I wrote a few months ago about the news that Bolsorano had been elected as the next president of Brazil. I talked about the things that he had promised to do that would be detrimental to the environmental condition in Brazil and potentially South America.
While it has taken a few months for him to start changing things, it is not encouraging.
His current move is to permit mining companies to work without permission from the indigenous people within their reserves. This is obviously in direct contradiction with the indigenous lands act as it essentially allows mining companies to simply seize indigenous land for their own use.
Apart from the terrible impact that this is going to have on the indigenous people, it is also extraordinarily bad for the environment. Mining companies are likely to strip the trees over any areas they are working, they will build roads that will allow them to get in their equipment but this always leads to more illegal land settlements and poaching along the routes and finally the mining practices of many of these companies are highly polluting and it is likely that the impact of the mining operation will extend far beyond where they actually extract materials from.
As some of you will have seen over the weekend Donald Trump welcomed Bolsorano into the White House. It is imperative that the rest of the world’s stands firmly against Bolsonaro’s terrible ideas and make it clear that even if Trump agrees with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest the rest of the world does not.
