An amazing mythology has already developed about Amazon fires. From Brendan O’Neill at spiked-online.com:
So now we know: the idea that the Amazon rainforest is burning on an unprecedented scale and that these fires will rob humanity of one of its key sources of oxygen is fake news. It is hard to think of any other global event this year that has been as awash with misinformation as the rainforest fires. We’ve been told these fires are a calamity, an act of ‘ecocide’; they’re proof of humanity’s contempt for the environment; they will blacken and possibly even destroy ‘the lungs of the world’, as the rainforests are referred to, given they produce 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen. It’s all untrue. We are being misled.
Everything – from the photos of fires being shared by heartbroken celebs to the wild claims about these fires harming the whole of humanity – is false. Some of the photos of the fires being tearfully shared on social media are 10 or 20 years old. Many are not pictures of the Amazon at all. Some are from south Brazil, others from India and Sweden. The idea that millions of glorious, oxygen-producing trees are been burnt to a cinder by evil humans is nonsense, too. To the extent that there has been an increase in fires in the Amazon – and this itself is a deceptive claim – many of this year’s new fires are of dry scrubland, where trees have already been felled.
It is untrue that the fires are historically huge or unprecedented. NASA says the Amazon fires are ‘slightly below average this year’. Many are pointing out that we are witnessing the highest number of fires in the Amazon for seven years. But as meteorologist Jesse Ferrell reports, prior to 2012 there were many years in which the Amazon had worse fires than this year’s: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2010. As Ferrell says, there are always fires on Earth: ‘Thousands of fires are continually burning across the Earth every day of every year, and they always have.’ The idea that what is currently happening in the Amazon is shockingly unusual or apocalyptic or proof of man’s fascistic disdain for his environment is an entirely politicised interpretation of a perfectly normal event.
