Wildfires are wreaking so much havoc that the smoke has been visible in cities up to a thousand miles away and even from space.
The eyes of nations around the globe are currently focused on the Amazon rain forest in Brazil, where wildfires are wreaking so much havoc that the smoke has been visible in cities up to a thousand miles away and even from space.
The practice of using fire to clear land has been used for"thousands of years," Meg Lowman, National Geographic Explorer, director of the International Tree Foundation and rain forest biologist, told ABC News. More recently, it's been used to clear certain types of forests in California and even trigger the growth of certain types of trees in the Australian Outback, Lowman said.
However, the experts cautioned people to not outright blame the farmers for the inferno destroying the rain forest. "I think it's important to step back and understand that a lot of these people are just trying to make a living," Garrett added.The country's climate is changing"quite rapidly," teetering on hotter and drier conditions these days, Lowman said.
Many Brazilians are blaming President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in January, and has called for a double-digit increase in deforestation, AP reported. "This is actually arson," Daniel Brindis, forest campaign director for Greenpeace USA, told ABC News, describing the scale at which the fires are being set as"incredible."
"It's perceived that more can be cleared and more can be legally cleared without there being harms," she said. The Amazon rain forest is nicknamed the"Lungs of the World" for its ability to draw in greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide and produce oxygen through photosynthesis, Brindis said. "It's so easy to blame Brazil or blame the farmers, but they're making a living because we are buying their products," she said.
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