The Amazon rainforest
is one of the largest, if not the largest in the world. Rainforests are critically important for the global climate in many ways. It regulates temperature
and weather cycles in the Americas, and it
actually carries rain to much of the continent, which is a bread basket for the world. They have what are called
flying rivers above the jungle. These bands of moisture that really affect and regulate weather patterns far from the Amazon, and even more critical
now with climate change, the destruction of the Amazon, which has been accumulating over decades is accelerating almost at
the point of no return. Scientists are warning
that we're getting closer and closer to a tipping point, that we may even be there already. So if we pass that tipping point, we start seeing the rainforest
turning into a savanna, where you don't have the
trees that are able to pull all that pollution out of the air. You don't have the ecosystem
that's producing the rainfall that feeds the continent. Brazil's government says it's
working to stop deforestation, but behind the scenes, it's actively engaged in a campaign to prioritize and develop the Amazon. And it's really being
fueled and encouraged by a government that really
believes that the Amazon is there to be developed,
to be privatized, to be exploited for its natural riches. Unless we find a way to reduce the sort of voracious demand in the world for the commodities that
come out of the Amazon, it's really hard to see how this cycle of destruction
will really ever end. And eventually, it's gonna be too late. If you want to know why the
Amazon is being destroyed, it's not because people
just want to destroy it. It's because they're doing it for the things that we're
consuming far, far away. You have to understand
it from the perspective of certain forces in Brazil, especially the forces
behind ranching and logging. You really just need to go
to your local Home Depot and look at the hardwoods
that are being sold there, many of which come from Brazil and many of which come from the Amazon, and those are going on
your living room floor. Or think about it the next
time you have a barbecue and you're enjoying a really
nice steak or you buy a burger. Well, the beef that you're eating is part of this global beef system that starts in the Amazon. As much as the messaging
is that they don't want people in the Amazon to
be burning the Amazon, what the world is really
telling these people is that we will pay
you to burn the Amazon, because we will buy everything
that you're selling us. The Amazon rainforest, it's
lost in the past 40 years, an area the size of California. There was progress that was being made in slowing those burns. That's changed. The burns are accelerating this year. They were at an 11 year high last year. So why isn't anyone
being held accountable? This was a story that
was a year in the making. And the more I started digging, it became obvious that
everyone in the Amazon region is seeking a piece of land and grabbing a piece of public land. And the government is not
only looking the other way, but in many ways, they're
actually encouraging it. After spending some time on the ground and talking to dozens,
dozens and dozens of ranchers of enforcers, of park rangers, of people within Bolsonaro's inner circle, it becomes clear that everything pushes these ranchers and these farmers towards the decisions that they make. Not only do we have the
insatiable demand for commodities, but it's rooted in Brazil's culture, and it's rooted in Brazil's history. In the 70s and 80s, the Brazilian policy was very much to encourage
industrialized farmers and manufacturers into the Amazon, because they wanted to develop the Amazon as Brazil's ticket to first world status. This was during the Brazilian miracle, years of extremely high economic growth when the government was
calling people to the Amazon. A lot of poor Brazilians
had been working this land for decades, and yet they
had no claim to this land, and so the policy shifted from encouraging the big farmers and favoring the big guy into let's help the little guy. And it was one of the biggest
social welfare giveaways of all time, where they
started handing out government land in the
Amazon to small farmers, to poor Brazilians. You had TV ads, you had radio ads, you had ads in magazines that
drove people to the Amazon and encouraged millions of people to move from the coastal
cities into the Amazon and conquer what they were
calling the green hell. And they said it was a land without men for men without land. That's what drove this
massive migration of people to the Amazon, to stake their claim in the Amazon, to sort of be homesteaders, to clear a piece of land and make something of it and contribute to this rapaciously
growing economy of Brazil. That message several decades
later still persists. It's very much in the Brazilian culture that in order to prosper,
you need to have land. There's almost a roadmap to
how deforestation happens. It's a very predictable cycle. In the Amazon, you have a mess
of a land management system, and so there's a lot of public land that hasn't been designated
for a specific purpose. Typically poor Brazilians will go in, they're the foot soldiers of
deforestation in a lot of ways. They'll claim this land,
they'll band together and really create these societies. The hardwoods are always the first to go. And so the easiest way to sort of survive is to get cattle and sell it to the internal market or the global market. They don't last too long on the land, 'cause it's very difficult
to make a living in the end. And so a lot of these families are pushed off their land eventually or bought out of their land. And it's at that point
that the big ranchers and the big farmers come in and they start gathering this land and accumulating land empires, and they're able to say
we didn't clear the land. We weren't the ones who burned it down. They build their empires
and they start producing soy beans, coffee, cacao. In Brazil, these are not
small farmer products. They require irrigation and investment, and they require a lot of money. It's typically the big
farmers who get into this. The Bolsonaro administration
didn't invent the practice of turning a blind eye
as the Amazon is raided and granting amnesty afterwards. However, the government
through its actions is accelerating those land
grabs like never before. They have stripped the regulating agencies of their manpower, the budgets have been cut. The people in charge of
land management agencies are ranchers and farmers
who have a direct stake in making sure that the
system keeps running. And possibly most damaging
is that the government wants to amnesty more recent invasions and bigger invasions than ever before. Scientists tell us that
this is the decisive decade. President Biden of the
United States, again, to try to sort of pressure Brazil into doing something to reign in the destruction of the Amazon, President Biden invited
President Bolsonaro to a climate summit that was held in 2021. President Bolsonaro. He was defiant. What he pointed to was this
idea of an Amazonian paradox. What he meant by that was
that Brazil's rainforest is one of the greatest
resources in the world, and yet 24 million people who live around the Amazon region, they're poor. So he basically said if the United States or any other richer nation in the world wants Brazil to stop deforestation, they gotta pay for it. Just getting to the Amazon is a hike. I live in San Paulo. Just flying there is
a really long journey. There's no cell service,
the roads are terrible. And so anywhere you go is a journey. We visit one town where this had happened approximately 20 years ago
called Uniao Bandeirantes. And this is a town that
really didn't exist except in the last 20 years. It was pure rain forest. And now it's almost 2,000 families ended up settling there. Everywhere you look, you
see coffee plantations and cattle ranches, and you have thousands
and thousands of farmers who have been living on this land that they don't have title to. One of the most surprising aspects of the journey that we took was that it's really hard to find
clear villains there. I think from the outside, you look at the Amazon and you think, well, you know, monsters that are tearing down
this beautiful rainforest. When you get there and you
start talking to these people, you realize that some of
the decisions they've made are decisions that other
people would have made if they were in those shoes. One of the farmers that
we spent some time with is a man named Baiano. A few decades ago, he traded a motorcycle for a plot of land. And 20 years later, he
has built a mini empire. He was a small farmer
with 200 hectares or so, and he'd made the transition
from cattle to coffee. It was something he was very proud of. One of the arguments that you
hear from environmentalists and from people looking abroad is that there should be sustainable ways to live in harmony with the forest. There's no market for the
products that you make when you are producing from the forest. Another man who we met was
named Everaldo Pandolfi. He was one of the original settlers of Uniao Bandeirantes. He arrived in around 2000
with a few of his brothers, and it was pure rainforest
when they arrived. Pandolfi recognizes that to make a living on the land,
you have to clear the land. That's just the way it is. There's no other way to do it in his view. He went for the hardwoods first, because that brings in the fast cash. He torched the scrub to clean it up, and then he put cattle on the land. That's what was repeated over and over again in
this particular town, and it's been repeated across the Amazon, and it's really a driving force behind the deforestation that we're seeing now. On the other end of this story, you have the industrialized
ranchers and farmers. Some of these guys have
amassed land empires in the tens of thousands of hectares, which is possible only if you were awarded it by the dictatorship, you bought it up from small farmers or they're land grabs themselves. One of the rancher we met,
a very successful rancher, Adelio Barofaldi. His history is like the
history of so many people that have settled in the Amazon. He migrated to the Amazon
from another part of Brazil in search of prosperity that
he couldn't find at home. Barofaldi is a staunch
supporter of Bolsonaro as are most of the big ranchers
and farmers in the state and throughout the Amazon. These are the guys that Bolsonaro says can solve the problem of deforestation. And so as Bolsonaro is seeking to amnesty a lot of these land grabs, the biggest change that he's proposing is allowing these big farmers who have deforested more recently to apply for official
title to this Amazon land. Over the years, Adelio Barofaldi has amassed over 40,000 hectares of land, and he's strived to actually
follow the law in Brazil. He built his cattle ranching empire on a system that is designed
to be gamed in a way. And he has actually tried, in his view, is to really follow the rules in Brazil that do allow you to go in
and develop a cattle ranch. He actually replanted
a lot of the preserve that he's required to
have under federal law. These are the guys that'll say that are the biggest advocates
for privatizing the Amazon, because they say they have the resources to protect the Amazon. And what you're seeing
now is the land invasion sort of flipping on its head in that you have large property owners who are still fighting for that land because they don't actually own title to a lot of this stuff. So they're still fighting for
this land by smaller farmers who are trying to break
into their reserves and cut down their trees. Over the years, the
public undesignated land has pretty much been snapped up. What's left in the Amazon
are protected parks and indigenous territories. And so those are the lands
that are now under attack. There are people that are trying to fight this sort of wave of
destruction as best they can. And one of them is a park ranger. We met a man named Carlos Rangel. He's a 72-year-old park ranger. He's ready to retire. He's been fighting this fight for 20 years and he will plain say he's exhausted. He dreams of retiring to write the great Brazilian novel, but he's afraid to leave his job because he's afraid that his replacement won't have the same sort of drive to protect the land. He oversees a park that is
twice the size of Rhode Island, and he does it with a
staff of just a few people. It's basically been a long
campaign to fight back, to keep back people who
want to go into his park and turn it into cattle ranches. He goes out into the
woods with his rangers and he's hacking his way through the woods with the machetes. It's incredibly difficult work, because the forest, you go 10 feet and you can't see the person anymore. It's easy for them to escape. Sometimes, it'll take 12
hours to get 20 kilometers. We weren't able to make those journeys because it was just so
deep into the forest that they were happening. Brazil does need to resolve
it's land titling system. It's a system that is so dysfunctional, that in many cases, you don't
know who the real owner is. A lot of people are making a lot of money from the dysfunctional
land management system that's in place. There's an incentive to keep that going, to not fix this broken system, because otherwise Brazil
would run out of space to feed the world's
appetite for commodities. It's a really complicated
and nuanced phenomenon. It's just not gonna be solved
unless you really recognize the social, economic,
political, and cultural forces that are behind that drive
destruction in the Amazon.
