An Urgent Message From The Amazon Rainforest
NOTE FROM BEN: Due to the urgency of the crisis in the Amazon Rainforest, we will be donating 50% of the proceeds of all Banter Membership purchased this week to the Rainforest Trust, a truly amazing organization doing vital work in the region. I have personally donated to this non-profit and believe doing so will have a significant impact.
by Ben Cohen
By now it should be abundantly clear that we are in the midst of a severe planetary crisis. As the planet dramatically heats due to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the Brazilian government is doing everything in its power to destroy our only hope of surviving: the Amazon rainforest.
With the past 8 months, there have been 73,000 fires recorded in the rainforest, almost twice as many as 2018's total number of fires. According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, the Amazon lost 870 square miles of forest in July alone. Roughly one football stadium worth of land disappears every minute due to slash and burn farming practices — a truly breathtaking amount of destruction on a scale difficult to comprehend.
President Jair Bolsanaro is not remotely concerned about the wholesale destruction of the Amazon, and is actively facilitating the demise of the world’s most important eco- system.
“If I get there [become president], there will not be a single square centimeter demarcated as indigenous land,” Bolsonaro said in March, 2017. Indigenous peoples, Bolsonaro claimed, want “electricity, television, to date blonde chicks, and the Internet”.
When elected, Bolsonaro essentially declared open season on the Amazon Rainforest. “Brazil does not owe the world anything when it comes to environmental protection,” he claimed. He has moved rapidly to expand Brazil’s agribusiness sector, enabling the soy and cattle industries to expand into legally protected areas without restriction, and then lied to the world about devastation he mandated. Last month, Bolsonaro fired Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, head of Brazil’s space agency, for reporting on the massive increase in deforestation from the country’s environmental monitoring system. After reports about mass deforestation, Bolsonaro blamed NGOs and activists for starting the fires to make him look bad.
“The fire was started, it seemed, in strategic locations,” he said. “There are images of the entire Amazon. How can that be? Everything indicates that people went there to film and then to set fires. That is my feeling.”
Without the Amazon, we die
The importance of the Amazon Rainforest cannot be overstated, and cannot be left in the hands of men like president Bolsonaro. The forest holds colossal amounts of carbon in its billions of trees and plants that have accumulated over hundreds or even thousands of years. The leaves also absorb more CO2 every year, keeping global temperatures (somewhat) in check as humanity burns through fossil fuels for its energy needs. When the Amazon is burned to make way for farmland, huge amounts of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Then, there is nothing left to absorb it. Due to this massive deforestation, scientist around the world now estimate that the planet is near the tipping point where the Rainforest will no longer function as a carbon sink. This is nothing short of catastrophic.
What you can do
Given the severity of the situation, we now all have to act to preserve the rainforest and empower indigenous peoples to take back control of their land. The single best thing you can do is to donate to non-profits doing vital work in the region. Business Insider has a very good list of non-profits you can donate to (we have vetted the organizations to — they are all extremely reputable):
Amazon Conservation Association
As mentioned above, If you purchase a Banter Membership this week, we will be donating 50% of the proceeds to the Rainforest Trust, an organization I have personally donated to. If you are not a member, you can sign up below: