked to forests for food, fuel, timber and sublime inspiration. Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against climate change. Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws. In the tropics, which contain half of the world's forest biomass, tree-cover loss has accelerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the shrinkage would make the tropical rainforest the world's third-biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, after China and America.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon basin— and not just because it contains 40% of Earth's rainforests and harbours 10-15% of the world's terrestrial species. South America's natural wonder may be perilously close to the tipping-point beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down their axes. Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, is hastening the process—in the name, he claims, of development. The ecological collapse his policies may precipitate would be felt most acutely within his country's borders, which encircle 80% of the basin— but would go far beyond them, too. It must be averted.
Humans have been chipping away at the Amazon rainforest since they settled there well over ten millennia ago. Since the 1970s they have done so on an industrial scale. In the past 50 years Brazil has relinquished 17% of the forest's original extent, more than the area of France, to road- and dam-building, logging, mining, soyabean farming and cattle ranching. After a seven-year government effort to slow the destruction, it picked up in 2013 because of weakened enforcement and an amnesty for past deforestation. Recession and political crisis further pared back the government's ability to enforce the rules. Now Mr Bolsonaro has gleefully taken a buzz saw to them. Although congress and the courts have blocked some of his efforts to strip parts of the Amazon of their protected status, he has made it clear that rule-breakers have nothing to fear, despite the fact that he was elected to restore law and order. Because 70-80% of logging in the Amazon is illegal, the destruction has soared to record levels. Since he took office in January, trees have been disappearing at a rate of over two Manhattans a week.
The Amazon is unusual in that it recycles much of its own water. As the forest shrivels, less recycling takes place. At a certain threshold, that causes more of the forest to wither so that, over a matter of decades, the process feeds on itself. Climate change is bringing the threshold closer every year as the forest heats up. Mr Bolsonaro is pushing it towards the edge. Pessimists fear that the cycle of runaway degradation may kick in when another 3-8% of the forest vanishes—which, under Mr Bolsonaro, could happen soon. There are hints the pessimists may be correct (see Briefing). In the past 15 years the Amazon has suffered three severe droughts. Fires are on the rise.
Brazil's president dismisses such findings, as he does science more broadly. He accuses outsiders of hypocrisy—did rich countries not fell their own forests?—and, sometimes, of using environmental dogma as a pretext to keep Brazil poor. "The Amazon is ours," the president thundered recently. What happens in the Brazilian Amazon, he thinks, is Brazil's business.
Except it isn't. A "dieback" would directly hurt the seven other countries with which Brazil shares the river basin. It would reduce the moisture channelled along the Andes as far south as Buenos Aires. If Brazil were damming a real river, not choking off an aerial one, downstream nations could consider it an act of war. As the vast Amazoniah store of carbon burned and rotted, the world could heat up by as much as 0.1°C by 2100—not a lot, you may think, but the preferred target of the Paris climate agreement allows further warming of only 0.5°C or so.
Mr Bolsonaro's other arguments are also flawed. Yes, the rich world has razed its forests. Brazil should not copy its mistakes, but learn from them instead as, say, France has, by reforesting while it still can. Paranoia about Western scheming is just that.
The knowledge economy values the genetic information sequesered in the forest more highly than land or dead trees. Even if it did not, deforestation is not a necessary price of development.
Brazil's output of soyabeans and beef rose between 2004 and 2012, when forest-clearing slowed by 80%. In fact, aside from the Amazon itself, Brazilian agriculture may be deforestation's biggest victim. The drought of 2015 caused maize farmers in the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to lose a third of their harvest.
For all these reasons, the world ought to make clear to Mr Bolsonaro that it will not tolerate his vandalism. Food companies, pressed by consumers, should spurn soyabeans and beef produced on illegally logged Amazonian land, as they did in the mid-2000s. Brazil's trading partners should make deals contingent on its good behaviour. The agreement reached in June by the eu and Mercosur, a South American trading bloc of which Brazil is the biggest member, already includes provisions to protect the rainforest. It is overwhelmingly in the parties' interest to enforce them. So too for China, which is anxious about global warming and needs Brazilian agriculture to feed its livestock. Rich signatories of the Paris agreement, who pledged to pay developing ones to plant carbon-consuming trees, ought to do so. Deforestation accounts for 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions but attracts only 3% of the aid earmarked for combating climate change.
The wood and the trees
If there is a green shoot in Mr Bolsonaro's scorched-earth tactics towards the rainforest, it is that they have made the Amazon's plight harder to ignore—and not just for outsiders. Brazil's agriculture minister urged Mr Bolsonaro to stay in the Paris agreement. Unchecked deforestation could end up hurting Brazilian farmers if it leads to foreign boycotts of Brazilian farm goods. Ordinary Brazilians should press their president to reverse course. They have been blessed with a unique planetary patrimony, whose value is intrinsic and life-sustaining as much as it is commercial. Letting it perish would be a needless catastrophe. ■
THE BRASIL NATION AND IT RAIN FOREST, PRODUCE 20 PER CENT OF THE OXYGEN ---- From The Economist - August 3 - 2019
ReplyDeleteBooks & arts
Killer insects
The itch of fate
The Mosquito. By Timothy Winegard. Button Books; 496 pages; $28.
Text Publishing; £12.99
During the second world war, American troops in the Far East were said to have two foes. The first was Japanese. One propaganda poster depicted an enemy's sabre, slick with blood. The second adversary had no sword but was terrifying all the same. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes infected around 60% of Americans stationed in the Pacific at least once. Drugs such as Ata-brine could help, but nasty side-effects meant that some gis shunned their daily dose—with predictable consequences. "These Men Didn't Take Their Atabrine" warned a sign propped below a pair of human skulls in Papua New Guinea.
At least decent treatment was available. For most of human existence, says Timothy Winegard in his lively history of mosquitoes, "we did not stand a chance" against the insect and its diseases. That was partly because of ignorance. Earlier humans blamed malaria and its mosquito-borne cousins on "bad air" from swamps, even as the years passed and death kept whining at their ears. Malaria once killed over 20% of people in the Fens of eastern England. Yellow fever ravaged Memphis, Tennessee, deep into the 1800s. No wonder Mr Winegard calls the mosquito a "destroyer of worlds", which may have dispatched around half of all humans ever born.
But his book is more than a litany of vietims. Mr Winegard convincingly argues that the insect has shaped human life as well as delivering death. Mosquitoes helped save the Romans from Hannibal and Europe from the Mongols. And if malaria has changed history, so has resistance to it. Europeans believed that the relative immunity enjoyed by some Africans made them ideal slaves in the New World. Later, the tables were turned. "They will fight well at first, but soon they will fall sick and die like flies," predicted Teussaint Louverture of the Frenchmen sent to end his slave revolution in Haiti. He was right. About 85% of the 65,000 soldiers deployed to the colony died of mosquito-borne illnesses, and Haiti won its independence.
These dashes across time and distance could become exhausting, but Mr Winegard is an engaging guide, especially when he combines analysis with anecdote. One highlight relays a bizarre plot by a Confederate zealot to infect Abraham Lincoln with yellow fever; another passage explains the ancient Egyptian habit of fighting malarial fevers by bathing in urine. (A few of the witticisms fall flat. Calling the 18th-century Caribbean a "dinner-party buffet" for mosquitoes seems glib, for example; anthropo-morphising the pests as a "guerrilla force" is a metaphor too far.)
But much of Mr Winegard's narrative is thrilling—above all the concluding chapters in which he tackles the modern mosquito. Drugs and insecticides have helped slash malaria rates, but mosquitoes can quickly develop immunity themselves. In total, the insects still kill over 800,000 people every year. And though gene-editing might one day render them harmless, or even obliterate them altogether, mosquito-borne illnesses such as Zika have recently been spreading to new regions. The destroyer of worlds has not finished yet. ■