Burning South America

What is it going to take before we realize that this socioeconomic system is the gateway to hell?

How long will we allow ridiculous industries bring disaster and ruin to what is left of this once beautiful subcontinent of America? So few people seem to understand the damage that the industrial agriculture sector causes principally genetically modified soybeans and industrial cattle production (nearly all for export). People see Zebu cattle bred in India walking along a Bolivian dirt road on the wrong continent and they think “How lovely?” “How pastoral?” “Natural splendour”

None of this is natural. The Bolivian forests are gone now because they got in the way of progress and even the animals themselves are human-made through breeding and artificial insemination designed for a different continent where they are worshiped like Gods by Hindus. For some reason it seems difficult for us to understand, even intuitively, that these introduced animals (many humans included) are committing suicide. When will we realize that when we burn our home we burn ourselves into the very air that we breathe?

September 2024: The Planet is Burning, Again

This time it is Bolivia that is producing enough smoke to drown a continent two to three times the size of the US. Nearly four million hectares are in flames just in two Bolivian States, Santa Cruz and El Beni. What’s worse, most of these fires are intentional to burn brush and forests so as to have more grassland for soybeans and cattle feed.

The population of the city of São Paulo (some 23 million souls) is more than 2000 km away from the fires to the East in Brazil. Thanks primarily to these fires in Bolivia it now has the filthiest air on the planet, beating out Lahore in Pakistan and Jakarta in Indonesia. The latter is the capital city of Indonesia but just for now. Jakarta is currently being evacuated because of sea level rise, flooded streets from climate change. The Indonesian government intends to permanently abandon Jakarta and build a new Indonesian capital. Also on the East coast of the South American continent Bolivian smoke has arrived to Buenos Aires (3000km away).

5000 volunteer fire fighters in Bolivia trying to bring the fires under control and it is still wintertime. Soon the monsoon rains, the annual natural floods, will return to The Beni. The wet season will quench the fires as they always do but the 2024 fires are very early, and they’re unusually extensive. Also when the rains do come much of the soil washes away too in fire damaged areas. The smoke damage is extreme for this time of year, fires normally peak much later in the year in November. Also significant, though rarely commented on in the press (because of the power of the cattle industry) is that most of these fires are lit on purpose to burn brush and forests so that cattle can graze on the new grass that might grow out of the embers when the rains eventually come. These fires burn away natural forests so that the cattle farmers can have more “productive” land for more cattle to be shipped to global markets. The extra cattle export profits these fires bring might last a decade or more. In the meantime hundreds of millions of autochthonous animals will be burned alive. Human structures are also being destroyed and lives will be lost. Short term profits might be a little higher for the meat and milk farming sector both of which we should long ago stop promoting as human foodstuffs. Meat and dairy should have become a thing of the past.

Never Question the Logic of Capital

Why put European and Asian cattle in a southern Amazon forests and swamplands where they have never lived naturally. Why expose these animals to diseases that they have no resistance to? By so doing we bring them to places where their young calves will be snapped at by alligators, where they might consume dangerous unfamiliar native plants? Why are we breeding more cattle at all? There are better alternatives. Cacao trees, from which chocolate is made, grow naturally in the region. Why not plant chocolate trees instead of burning down native hardwoods for cattle? In fact you don’t need to plant the trees as the native monkeys propogate the trees naturally.

The main reason is one of scale and commodity; an export market for western-style burger food all across the planet. The social and environmental costs are externalised by big agro. Fire damage is a cost born by the State, in this case the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Relief for the asthmatic lungs of local children breathing in what is nearly ten million acres of native brush and forests on fire? Well that will have to wait till the wet season. Too poor for health coverage? Let them go to public hospitals across the border in Argentina. The birds, snakes and insects will be gone too. Collateral damage for cheap hamburgers.

Why? Because money! So why not?

Are humans really such an infantile monkey that we will drive cattle into the Amazon’s forests, burn the native creatures alive while destroying the atmosphere we breathe? Well yes! This is what we have become. Destroyers of our own livelihoods, our own and soon, of ourselves.