The year 2021 ended the way it started: bad, awful, disgraceful. On the last day of December, the Federal Government announced another of its feats, the destruction of a new 8,531 km2 closed.
This area corresponds to one and a half times that of the Federal District, where militiamen and soldiers engineer the annihilation of natural heritage, public health and education — of civilization, in short. Under the complicity of a venal Congress and the blind eye of a weak-hearted Supreme.
This is Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, completing three years of bad news for everything that lives and thrives. It will go down in history as the most degrading period after the 1988 Constitution, rivaling only the torturous dictatorship that preceded it.
The great hinterland of Guimarães Rosa is on the way to being finished, while most of those who care about the environment only have eyes for the Amazon. Half of the Brazilian savannah has already gone to the sack, and this Pyrrhic victory over nature is celebrated with Brazilian flags on every farm gate in the region.
From August 2020 to July 2021, the Prodes Cerrado system of the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) captured the 8,531 km2 clear-cut, implying an increase of 7.9% over the previous period. Last year, the satellites used by Inpe had registered 7,905 km2.
The increase in deforestation and fire is worrying because it reverses a downward trend, but it is necessary to recognize that the situation has already been worse. From 2001 to 2004, the annual rates were in the order of 25 thousand to 30 thousand km2, triple the current cadence.
The pace dropped by half between 2005 and 2008, then plummeting to less than 8,000 km2/year. That was until 2018, the year of Bolsonaro’s election, when agribusiness, fueled by the boastful frenzy and by a sinister minister, used a chainsaw and chain to pass the herd on the natural environments.
Worse for the Amazon, which saw deforestation return to the five-digit level, and for the cerrado, which is approaching that. Few pay attention to the crucial difference in the situation of the two environments, however: the biome to the north is twice the size and 82.6% preserved, against only 48.8% for the cerrado.
If the rate of devastation continues to increase, the cerrado could reach a critical point in two decades. By losing 62% of its original coverage, the biome would see “percolation”, the connectivity of natural corridors through which fauna circulates, whose survival would then be systematically threatened, threatened.
Our savannah is home to more than 20,000 plant species, including 5,000 endemic—plants that only exist there. 263 mammals depend on them, 71 of them only present in the dominant biome of the Central Plateau.
What would the cerrado be without the imposing maned wolf, without the buritis that dot the humid paths? A shy backlands, diminished, by the way.
There is no lack of initiatives and solutions, however, as shown in the series of reports Foco no Cerrado, in this leaf. Lack is decency. Humanity. Government.
Our generation has done the most to destroy biodiversity, but it has also been able to make it a value in itself. For no other reason, the greatest biologist of the turn of the century, Edward O. Wilson, defended in his last years that each biome on Earth should have half of its area preserved.
Wilson died in this disgraceful end of 2021. Thomas Lovejoy, his companion in defending the natural world, is also gone. Savannah and Amazon forest totter.
The hunger returned. Covid’s numbers have rotted away. Children are without vaccine. Ômicron and H3N2 raise a sizeless tsunami. Poor Bahians and miners succumb, drowned and buried.
With so much death, only Bolsonaro has fun. It’s in its element.
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