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Amazon Rainforest Fires

I've seen the Amazon rainforest fires. They're a warning from the Ghost of Climate Future.

When the Amazon suffers, human suffering isn't far behind. With deforestation, we are compromising our climate and moisture cycles in alarming ways.

Paul Rosolie
Opinion contributor

It’s July 2019 and I’m standing in what used to be the Amazon rainforest. Millennium trees lie dying in the dirty sunlight. As the towering flames thunder off, I’m left in a swirling snow of ashes. Bamboo explosions fire off like canon blasts. The air smells like singed fur and agony. Many animals have fled, and many more lie dying. The loud, warm, dark green beauty here just hours ago is gone. Everything is ashes.

As the director of the Peruvian conservation nongovernmental organization Junglekeepers, I am part of a team that protects more than 30,000 acres of primary (uncut) forest. My entire career has been dedicated to studying and protecting Amazonia and other biodiversity-rich regions. But this year, smoke from the fires will blow over Sao Paulo, Brazil, and eclipse the sun. For the first time in my 13 years as a conservationist, I’m witnessing international horror and sympathy for the Amazon.

As the news cycle picks up the blaze, I find myself in newsrooms in Manhattan trying to explain the many misconceptions: Unlike the fires out West, these fires are not a natural part of the rainforest. A healthy Amazon doesn’t burn. These fires cannot be simply extinguished and the problem solved, despite international determination. Also, this problem is not unique or contained to the Amazon.

Deforestation is a worldwide problem

The truth is we are decimating forests and ecosystems around the world at an alarming rate. To maintain healthy moisture cycles that provide sufficient rain for farmers, hydropower and weather, we must keep healthy rainforests standing. To stop these fires, we must stop deforesting the Amazon. Otherwise, we reach the tipping point where the Amazon moisture cycle is broken — it dries out — and we begin to see devastating changes to our planet.

Paul Rosolie in the Madre De Dios region of the Peruvian rainforest in July 2015.

Some people will read this and dismiss it as tree-hugging alarmist propaganda, but I’m not saying this as a researcher who has studied this in the confines of a lab — I’ve been on the ground there for more than a decade. I have met the Ghost of Climate Future. When I’m not in the Amazon, I’m in India studying the migration of tigers and elephants between the fractured scraps of forest not yet destroyed by man.

Transitioning between the Amazon and India is like traveling in time. In Amazonia, humans are a small force on a landscape dominated by forest. In India, forests are islands in the ocean of a human-dominated landscape. In this way, I get to see the human-to-nature ratio in different settings.

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In India, my work centers on wildlife. I follow elephant herds that no longer have enough forest to feed on, that have nowhere to go. I track starving tigers that prowl the fringes of farms because the forests and deer have been depleted. But we humans have a hard enough time accepting diversity within our own species, let alone coming up with sympathy for wild animals.

Natural world, human world are one

Through my work with wildlife, I have also peered into the window of human suffering caused by the effects of changing land use. India is a country where 70% of rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood. There, deforestation has rapidly changed the weather patterns in the past few decades, and 42% of the country is now experiencing drought (that’s approximately 500 million people).

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A 2016 study showed a sharp decline of monsoon rainfall in India between 1980 and 1990, and 2000 and 2010, largely due to the transformation of forest to cropland (which diminishes evapotranspiration, the process by which moisture moves from soil to trees to atmosphere). The consequences of these changes for the people who still depend directly on rain are often devastating.

Recently, virtually everyone united in a moment of horror as the Amazon burned. For once, the world gained a fleeting glimpse into what’s happening in rainforests across the world, where biological Notre Dames burn every day. We’ve learned many times over what happens when our natural systems are damaged. How close to the tipping point do we need to come before people’s infinite capacity to calmly watch their own demise is broken? If the past 13 years in Amazonia and India’s tiger lands have taught me anything, it’s the haunting truth of Jane Goodall’s — “We’ve just been stealing, stealing, stealing from our children, and it’s shocking.”

Paul Rosolie is the director of Junglekeepers, a naturalist, wildlife filmmaker and author of the new novel "The Girl and the Tiger," on wildlife conservation in modern India. Follow him on Instagram @paulrosolie and Twitter @PaulRosolie

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