The Amazonian regions of Brazil have spent much of August hidden under a plume of toxic smoke, suffering the highest number of documented forest fires in nearly two decades. As of Wednesday, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has documented 1,540 active fires nationwide.
Locals in Brazil’s Amazonian interior complain of being unable to breathe and suffering increased asthma attacks and other respiratory damage as the smoke encircles them. Despite the near record-high numbers of fires and the pervasive effects on the fires in the country, global environmental activists have not taken up this year’s alarming fire season as a popular cause, unlike the eruption of outrage at the government of conservative then-President Jair Bolsonaro in 2019.
At the time, celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and Madonna issued impassioned pleas on their social media accounts – some accompanied by photos later found to be decades old – for the world to condemn Bolsonaro over fires in the Amazon Rainforest. At press time, none of these personalities have commented on the fires currently ongoing under socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, despite some of them — notably Mark Ruffalo — campaigning for Lula in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election.
INPE, the Brazilian space institute, documented 88,900 fires in the country from January 1st to August 19th, the Brazilian outlet UOL reported on Wednesday, adding, “The result for the same period was only worse in 2004, 2007 and 2010.”
Lula was president from 2003 to 2011 before returning to power in 2023.
The Agence France-Presse (AFP) described the situation as the “worst in nearly two decades.”
Agência Brasil, the state news agency, reported on Thursday, “Since January, over 59 thousand hotspots have been recorded in the Amazon—the highest since 2010.” The majority, 60 percent, of those fires are reportedly on federal government land.
“As a result, the smoke from the fires has reached cities across ten states, where skies have turned gray and air quality has deteriorated,” it observed.
The outlet reported that Lula’s officials announced a vague plan to “set up action fronts” in affected regions.
“We have 21 municipalities concentrating half of all fire hotspots in the Amazon. And we’re separating them into three regions,” deforestation official André Lima told Agência Brasil, “where we want to set up fronts with multiple agencies at federal and state levels, and we’re also going to call in municipal bodies, so we can take action on these new outbreaks.”
The AFP reported that illegal fires were likely to blame for the situation, omitting whether the Lula government was changing its strategy to address those fires, as it was clearly not succeeding. The outlet profiled locals in the Brazilian interior who described “struggling to breathe,” often even in their own homes, as the smoke plumes covered their communities.
“It’s terrible. Yesterday I woke up at midnight and my eyes were tingling because of this smoke entering my house,” one resident, identified as 62-year-old Carlos Fernandes, told the outlet.
Lula’s third term has been devastating for the Amazon Rainforest. By February, INPE was documenting record-breaking forest fires in the Amazon – almost 3,000 in February alone, representing a 298-percent increase from 2023. That month, Brazilian authorities also witnessed record-high levels of deforestation activity, threatening the vitality of the ecosystem, one of the planet’s largest.
Despite the alarming scale of the situation, a host of public figures and politicians who were vocal about stopping the Amazon fires during the Bolsonaro years have not commented on Lula’s environmental disaster. In 2019, the Amazon fires became a popular topic on social media, as DiCaprio, French President Emmanuel Macron, and others shared an alarming photo they claimed to be showing the current situation in Brazil. In reality, while the photo was undated, it was taken by a photographer who died in 2003, making it impossible for it to be an accurate representation of 2019 Brazil.
The activists and politicians accused Bolsonaro of being responsible for the fires because, as a conservative, he rejected wasteful government spending on alleged environmental programs under Lula. Macron, in particular, demanded global action to intervene in Bolsonaro’s leadership, a move the Brazilian president referred to as “colonialist.” France retains colonial control of a sliver of Amazon Rainforest as part of French Guiana.
President Joe Biden, then a candidate for the top office, entered the fray by threatening to destroy Brazil’s economy with sanctions if Bolsonaro did not accept billions of dollars in American taxpayers’ money to “stop tearing down the forest.”
“Brazil, the rainforests of Brazil are being torn down, are being ripped down,” Biden said during a debate in September 2019. “I would be gathering up and making sure we had the countries of the world coming up with $20 billion, and say, “Here’s $20 billion. Stop, stop tearing down the forest. And if you don’t, then you’re going to have significant economic consequences.”
Bolsonaro replied by threatening to go to war with the United States.
At press time, the most vocal celebrity defenders of the Amazon have not publicly commented on the situation in August 2024. Ruffalo appears to have fallen silent on the matter on Twitter, where he has mostly spent his time praising the Democratic National Convention.
Biden and Macron have also not condemned Lula at press time, as they did with Bolsonaro.
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