By Sam Eaton, Paris, 3 September 2018<\/p>\n
Illegal logging and land seizures are driving an ominous yet overlooked trend: tropical forests are flipping from storing carbon to releasing it.<\/em><\/p>\n I<\/span>t<\/span> wasn\u2019t until heavily armed men arrived from across the river that Cl\u00e1udio Jos\u00e9 da Silva realized who was bankrolling the latest episode of illegal logging. His bare chest traced with blue-black lines of body paint, da Silva is a member of the Guajajara people in eastern Brazil, one of the country\u2019s largest indigenous groups. Their side of the Car\u00fa River is pristine Amazon rainforest. Across the river, the rainforest has been razed and replaced by cattle ranches and farms. On paper, the Guajajaras\u2019 nearly 700 square miles of rainforest are protected as federally recognized indigenous territory. In reality, the group lives under constant threat of theft and violence. Just the day before, da Silva\u2019s self-defense force, the Guardians of the Forest, caught the local sheriff\u2019s son using cattle to drag lumber from their forest. Armed with machetes, they chased him away and confiscated the cows. Now the sheriff had come bearing an ultimatum: Return the cattle or his posse would retrieve them by force.<\/p>\n \u2018This struggle, for us, is war,\u2019 da Silva says. He claims to have received dozens of death threats since founding the Guardians of the Forest in 2012. \u2018The loggers carry arms. The farmers are armed. They want confrontation.\u2019 Indeed, on August 12, a month after I visited da Silva, the dead body of his comrade, Jorginho Guajajara, was found in a nearby river.<\/p>\n Violent conflicts over land and logging have spilled blood throughout the Amazon since the 1980s, when the murder of the organizer Chico Mendes made international headlines. Brazil is the deadliest country in the world for land defenders, with more than 140 killings since 2015, according to the NGO Global Witness. The state of Maranh\u00e3o, where the Guajajara live, is perhaps the most dangerous: In 2016, more attacks on indigenous groups occurred there than anywhere else in Brazil, according to the Pastoral Land Commission.<\/p>\n Apart from the human toll, the violence in the Amazon is also driving an ominous trend in the earth\u2019s climate system. Last October, Science<\/i> published one of the most important \u2014 and least noticed \u2014 climate studies in years. Tropical forests in the Amazon and around the world have been so degraded by logging, burning, and agriculture that they have started to release more carbon than they store, according to scientists from the Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University. In the parlance of climate change, these forests are flipping from carbon sinks to carbon sources.<\/p>\n Humans have deforested roughly 16 percent of the entire Amazon basin so far, Nobre cautions \u2014 just 4 to 9 percent from his projected tipping point<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is very bad news, for two reasons. First, until now, the capacity of forests to absorb carbon dioxide via photosynthesis has been a crucial buffer against greenhouse-gas emissions: The forests\u2019 absorption of CO2 <\/sub>has limited the global temperature rise to considerably less than it would otherwise be. Second, forests must absorb even more carbon going forward if humankind is to contain that temperature rise to a survivable amount. Current trends put the earth on a trajectory to an increase of 3.5 degrees Celsius, an amount that scientists have warned is \u2018incompatible with organized society.\u2019 Minimizing future emissions is imperative, but it\u2019s not enough. To meet the Paris Agreement\u2019s commitment to hold the temperature rise \u2018well below\u2019 2\u00b0C, humankind must also \u2018go negative.\u2019 That is, we must extract the CO2<\/sub> that\u2019s already in the atmosphere and store it where it can no longer trap heat, notably in the earth\u2019s trees and soil. And that means growing more trees, not cutting them down.<\/p>\n \u2018This is really very serious,\u2019 says Carlos Nobre, Brazil\u2019s leading climatologist, in an interview at his home in a tree-lined suburb outside S\u00e3o Paulo. Nobre has the tired expression of someone who\u2019s been ringing the alarm bell for too long while society looks away. He says the world\u2019s forests have been absorbing roughly 30 percent of the CO2<\/sub> emissions generated by human activities. But Nobre\u2019s research, conducted with Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University, has found that deforestation, combined with rising temperatures and the droughts and fires they encourage, is taking a heavy toll.<\/p>\n \u2018We\u2019re dangerously approaching a point where the convergence of all these drivers might reach irreversibility,\u2019 Nobre says. Cross that threshold, and much of the Amazon rainforest will begin to die. The Amazon could reach that tipping point if 20 to 25 percent of its original forest cover is destroyed, Nobre estimates. In that case, more than half the Amazon would transition from rainforest to savannah, releasing massive amounts of CO2<\/sub> into the atmosphere as the trees die and burn. Such a \u2018dieback\u2019 is one of the scenarios that could trigger runaway global warming, according to the \u2018hothouse Earth\u2019 study published by the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute in June.<\/p>\n Humans have deforested roughly 16 percent of the entire Amazon basin so far, Nobre cautions \u2014 just 4 to 9 percent from his projected tipping point. This means that the deforestation must be halted \u2014 and soon \u2014 if humankind is to have much chance of avoiding a climate catastrophe.<\/p>\n More than two-thirds of the foreign capital driving the expansion of Brazil’s soy and beef sectors were channeled through offshore tax havens<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Just as the consequences of the Amazon\u2019s deforestation are global, so are its causes. \u2018There\u2019s really no mystery as to the main reasons we\u2019re seeing tropical forests disappear,\u2019 says Frances Seymour, a senior fellow on forest and governance issues at the World Resources Institute. \u2018Vast areas continue to be cleared for soy, beef, palm oil, and other globally traded commodities.\u2019<\/p>\n The world\u2019s growing demand for meat has transformed Brazil into an agricultural superpower. Today it boasts the largest commercial cattle herd in the world. It\u2019s also the world\u2019s largest exporter of soy, mostly for animal feed, with food giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland eagerly processing that harvest into their transnational supply chains. Globally, hundreds of billions of dollars are invested each year in cattle, grains, and palm oil, which translates into additional deforestation. Dirty money only feeds the destruction: More than two-thirds of the foreign capital driving the expansion of Brazil\u2019s soy and beef sectors were channeled through offshore tax havens, according to a Stockholm University study published in Nature<\/i> in August, making accountability for environmental destruction that much harder to enforce.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As with the assaults against the Guajajaras, much of the clearing of tropical forests, in the Amazon and elsewhere, is illegal \u2014 but it continues with the blessing of corrupt officials. Throughout Brazil\u2019s so-called \u2018arc of deforestation,\u2019 a crescent-shaped strip tracing the southern and eastern edges of the Amazon, such violent clashes are only the first stage in a chain of events that threatens indigenous people and global climate stability alike.<\/p>\n Criminal organizations and land grabbers start with illegal logging, Nobre explains, extracting valuable timber from indigenous lands and other supposedly off-limits areas. With the money gained from selling that timber, the criminals clear the land and plant grass for cattle. Once they have enough cows on the land, they draw up phony titles and sell the lots.<\/p>\n It\u2019s at this point that the corruption becomes institutionalized. Astonishingly, criminals who seize land then have their actions made legal, because the Brazilian government grants them amnesty. In 2017, President Michel Temer signed legislation \u2018regularizing\u2019 illegal land claims by anyone who appropriated Amazonian land before 2011. And that amnesty was an extension of the previous 2004 limit. The maximum area of claimable land was also increased, from 1,500 hectares (3,706 acres) to 2,500 hectares (6,178 acres) per person. \u2018It\u2019s a very perverse dynamic,\u2019 Nobre says.<\/p>\n In 2017, President Michel Temer signed legislation \u2018regularizing\u2019 illegal land claims by anyone who appropriated Amazonian land before 2011<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In Brazil, that dynamic has also transformed the political landscape, enabling a coalition of landed rural elites called the ruralistas<\/i> to dominate, despite the fact that 86 percent of Brazil\u2019s population lives in cities and towns. Some have called the ruralistas\u2019<\/i> breathtaking rise to power a \u2018parliamentary dictatorship.\u2019 Their success is due to the growing economic clout of the agribusiness sector, as well as a savvy political union \u2014 dubbed the BBB caucus, for \u2018beef, Bibles, and bullets\u2019 \u2014 in which the farm lobby joined with evangelical and anti-gun-control parties to take control of Brazil\u2019s Congress.<\/p>\n The rise of the ruralistas<\/i> has largely reversed the Brazilian government\u2019s previous success in slashing deforestation rates. Between 2002 and 2009, federal protections were applied in the Amazon to an area twice the size of Germany; enforcement was beefed up; and financial credit was denied to properties associated with illegal deforestation. Those hard-won achievements are now being gutted. An embattled Temer, in exchange for the ruralistas<\/i>\u2019 support, has provisionally lowered environmental standards, suspended the ratification of indigenous lands, and reduced the size of protected areas. Nara Bar\u00e9, who heads the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations from the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), one of the largest such organizations in South America, explains that the ruralistas\u2019<\/i> motives are simple: \u2018to expand agribusiness and to expand large enterprises that are focused on the Amazon.\u2019<\/p>\n In the agricultural boomtown of Sinop in northern Mato Grosso, that logic is on full display. Sinop\u2019s brief history includes all the stages of the Amazon\u2019s deforestation: from logging in the 1970s, to cattle ranches in the 1980s, to today\u2019s mechanized soy plantations, which have brought wealth and prosperity to early settlers like Jaime Farinon, who owns an 8,000-acre farm there.<\/p>\n \u2018We came to this region in 1985 to occupy\u2014to turn this abandoned land into a productive area,\u2019 Farinon says, tapping a cigarette from a pack of Dunhills. Those were the final days of Brazil\u2019s military dictatorship, an era that Farinon remains nostalgic for. \u2018Maybe we\u2019ll manage to get a Trump here to align this country. This is a none-too-veiled allusion to Jair Bolsonaro, a current presidential candidate and apologist for Brazil\u2019s dictatorship, who is known for his attacks on women, black people, homosexuals, and indigenous communities. \u2018In these parts,\u2019 Farinon adds, \u2018you have to have a little blood in your veins.\u2019<\/p>\n When he first arrived in the Amazon, Farinon was allowed to clear the trees from half of his land. The laws have since changed to allow only 20 percent of private lands to be deforested, which is hindering expansion, Farinon complains. He owns another 1,700 acres that aren\u2019t worth clearing because of these limits: \u2018It\u2019s the laws that are blocking us.\u2019<\/p>\n President Temer reinforced that message last year, when\u2014again with the ruralistas<\/i>\u2019 support \u2014 he slashed the budget of the Ministry of Environment, which includes IBAMA, by a staggering 43 percent. Those draconian cuts, and the political message they\u2019ve sent, will make Selva\u2019s work even more untenable. His field office is responsible for patrolling an area with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. But \u2018we only have four agents,\u2019 he tells me, \u2018of which three will retire in the next 12 months.\u2019<\/p>\n The ruralistas<\/i> are also targeting one of the most effective strategies for protecting the Amazon: indigenous land rights. The ruralista<\/i>bloc has introduced more than 100 bills in Congress aimed at reducing the land rights and autonomy of indigenous and other traditional communities. \u2018Brazil\u2019s debt with the Indian is not over land,\u2019 says Nilson Leit\u00e3o, the ruralistas<\/i>\u2019 polished political leader, who wants to open indigenous lands to mining and other extractive industries.<\/p>\n Someone had placed a cross made of palm fronds on the riverbank \u2014 a clear threat<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But indigenous people are fighting back. In April, more than 3,000\u00a0representatives from over 100\u00a0groups descended on Bras\u00edlia, the nation\u2019s capital, for a week of rallies that proved to be the largest mobilization of indigenous people in Brazilian history. The agribusiness lobby \u2018is our main enemy,\u2019 says S\u00f4nia Guajajara, a vice-presidential candidate from the Socialism and Freedom Party and the executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, the umbrella group that organized the mobilization. \u2018They can\u2019t see the environment as a space that needs to be preserved because it guarantees life, guarantees water. They only see it as something to exploit, to create wealth.\u2019 Guajajara argues that preserving the rainforest requires more financial support and legal protection for indigenous people so they can do the kind of patrolling that Cl\u00e1udio Jos\u00e9 da Silva\u2019s Guardians of the Forest are doing in Maranh\u00e3o. \u2018The Brazilian state doesn\u2019t do it,\u2019 she says, \u2018so the indigenous people are doing it themselves. But they lack resources.\u2019<\/p>\n Guajajara\u2019s recommendation mirrors the findings of specialists: that the best way to defend forests is to empower the people who inhabit the forests, assuring them of property rights, legal standing, and government protection against invasions by outsiders. Annual deforestation rates in the areas legally managed by indigenous peoples have been two to three times lower than in other forests, while generating billions of dollars\u2019 worth of benefits from carbon sequestration, reduced pollution, clean water, and more, according to the Woods Hole Research Center and World Resources Institute. But in the Amazon, 71 million hectares \u2014 an area roughly the size of Chile \u2014 remain undesignated public lands, leaving them especially vulnerable to deforestation. \u201cThe land grabbers consider these areas to be a no-man\u2019s land that can be invaded,\u201d says Ren\u00ea Luiz de Oliveira, head of environmental enforcement at IBAMA.<\/p>\n Zero deforestation is possible in Brazil. One model of future land use projects that if the country continues to expand the agricultural and livestock frontier into new areas at the current rate, over 50 percent of the Amazon rainforest will be razed by 2050. However, if Brazil shifts to a sustainability scenario, reinvesting and strengthening its environmental policies and enforcement, deforestation can be virtually halted. Getting to that zero-deforestation future will require a reshuffling of economic incentives that makes it worthwhile to leave forests standing. But the payoff is potentially enormous, saving Brazil as much as $100 billion a year by\u00a02030 while also fulfilling the country\u2019s emissions-reduction commitment of 43 percent under the Paris Agreement.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in Maranh\u00e3o, I watch as da Silva and his fellow Guardians wake before sunrise and pour sweet black coffee from orange thermos containers into shared glass jars. They paint their faces and chests with a red paste made from uruc\u00fa seeds before climbing into speedboats for the day\u2019s patrol.<\/p>\n \u2018This painting represents blood,\u2019 da Silva tells me. \u2018We paint when we monitor our territory. It gives us more strength, more energy. This is for fighting.\u2019<\/p>\n The day before, da Silva and I had stopped at the spot where the sheriff\u2019s son had downed the trees he tried to steal. Someone had placed a cross made of palm fronds on the riverbank \u2014 a clear threat. But da Silva was undeterred. His biggest concern, he says, is that in 30 years\u2019 time, his people\u2019s territory will no longer be a vibrant rainforest, but rather the deforested landscape that relentless logging and industrial farming has engendered across the river. \u2018We keep fighting,\u2019 he tells me, \u2018so that this doesn\u2019t happen.\u2019<\/p>\n Sam Eaton is a freelance journalist and filmmaker based in New York. His work has been featured on PBS NewsHour, the BBC, APM\u2019s Marketplace, and UNTV\/. The reporting for this project was produced in partnership with PBS NewsHour and the public-radio program PRI\u2019s The World, with support from the Pulitzer Center and the Society of Environmental Journalists.<\/em><\/p>\n