Record-breaking climate firestorms are raging across the Amazon Rainforest. A stubborn South American drought and extreme temperatures are stoking climate fires in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana and Paraguay.
Global heating has scorched millions of hectares in the Amazon Basin this year. It’s so horrible that black rain with soot from these monster fires has poisoned Brazilian cities. That toxic smoke (50X above the World Health Organisation’s safe level) has choked 10.3 million km2(4 million mi2), an area larger than the United States.
Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Fracking, Big Forestry, Big Animal Agri and Big Fisheries have unleashed hell on earthly life and governments are paying them to do so.
So far in 2024, there have been 346,112 fires across all 12 South American countries, eclipsing the 2007 record of 345,322 blazes. From just June to August, the climate fires released the equivalent emissions of running eight coal-fired power plants for a year.
Billions of shrieking and terrified animals were cremated. The hush across the incinerated landscape is harrowing.
ALL earthbound life is interconnected. South America’s continental drought has bitten into its agricultural yield, many millions of people will suffer famine.
The Paraguay River, an important thoroughfare for grains, has hit an all-time low as Brazil’s headwaters are trickling instead of gushing into Argentina. Soy, corn and grain barges are gridlocked, incapable of moving while fully loaded. No rain means that river agricultural transportation is mostly paralysed.
By the way, the Paraguay-Parana system is a waterway of 3400km (2113mi) that courses through Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and landlocked Paraguay and Bolivia, ~250 million people. South America is bonemeal dry.
The world’s biggest jungle, the Amazon Rainforest, is a central spoke in the fight against global heating as well as a global food security stabiliser.
Since the late 1980s, the Amazon Rainforest has been mercilessly plundered, deliberately lit, illegally roaded, neonic mono-cultured, ranched, water starved, fracked, pipelined, mined, logged and burned – the equivalent area to Germany and France combined, ruined.
The answer to slowing down continental climate chaos is to reduce combusting fossil fuels, wood pellets and palm oil and hustle towards a zero-combustion world. But oh no, the world’s so-called ‘leaders’, led by trillionaire Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, have signed onto quadrupling oil and gas outputs by 2030. This madness is occurring in the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence: The more carbon combusted, the faster earthly life boils, burns, floods and starves.
This week, Australia’s neoliberal Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, greenlit three colossal coalmines boosting more HEAT whilst the Great Barrier Reef disintegrates from underwater bushfires on par with Black Summer.
On the other side of the world, many American states have new 10 to 20-year incarceration laws for protesters that interrupt coal, oil, fracking, pipelining and clear-cutting operations. Draconian measures to enrich planet annihilating corporations are in order to hasten the Age of Agony.
The oceans are increasing in temperature at a ludicrous speed from absorbing accelerating combustion heat, the equivalent energy of exploding 384 million Hiroshimas annually. The oceans drive Earth’s climate, which has gone berserk.
The Youth are demanding planetary change. It’s their birthright to breathe unpolluted air, drink untainted freshwater, eat non-poisoned foods and savour old-growth rainforests and oceans teaming with life.
Hence, the Youth are speaking out and protesting because their future is on the chopping block. Do they matter to the adults or not?
Agitate. Disrupt. Defend.
Reese Halter is a bees/trees/seas defender.
Unearthly Wails is a special edition, a collection of poetry
illustrated by renowned Ojibwa artist Terry McCue.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com to order
