by Eric Nepomuceno
Rio de Janeiro – sold 1is April, a thread of light appeared – faint, still vague, but still present – in the battle against the destruction of the environment carried out by the government of the ultra-rightist Jair Bolsonaro: the Federal Supreme Court, the most High Court of Brazil, began the trial of the so-called “green agenda”, consisting of seven legal challenges to the Court related to environmental issues.
The trial is considered historic. The lawsuits accuse the government of threatening, through acts and omissions, the environment, particularly the Amazon region. One of the members of the Court told the press, on condition of anonymity, that “if the government does not act, the judiciary cannot abstain”.
There are currently no less than 80 actions filed – and accepted – in the Federal Supreme Court that are directly related to the government’s environmental policy. This is a historic record. The seven that have begun to be examined therefore represent less than 10% of this total.
The issue is seen as fundamental in the face of the devastation directly encouraged by Jair Bolsonaro. And this problem does not only concern Brazil, it is considered a global problem.
Sept actions
The seven actions examined call into question the government’s dismantling of institutions dedicated to preventing the devastation of forests and sanctioning illegal initiatives. They also denounce government decisions considered to be imprudent, even outright illegal, in the field of the environment. The first of these actions accuses the government of intentionally liquidating the action plan for the prevention and control of the destruction of forests in the Amazon region.
This plan, implemented in 2004 under the government of former President Lula da Silva, succeeded in reducing the destruction of forests by 80% until 2013, thanks to changes in the legislation of the time relating to the control and the repression of environmental crimes.
This means, according to approximate data, that twenty billion trees were not felled and that five billion tons of carbon were no longer emitted.
This is, according to researchers and scientists, the greatest contribution of a country to the fight against the causes of climate change in the world.
Point of no return
On the first day of the trial in Brazil’s Supreme Court, lawyers working with the initiators of the lawsuits insisted on pointing out that the Amazon, under Bolsonaro, is very close to a point of no return, from which it will undergo irreversible changes.
In other words, the country is on the edge of the abyss. This is an extreme threat to the ecological balance, not only in Brazil, but also throughout the world.
It bears repeating what has already been said: since Bolsonaro took office, measures to end deforestation activities have decreased by almost 83%. The number of arrests made by IBAMA, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment, has also seen a drastic reduction of 81%. And at least five thousand convictions for environmental offenses have been deliberately overlooked and, thanks to government omission, are about to be time-barred.
This is clearly an action as macabre as it is unconstitutional, the result of which is not only increased destruction of the environment but also a clear incitement to impunity.
destruction of the forest
This is how we arrived at a devastating scenario: last year (2021), and compared to 2018, that is, a year before Bolsonaro became president, there was an increase in 76% of forest destruction in the Amazon region.
If we consider deforestation on indigenous lands, the increase was 138% during the same period. And in the conservation units determined by specific legislation, it was 130%. I repeat: these are the first three years of the current government. Already, the rate of emissions driving the climate emergency has exceeded the target three times.
Faced with such a picture, as desperate as it is threatening, the last hope is that the Federal Supreme Court will fulfill its duty to uphold the Constitution and put a definitive end to Bolsonaro’s obsession with destroying everything, absolutely everything that has been built over decades. (Article published by the Argentine daily Page 12, April 3, 2022; translation writing Against)
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