In a show of solidarity with indigenous women who marched on Brazil’s capital on Tuesday, activists delivered a letter to far-right President Bolsonaro demanding:
- Justice and ecology for Brazil’s people and its ecosystems, and act on the demands made by indigenous people at the Free Land Camp and Indigenous Women’s March.
- Declare a climate and ecological emergency and work with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
- Immediately halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025.
- Create a Climate and Ecological Justice Citizen’s Assembly and follow their recommendations.
Because of Bolsonaro’s policies, an area the size of a soccer field is destroyed every minute. It threatens not only the biodiversity – the Amazon is home to 30% of the world’s species as well as hundreds of endangered plants and animals – but also the home of one million indigenous people. In July, an indigenous leader of the Waiapi tribe was stabbed to death when armed miners invaded a village in a remote part of the Amazon. Many activists fear that those attacks are going to increase because of Bolsonaro’s pro-mining and pro-farming stance.
Why is the Amazon so crucial to the global climate? In a nutshell:
The Amazon, the lungs of the world, is approximately 400 billion trees large. Trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and through a process called photosynthesis, they transform CO2 into oxygen, which is released back into the air. Those 400 billion trees are already busy fighting the ever-increasing levels of CO2 emissions caused by burning fossil fuels. With the destruction of the Amazon, CO2 no longer would be absorbed, linger in the atmosphere, and speed up an already accelerated rise of global temperatures.
