By Daniel Bruno Vasconcelos and Jennifer Terriaga
September 5th is the Amazon Rainforest Day, but we have nothing to celebrate on this very remarkable date. The current president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro is ruining with the greatest natural wealth of the planet, an entire ecosystem is being destroyed in favor of agribusiness and mining. The Gore Capitalism¹ is increasing. It is present in policies and not only the forest that is being devastated, indigenous and traditional communities are suffering from the necropolitics² of the current government.
Brazilian people ask for help for all nations in an attempt to save the Amazon rainforest, we cannot let this ecosystem dies. With the advancement of the destruction of the forest, climate change will increase all around the world, it is not only about Brazil, everybody will suffer from these transformations.
According to INPE/Brazil (National Institute for Space Research), in August 2020, the Amazon rainforest had about 1,500Km² deforested, an increase of 33% over the same period last year. In the last 12 months, deforestation has exceeded more than 10,000Km², which represents about 50% of the total area of the Lombardy region (Italy).
Amazon´s destruction is not just happening due to Brazilian companies, the international capital from mining and multinational companies is fueling the devastation of the Tropical Forest. Amazon´s soil is characterized by being rich in ore, mainly gold and niobium. For these reasons, illegal mining is often carried out in the region, destroying not only vegetation but also rivers and soils due to the use of mercury to gold´s extraction.
An entire ecosystem has been destroyed in the service of agribusiness. The same corporate groups that export meat and soy produced in Brazil are responsible for the destruction of the rainforest. By not consuming these products anymore, you will be helping to preserve the Amazon rainforest.
In line with the speech of the current President of Brazil, the Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, does not work to protect the Amazon rainforest and the people who depend on its resources but to protect the interests of large corporations. His speech is based on the exploration of natural resources and the consequent deforestation, in favor of converting the Forest into an economic resource, exclusively.
Global action is needed, in which nations and organizations continue to reprehend and press for an end to the destruction of the rainforest. People that live in the forest ask for help immediately, the extermination has increasingly in the last two years, if there is no international action, soon everything will change, even the air you breathe! The Amazon rainforest asks for help!
¹ In Gore Capitalism (2010), the author Valencia T. Sayak explains that the term refers to extreme and explicit violence. In gore capitalism, the predatory use of bodies, founded on the spillage of unjustified blood, has its destructive peak with the expansion of the necro-empowerment of organized crime based on genocide as a business and commodity.
² Consult the work of Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (2018) to understand the politics of death in the contemporary world.
