Youth Incorporated Magazine

On Monday, São Paulo, a Brazilian city witnessed a blackout for an hour during the day time at 3 pm.  This was a clear result of the wildfires that are eating up the world’s largest tropical forests. Sources state that the winds brought in the smoke of the Amazon rainforest fires that occurred in Amazonas and the state of Rondonia, that resulted in the blackout. These fires were more than 2,700km away.

The images released showed the northernmost state of Roraima blanketed with dark black smoke. Additionally, the neighbouring Amazonas and Peru have declared environmental emergency and alert.  

This dreadful incident pushed the Brazilians to express their concerns on social media platforms. The hashtag #prayforamazonia began trending on twitter in a jiffy. This attracted the attention of the entire world. Most of the Twitter users also came down heavily on the President, Jair Bolsonaro for improper and inadequate environmental management.

The president took office in January this year. Since then, Brazil’s Amazon rainforests have suffered more than 73,000 fires till now as compared to 39,759 fires in 2018, confirmed the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). 

Since last Thursday itself, the forests have witnessed around 9,500 new fires majorly in the Amazon basin essential to slow the pace of global warming. Since Bolsonaro became the president, he had vowed to develop the Amazon region for mining and farming purpose, ignoring the larger concerns of deforestation.

Many environmentalists are of the opinion that the cause of such wildfires in the forest is the increased deforestation. Environmental activists also point out that a possible cause of this could be deliberate efforts of starting the wildfires to illegally clear out forests for the purpose of cattle ranching. 

INPE has published data that states that deforestation in Brazil’s portion of the Amazon rainforest accelerated more than 88 per cent in June compared to the same month in the previous year of 2018. After this publish, the president fired the director of INPE on the basis of the published data being false and incorrect. This has brought immense pressure on Bolsonaro from all over the globe.

The wildfires in Amazon’s rainforest have been continuing for almost 16 days now and the situation doesn’t seem to get better. The fires have taken place in times when the concern of deforestation is at its peak. 

It is sad to know though that most of the media is busy reporting other news that holds minimal relevance and are ignoring the major concerns and issues at hand that pose a great threat to the very surviving conditions of humans.