Amazon rainforest

Here’s a good news story: deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen by 60%.

The Amazon rainforest is a climate protector: it creates its own weather, it keeps itself cool by making rain, it stabilises regional temperature and stores staggeringly huge amounts of carbon in its biomass. Yet we have been cutting this forest down and dismantling its protective ecosystem before we have understood even a tiny percentage of its workings.

Why the fall in deforestation; what has made the difference?

Left: Bolsonaro; right: da Silva

Politics.

Under the far right government of President Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian rainforest was put out for tender and by 2022 accounted for more that half the world’s deforestation. But in October of that year, Bolsonaro lost a general election and, despite an attempted insurrection, was replaced by President Lula da Silva and his much greener and more environmentally aware government.

The new government passed immediate legislation to create conservation areas and to protect indigenous lands in the Amazon Basin. They have sent in the army to drive out illegal miners, loggers and land grabbers. Deforestation rates are falling and are predicted to fall by almost 90% in the next five years.

So, it can be done. We, the voters, can use political pressure to make essential environmental change, not just in the beautiful and extraordinary rainforests of the Amazon basin but in the beautiful and quite ordinary woodlands and fields around Trowbridge. We just have to make ourselves heard.

…the beautiful and quite ordinary woodlands and fields around Trowbridge…

We don’t even need new legislation; we merely need to make sure that our councillors properly apply the legislation that is already in place. The fields between Trowbridge and Southwick, open green spaces in the environmentally important Lambrok Basin, should be protected by Wiltshire’s Core Strategy (read Core Policy 50 on page 260), a well written piece of legislation, the outcome of several years’ worth of hard work by Wiltshire Council, that says everything that needs to be said.

If the Council fails to use the Core Strategy to protect our landscape and the wildlife that we share it with, we have the political power to make change: we can vote. We can protect our countryside in exactly the same way that the Brazilian electorate is protecting its rainforest.