Despite rules to the country, and constant promises by the Brazilian government, fires continue to burn across the Amazon. More importantly, the majority of these fires appear to have been set deliberately to clear land rather than as natural events.
It is not surprising that this has carried on, as as although Jair Bolsonaro’s government is pushing this rule against burning, his own actions have demonstrated his opposition to this rule constantly.
With his continual attack on science and the protection of the Amazon (the cost of his denial of medical science may well run into the hundreds of thousands of lives due to coronavirus), it is unsurprising that when the Brazilian government makes a common-sense ruling about not setting fires in the Amazon it is largely ignored. One of the big things that Bolsonaro has done while in power is to deliberately bit-by-bit take apart the ability of the government to police rules within the Amazon rainforest – when you have a government leader who does not believe in looking after the natural world that is liable to trickle down into the opinions of people in his or her country. Dismissing science or environmental knowledge as European colonialism does not remove the truth or impacts of decisions that ignore the facts, though thus far Bolsonaro seems to have done a good job in blaming his own administrations incompetence on other countries.
Thankfully, it is only a little over a year until Brazilians have a chance to throw Bolsonaro out of office. Unfortunately as with Trump in the USA, despite becoming a pariah of the international community and being hated by a large number of his own people his re-election, while not certain, is reasonably likely.
