When bad things happen, we want to blame someone. Our brains evidently struggle to accept that catastrophes might just occur on their own. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins blames this determination to impute agency for the emergence of religion. A faulty bit of genetic wiring, he reckons, makes us see human involvement where none exists. Our remote ancestors could not believe that earthquakes or volcanic eruptions were nobody’s fault. Somehow, they must have been provoked by wickedness. Gods were a way to link natural disasters to human behavior.
You might think that modern human beings have outgrown that tendency; but our DNA is not easily escaped. Look at the reaction to the wildfires in Brazil last week. Running through the coverage is that they must have been someone’s fault.
“Bolsonaro, Trump, and the nationalists ignoring climate disaster,” was how the Washington Post titled its story. “Brazil’s president is facing backlash,” was NPR’s headline. “As the Amazon burns, Brazil’s Trump-like President who let loggers and miners destroy the land isn’t acting,” tweeted Kamala Harris.
You see how our neural circuitry works? Here is a person we don’t like — Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s rightist leader. And here is an event we don’t like — the Amazon fires. So the first must, in some unspecified way, be responsible for the second. While we’re about it, we don’t like Donald Trump either, so let’s bring him in somehow. This is not conscious propaganda by the writers involved; it is simply the way in their brains make connections.
Are the Amazon fires especially severe this year? That depends on what we compare them to. Yes, there are more blazes than there had been at this point in 2018. But if we zoom out a little and consider, say, the last 20 years, we see that 2019 is, if anything, slightly below average. Claims that we face a calamity are based largely on satellite evidence, but NASA says that “total fire activity across the Amazon basin this years has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years”.
For most people, though, statistics hold little interest. Our minds don’t understand numbers nearly as well as they understand villains. When we see flames, we look for an arsonist. Christians were blamed for the conflagration that consumed Nero’s Rome. Communists were blamed for the Reichstag blaze in 1933. Jihadis are still blamed by some shadowy websites for the fire at Notre Dame. A terrible inferno in a West London tower block in 2017 was widely, but vaguely, laid at the door of the Tories. So, naturally, forest fires in Brazil must be the fault of the local bad guy, Bolsonaro.
That the same fires are roaring in neighboring Bolivia is irrelevant. Those who want to accuse Bolsonaro won’t notice evidence of similar outbreaks in a country run by a far-left president. Nor will they notice that Bolsonaro has deployed 44,000 troops to contain the fires. Nor that the images of flaming trees shared on social media by Emmanuel Macron are decades old. They have started with their conclusion, namely that all this is Bolsonaro’s fault — and, what the hell, Trump’s, too.
The idea that Trump is to blame is especially telling, because it reveals the Left’s double-think. Eco-activists enjoy preaching at wealthy countries though, deep down, they know that no amount of decarbonization by the West can counteract the growing emissions of developing states. Yet they shy away from the conclusion to which their logic impels them, namely re-colonizing these states in the name of green policies. Hence their determination to find a way indirectly to blame America.
In fact, the single worst thing that the United States could do in response to forest fires is to trade less with Brazil. Deforestation is a function of poverty. It slows as firewood gives way to electricity and traditional farming to modern agriculture. Rich countries can afford to plant more trees.
Europe and North America have seen extensive reforestation over the past half century, enough to cancel out the continuing loss of trees in the global south. Overall, the amount of forest cover on the planet has, according to the University of Maryland, grown by an area equivalent to Alaska and Texas since 1982. Brazil is not yet a net tree planter, but it is close — deforestation has slowed by 70% since 2004.
Commercial sanctions on Brazil — or, at the very least, refusal to sign trade deals, as Macron is threatening — will only serve to delay that growth, finally set to take off after two sluggish socialist decades there. We should encourage a Brazilian government that finally wants to join the global market system. Making Brazilians richer is the surest way to preserve the rainforest.
