A climate tipping point in the Amazon
A climate tipping point in the Amazon
Illegal logging and land seizures are driving an ominous yet overlooked trend: tropical forests are flipping from storing carbon to releasing it.
by Sam Eaton, 3 September 2018
It wasn’t until heavily armed men arrived from across the river that Cláudio José da Silva realized who was bankrolling the latest episode of illegal logging. His bare chest traced with blue-black lines of body paint, da Silva is a member of the Guajajara people in eastern Brazil, one of the country’s largest indigenous groups. Their side of the Carú River is pristine Amazon rainforest. Across the river, the rainforest has been razed and replaced by cattle ranches and farms. On paper, the Guajajaras’ nearly 700 square miles of rainforest are protected as federally recognized indigenous territory. In reality, the group lives under constant threat of theft and violence. Just the day before, da Silva’s self-defense force, the Guardians of the Forest, caught the local sheriff’s son using cattle to drag lumber from their forest. Armed with machetes, they chased him away and confiscated the cows. Now the sheriff had come bearing an ultimatum: Return the cattle or his posse would retrieve them by force.
‘This struggle, for us, is war,’ da Silva says. He claims to have received dozens of death threats since founding the Guardians of the Forest in 2012. ‘The loggers carry arms. The farmers are armed. They want confrontation.’ Indeed, on August 12, a month after I visited da Silva, the dead body of his comrade, Jorginho Guajajara, was found in a nearby river.
Violent conflicts over land and logging have spilled blood throughout the Amazon since the 1980s, when the murder of the organizer Chico Mendes made international headlines. Brazil is the deadliest country in the world for land defenders, with more than 140 killings since 2015, according to the NGO Global Witness. The state of Maranhão, where the Guajajara live, is perhaps the most dangerous: In 2016, more attacks on indigenous groups occurred there than anywhere else in Brazil, according to the Pastoral Land Commission.
Apart from the human toll, the violence in the Amazon is also driving an ominous trend in the earth’s climate system. Last October, Science published one of the most important — and least noticed — climate studies in years. Tropical forests in the Amazon and around the world have been so degraded by logging, burning, and agriculture that they have started to release more carbon than they store, according to scientists from the Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University. In the parlance of climate change, these forests are flipping from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
More:
https://mondediplo.com/openpage/amazon-tipping-point
Environment and energy:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127119643
