Opinion | Bill McKibben: 'The new Brazilian leader called himself 'Captain Chainsaw' and mocked environmentalists who feared his pro-clearance policies could decimate the Amazon.' - NBCNewsTHINK
And finally, when you cut down a forest, you remove the most effective means of scrubbing those greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The Amazon isas the “lungs of the planet,” and the trees that inhabit it breathe in vast amounts of the carbon dioxide that we produce, returning oxygen in its place. Hacking away at those lungs is dangerous for any organism, the earth included.
The tragedy here is that, for several decades, Brazil had shown real dedication to managing the Amazon with some concern for the planet’s future. In the 1980s, as scientists first began to understand the crucial importance of the world’s biggest forest, they despaired about whether the country could slow its deforestation and many of those who tried,But with financial support from the rest of the world, Brazil began to protect the vast Amazon.
There’s been some backsliding in recent years, but it took Bolsonaro to really unravel the skein of protections. His election depended on support from ranchers and loggers, and he’s taken a Trumpian pleasure in plundering the Amazon. The forest was “like a virgin that every pervert from the outside wants,”
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