‘The Amazon Is Completely Lawless’: The Rainforest After Bolsonaro’s First Year

When the smoke cleared, the Amazon could breathe easy again.

For months, black clouds had hung over the rainforest as work crews burned and chain-sawed through it. Now the rainy season had arrived, offering a respite to the jungle and a clearer view of the damage to the world.

The picture that emerged was anything but reassuring: Brazil’s space agency reported that in one year, more than 3,700 square miles of the Amazon had been razed — a swath of jungle nearly the size of Lebanon torn from the world’s largest rainforest.

It was the highest loss in Brazilian rainforest in a decade, and stark evidence of just how badly the Amazon, an important buffer against global warming, has fared in Brazil’s first year under President Jair Bolsonaro.

He has vowed to open the rainforest to industry and scale back its protections, and his government has followed through, cutting funds and staffing to weaken the enforcement of environmental laws. In the absence of federal agents, waves of loggers, ranchers and miners moved in, emboldened by the president and eager to satisfy global demand.

A Recent Systematic Increase in Vapor Pressure Defcit over Tropical South America

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Nature Research – Scientific Reports Armineh Barkhordarian (1,2)*, Sassan S. Saatchi (2,3), Ali Behrangi (4) PaulC. Loikith (5) & Carlos R. Mechoso (1) 25 October 2019 [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]We show a recent increasing trend in Vapor Pressure Defcit (VPD) over tropical South America in dry months with values well beyond the range of trends due to…

Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest

One day in 2014, Belém, a member of Brazil’s Kayapo tribe, went deep into the forest to hunt macaws and parrots. He was helping to prepare for a coming-of-age ceremony, in which young men are given adult names and have their lips pierced. By custom, initiates wear headdresses adorned with tail feathers. Belém, whose Kayapo name is Takaktyx, an honorific form of the word “strong,” was a designated bird hunter.

Far from his home village of Turedjam, Belém ran across a group of white outsiders. They were garimpeiros, gold prospectors, who were working inside the Kayapo reserve—a twenty-six-million-acre Amazonian wilderness, demarcated for indigenous people. Gold mining is illegal there, but the prospectors were accompanied by a Kayapo man, so Belém assumed that some arrangement had been made. About nine thousand Kayapo lived in the forest, split into several groups; each had its own chief, and the chiefs tended to do as they pleased.

Ever since the Kayapo had come into regular contact with the outside world, in the nineteen-fifties, whites had been trying to extract resources from their forests, beginning with animal skins and expanding to mahogany and gold. In the eighties, some chiefs made easy profits by granting logging and mining rights to outsiders, but after a decade the mahogany was depleted and the price of gold had dropped. After environmental advocates in the Brazilian government brought a lawsuit against miners, the Kayapo closed the reserve to extraction. Since then, though, international gold prices have tripled, to fourteen hundred dollars an ounce, and an influx of new miners have come to try their luck.

As seis mudanças urgentes para conter a emergência climática, segundo 11 mil cientistas

Um estudo global elaborado por cerca de 11 mil cientistas confirmou as pesquisas que apontam que o mundo está diante de uma emergência climática.

O estudo (em inglês), baseado em 40 anos de dados obtidos a partir de diferentes medições, aponta que os governos estão fracassando no combate a essa crise e que, sem mudanças profundas e duradouras, estamos diante da perspectiva de “sofrimento humano inédito”.

O trabalho também aponta seis áreas em que medidas imediatas poderiam ter um grande impacto na contenção da crise.

Garimpo em terras indígenas é rechaçado por índios no Peru e na Bolívia

Em um dos principais rios da Amazônia boliviana, o Madre de Dios, que atravessa santuários ecológicos no Departamento de Pando, a indígena takana Teodócia Castellon, 37, trabalha das 6h às 18h numa balsa de extração de ouro estacionada bem ao lado da sua terra indígena, a Takana II.

Mas assim como os outros 35 ou 40 indígenas que executam o mesmo serviço, segundo Teodócia, ela se diz pronta a abandonar o garimpo desde que o projeto autossustentável de extração de castanha, que hoje funciona apenas cinco meses por ano, seja ampliado na comunidade.

O mundo sem a Amazônia

e a Floresta Amazônica fosse toda convertida em pastagem, a quantidade média de chuvas que cairia sobre o Brasil diminuiria 25%. A conclusão é de pesquisadores norte-americanos e brasileiros que simularam como seria o clima global caso a Amazônia fosse ocupada pela pecuária em parte ou no todo, em diferentes cenários. A diminuição das chuvas apontada pelo estudo se somaria àquela que já é de se esperar em parte do território brasileiro por causa do aquecimento global.

Mercúrio: o veneno do ouro

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Luiz Carlos Azenha TV Record Setembro de 2019   Série de vídeo-reportagens sobre os impactos do mercúrio utilizado na exploração do ouro na Amazônia. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/showcase/6287971/video/359981581″ align=”center” title=”Veneno do Ouro: O drama dos Munduruku”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/showcase/6287971/video/359791718″ align=”center” title=”Veneno do Ouro: Mistério no Acre”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/showcase/6287971/video/359575661″ align=”right” title=”Veneno do Ouro: A queima”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/showcase/6287971/video/359092426″ align=”center” title=”Veneno do Ouro: O…

Maioria dos brasileiros defende proteção de florestas onde vivem índios isolados

A maior parte dos brasileiros é favorável à proteção de florestas onde se encontram tribos indígenas isoladas, aponta pesquisa Datafolha.

A pesquisa Datafolha, contratada pelo ISA (Instituto Socioambiental), mostra que 93% dos brasileiros é a favor de políticas públicas que reforcem a proteção de florestas para garantir a sobrevivência de índios isolados. O levantamento foi feito entre 4 e 6 de junho deste ano em 168 municípios de todo o país. A margem de erro é de dois pontos percentuais para mais ou menos.

Segundo a Funai (Fundação Nacional do Índio), há cerca de 114 registros de índios isolados na Amazônia Legal.