- Lacking trucks and gear, a civil servant once destined for the priesthood now uses WhatsApp groups to direct volunteers who must manually carry river water through dense forest to tackle record blazes deep in an Amazonian town five times the size of New York City.
- Once rare, record-breaking wildfires destroyed millions of hectares across the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, leaving surviving forests increasingly fragile and susceptible to recurring blazes.
- Only 16% of Amazonian municipalities in Brazil have operational military fire brigades, forcing rural towns to rely on underfunded local offices and unpaid volunteers to defend the rainforest.
“It’s easy to criticize local burning practices, but they are not only cultural, they’re a necessity to local communities,” Acará’s environmental secretary, Sônia Elídia Reis Mota, told Mongabay from her office. “These crops are their subsistence. If they don’t burn, they won’t have anything to eat or won’t make enough money to buy food.”
When you have someone at the local environmental agency spilling lies like that, this certainly does not bode well for the rest of the forest there. You just need to literally go to the neighboring city, Tomé-Açu, to find multiple successful syntropic farms that formed a local coop to export their produce, and have learned that monocrops, slash and burn are not the answer, see (in Portuguese): A trip to the part of the Amazon where Japanese is spoken
Thank you for posting this. When I read the article, I also rejected the idea that the burning was necessary, but it was a small enough part of the article that I didn’t bother to point out the falsehood. The rainforest does not need to burn in order to be productive. I encourage people to read up on veganic permaculture food forests and syntropic agriculture methods. None of these subsistence farmers would ever go hungry (in the absence of “natural” disasters) if they, as communities, implemented these systems of food production.