Climate Changed
The Amazon Rain Forest Burns Again
Torrential rain has been the only thing slowing down the ruin.
Logs stacked at a lumber mill near Boa Vista, Roraima state, Brazil, in February 2019.
Photographer: Dado Galdieri/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The election of Jair Bolsonaro, a regulation-hating populist with a big following in Brazil’s farm country, was supposed to trigger a surge in deforestation of the Amazon. Five months into his presidency, there are essentially no signs of any such pickup. If anything, the numbers are down.
But conservationists are deeply concerned. Not only do they see the lull in cutting and burning under Bolsonaro as an aberration — due to unusually heavy rainfall — they point to something alarming that has escaped notice across much of the world: Deforestation has been on the rise for years.