Columns On Oct. 30, Brazilians voted in a presidential runoff election that was won by Luiz ‘Lula’ Ignacio da Silva. It was a victory by the narrowest of margins, although in fairness, the president elect’s opponent had the clear support of the federal highway patrol, which reportedly set hundreds of roadblocks in areas of the country that had supported the former president in the first round of voting.
It was an election with massive stakes, perhaps the most important of 2022, in any country, a vote that, in the best-case scenario, will impact not only Brazil but the whole world, especially in terms of the unfolding climate emergency.
As Brazil controls the largest part of the Amazon region, the fate of the region is in its government’s hands. Under the far-right reactionary Jair Bolsonaro, who has ruled Brazil since 2018, the meager protections in place to protect it were removed, leading to an orgy of both legal and illegal mining and logging and the subsequent encroachment of large agribusiness interests that threaten to transform the region from a forest into a savannah.
A side effect of this activity that the soon to be former president seemed gleeful about was the suffering being visited on what’s left of the country’s indigenous peoples, some of them uncontacted and living in isolation in their territories for centuries.
When climate scientists talk about ‘tipping points’ that could precipitate greater natural disasters in the short term and force average temperatures higher over time, the loss of the Amazon is one of their chief concerns. Preserving it becomes doubly important considering other tipping points are already being reached in terms of glacier melt, the loss of the world’s coral reefs, and other major forests like those in the Congo Basin that are being ravaged out of the view of most media.
