This article appears in the September 6, 2019 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
London’s Scam in the Amazon: Chicken Little Redux
[Print version of this article]
Sept. 1—Over the past ten days, French President Emmanuel Macron and other heads of government, joined by Pope Francis and a gaggle of sanctimonious Hollywood celebrities, have engaged in a hysterical, ideology-driven campaign purporting to save the Amazon from what they claim are unprecedented fires. International media are bolstering this campaign, citing “experts” loudly demanding emergency action before the world comes to an end. Lurid pictures of burning forest fires have been posted and reposted on social media, along with sensationalist headlines proclaiming that there is a record number of uncontrolled fires burning in Brazil’s Amazon, which are rapidly reaching the “tipping point” of destroying the largest rainforest on the planet.
Heard throughout was the argument that the Amazon is “the lungs of the planet” producing “20% of the world’s oxygen,” and that the Amazon is the regulator of planetary climate change by “capturing carbon.” A supranational authority must be imposed over the region in order to protect indigenous people and “pristine nature,” according to these hysterics.
In fact, there seems to be an intense competition underway among Macron, liberal media conglomerates such as CNN and the New York Times, and “green” activists Greta Thunberg and others of her ilk as to who can cram the greatest number of lies about the Amazon into a single sentence. As climate expert Michael Shellenberger documented in an Aug. 26 Forbes article, many of the posted photos claiming to show Amazon fires, weren’t even pictures of the Amazon, but fires in other countries, several from twenty or thirty years ago!
These deliberate lies are all concocted with only one purpose—to justify the elimination of national sovereignty, to usher in the British Empire’s policy of Green Malthusianism and unleash a modern eco-fascist form of medieval flagellants among hysterical youth. Witness the deployment of the London-spawned Extinction Rebellion and the affiliated FridaysForFuture movement of brainwashed youth who have protested at Brazilian embassies and consulates around the globe—several of these were labeled “die-ins”—not only to blame the Brazilian government for destroying the Amazon, but to “grieve” for what these young people described as the destruction of the planet and their hopes for their future. This is a real death cult designed to instill pessimism and depression in vulnerable youth.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!
Let us start with the facts, and then turn to the geopolitical policies behind London’s current assault, and end with a discussion of the actual physical economy and science involved in the Amazon matter, including measures that should be taken.
First, the net contribution to the world’s oxygen from the Amazon is effectively zero. EIR published material on this decades ago. Today, even some leading environmentalists are publicizing this scientific reality, out of explicit fear that the backlash against the “lungs” lie could sink the bigger “man-made climate change” lie they propagate.
A case in point: Yadvinder Malh, founding director of Oxford University’s Centre for Tropical Forests, on Aug. 24 posted an entry on his blog debunking the “lungs” story, as follows:
The Amazon rainforest accounts for about 16% of the oxygen produced by land-based photosynthesis globally, he details. But when you add in the photosynthesis by phytoplankton in the oceans, which produce almost five times as much oxygen as the Amazon, the Amazon’s share of global oxygen drops to 9%.
Furthermore, at night, plants consume over half of the oxygen they produce during the day, through respiration. The remaining oxygen is consumed mainly by microbes breaking down dead leaves and wood (“heterotrophic respiration”). Thus, Malh explains:
The net contribution of the Amazon ecosystem (not just the plants alone) to the world’s oxygen is effectively zero [which] is pretty much true of any ecosystem on Earth, at least on the timescales that are relevant to humans (less than millions of years).
Second: It is said that there are catastrophically more fires in Brazil’s Amazon this year. But NASA’s Earth Observatory reported on Aug. 22:
As of Aug. 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years. . . . Though activity appears to be above average in the [Brazilian] states of Amazonas and Rondonia, it has so far appeared below average in Mato Grosso and Para.
In fact, all estimates of fires since 2016 are “preliminary, and should be interpreted with caution,” NASA warned, because fire impact involves more than their number, but also the type of fire, extent, and interactions with climate conditions. The year 2019 may prove the highest fire year since 2012, and the fires may be more intense “than previous years, measured in terms of fire radiative power,” NASA wrote, but it is not the never-before-seen “catastrophe” proclaimed.
Neither is the Amazon forest burning down. Daniel Nepstad, who was the lead author for the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told Forbes contributor Shellenberger that most of the fires that are burning in the Amazon region are in the dry scrub and tree areas that border the forest. Amazon forest fires are not detected by satellite because they are hidden by the tree canopy, Nepstad explains, reporting:
We don’t know if there are any more forest fires this year than in past years, which tells me there probably isn’t. I’ve been working on studying those fires for 25 years and our [on-the-ground] networks are tracking this.
But perhaps the biggest lie of all, because it is the carrier of the deadly British lie that man is an innately destructive force at war with his environment, is the fairy tale about the Amazon being “pristine nature,” which man has come along and destroyed. The same liars claim that the “lifestyle” of the small groups of miserably poor people living as primitive hunters and gatherers, a lifestyle appropriate to the Amazon, has been destroyed.
A Developed Civilization Once Inhabited the Amazon
The truth is quite different. The rich soil, organized distribution of trees, and great mounds of pottery shards hidden under now tree-covered, man-made earthen structures rather demonstrate that the Amazon is in reality a gigantic “orchard,” shaped by earlier, more-developed civilizations that had improved the forest they once inhabited.
Over a quarter of a century ago, an article published in the Jan. 22, 1993 issue of EIR, “Myths Surrounding the Amazon Region,” reported:
One myth that was recently demolished, concerned the cultural levels of the populations that occupied the prehistoric forest. According to an archeological view backed by environmental determinists, the forest could not have supported a technologically advanced population before the arrival of the Europeans. This line of thought held that cultural development in South America originated in the Andean region and that horticulture was introduced into the Amazon by invaders from the Andes who displaced the native hunting and gathering populations. Presumably the native populations could not evolve more complex societies because of the limitations of the forest’s resources—or so the argument goes.
But, since the nineteenth century, explorers had been coming across evidence that contradicts that. And, in 1987, American archeologist Anna Roosevelt of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, and her collaborators, presented nearly incontrovertible evidence that relatively advanced cultures arose in the Amazon region. During excavations in Taperina, near Santarem, the archeological team discovered evidence of human settlements that date variously from 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. These findings, which included pottery fragments, are the oldest indication of civilization on the American continent.
According to Roosevelt, the Amazonic floodplain must have constituted one of the most densely populated regions during the pre-history of the Americas, given the heaps of shell middens and earthworks extending for tens of square kilometers that are commonly found all along the lower Amazon River. This discovery, she says, proves that the Amazon Basin supported populations that were much more numerous and technologically advanced than the remnants found when the Europeans arrived.
Closely related is London’s Worldwide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) promotion of the “noble savage” claptrap, arguing that the impoverished and backward “way of life” of indigenous populations living in the Amazon must be protected. The WWF and affiliated environmental NGOs have used this as a justification to impose nature reserves in which the only thing “preserved” is backwardness. The creation of the Yanomami Indian reserve in 1991 had been a pet project of the WWF and its president, the Queen’s Consort Prince Philip, since the early 1960s. Its creation had nothing to do with protecting the Yanomami, but rather everything to do with preventing development of the region’s plentiful resources and the building of infrastructure projects required for economic advancement.
In a December 25, 1992 interview with EIR, Sen. Gilberto Mestrinho, previously the governor of Amazonas state, eloquently counterposed the racist and anti-human frauds of “indigenism” so long defended by the British Crown, with a Christian, human view of man, whose “capacity for creation is fantastic”:
These issues are raised periodically by people who don’t even know what Indians are, don’t consult them, and defend their alleged rights when the Indians don’t even want them. . . . The Indians seek integration; they don’t want to maintain their pseudo-culture . . . they want to improve their quality of life.
As for ecology, Mestrinho asserted:
This is a fascist, anti-Christian sentiment, because the human being is more important than nature. The most important thing in nature is man; he is the beginning and the end of everything, and all of society’s actions are geared toward benefitting man; he is superior to everything, and in fact, only he is capable of protecting the other animals, the forests, and not the other way around.
British Geopolitics Butts In
French President Emmanuel Macron tried to commandeer the agenda of the Aug. 24-25 G-7 summit, insisting that Amazon fires were the most pressing issue facing the planet. On the eve of that summit, on Aug. 22, he tweeted:
Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest—the lungs which produce 20% of our planet’s oxygen—is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G-7, let’s discuss this emergency first order in two days!
While Macron grandstanded with his offer for the G-7 to give Brazil a trivial $20 million for “Amazon reforestation,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chimed in, demanding the world declare an “international eco-emergency,” and that it de facto put the Brazilian government in receivership to supranational institutions.
Pope Francis’ involvement is particularly evil. He has convened the “Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon,” to be held in Rome Oct. 6-27, providing a religious “moral” veneer for an international eco-fascist drive. The preparatory document for the synod, entitled “Amazonia: New Pathways for the Church and for an Integral Ecology,” includes several scare stories about the Amazon’s ecology. The document states at one point that “from an environmental point of view, the Amazon is a lung of the planet and one of the sites of greatest biodiversity in the world.”
What this all boils down to is the British imperial doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect,” which Western powers have used for two decades as a pretext for intervening in several nations to effect “regime change” operations. The Amazon case is no different, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, along with key national institutions such as the armed forces, understands this.
Brazil Asserts National Sovereignty
The Brazilian President responded angrily to the overt threat of foreign intervention, and in a short address to the nation Aug. 23 announced the deployment of 43,000 troops to help combat the fires.
Fires occur every year during the hot, dry and high-wind season in the Amazon, and they are worse in warmer, drier years such as this one, Bolsonaro pointed out. He further stated that there are more than 20 million Brazilians who live in that area, who have been waiting for years to develop, along with the rest of the country. Brazil, he emphasized, is open to dialogue, and will do more to combat fires, but “we are responsible for protecting the Amazon.”
Gen. Augusto Heleno, head of Bolsonaro’s Security Cabinet, stated that “the Brazilian Amazon is a patrimony of our people, who will know how to protect it from the threats of those who harm the forest with illegal actions and will react against those who intend to violate our sovereignty.” Other military statements reflected the same sentiment.
In offering his measly $20 million to Brazil, Macron arrogantly repeated the fraudulent premise that the Amazon forest is a “subject for the whole planet,” because it is “the lung of the planet” and we cannot “allow you to destroy everything.” Brazil’s response was unequivocal: “We refuse [the aid] because we see interference. . . . The G7 help was decided without Brazil,” the country’s Ambassador to France, Fernando Serra, told French television network BFM TV on Aug. 27. The previous evening, President Bolsonaro had tweeted again that Brazil rejects such plans “to save the Amazon, as though we were a colony or no-man’s-land.”
Brazil’s response is consistent with what it has affirmed historically. Led by the British monarchy, the City of London and its Wall Street appendages have for decades proffered numerous schemes by which to establish supranational control over the Amazon under the pretexts of “saving the environment” and “saving indigenous peoples” from economic development.
Blocking all such attempts has been an official tenet of Brazilian national military doctrine since 1990. That year, the Armed Forces’ Superior War College published a document titled 1990-2000: The Vital Decade, which outlined a ten-year national development perspective, in which it warns that the Amazon “continues to be a target of international avarice.” International ecological movements are specified in some detail as one of the “several layers of sheepskin [worn] to hide its wolfish intentions.” The Brazilian military’s elaboration of that doctrine was influenced at the time by Lyndon LaRouche’s EIR and its exposés of the British Crown’s WWF and related environmentalist movements.
For example, EIR was instrumental in exposing the British hand behind the creation of the “Guyana Shield Initiative,” related to the region known as the Guyana Shield. This area, which incorporates current-day Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and a portion of the Brazilian state of Roraima, has historically been the geopolitical target of the Anglo-French-Dutch oligarchy, as the preferred entry-point for establishing a foothold in the Amazon.
In October of 1999, EIR’s representatives in Brazil publicly exposed the role of the WWF, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and several other national and international environmental NGOs in establishing the “Guyana Shield Initiative,” by which they succeeded in setting aside 177,000 hectares of “conservation land” in Roraima, as either Indian reserves or conservation areas. This was done for the sole purpose of stopping any rational development of the state, and preventing any activity aimed at civilizing these large territories.
Brazil Not the Only Geopolitical Target
Nor is Brazil the only target. Amnesty International and unnamed groups claiming to represent “Amazonian indigenous peoples” issued an open letter on Aug. 22 calling on the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to take action against Bolsonaro and Bolivian President Evo Morales for committing “genocide” against indigenous populations. Paraguay was similarly targeted.
In response, Morales on Aug. 23 called for an urgent foreign ministers’ meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OCTA), known informally as the Amazon Pact. This includes the eight countries in the Amazon region (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela). The call was an appropriate response to the imperial assault on the region, to formulate a plan to address the Amazon fires from the standpoint of “defending our sovereignty and natural wealth,” as Bolsonaro put it. But his and most other member nations’ insistence that “undemocratic” Venezuela be excluded from such a meeting is a mistake; it plays into British “left-right” geopolitical games dividing the continent along ideological lines, which Morales had warned against. A summit of the Amazon Pact is now planned for Sept. 6 in the Colombian city of Leticia on the Brazilian border.
Amazon Basin: Too Much Development,
or Too Little?
There is a real problem with the way in which agriculture and clearing are currently done in the Amazon basin. This is a result of too little technology and development, not too much. What should be done is to transform the Cerrado region of south-central Brazil and similar areas into breadbaskets of modern agriculture. The Cerrado is Brazil’s great national treasure—a well-watered grassland of 205 million hectares or 24% of Brazil’s total land area of 846 million hectares.
This huge physiographic region—less well known than the Amazon rainforest—is a world-class opportunity, given its “man-made natural” resource potentials, for population settlement, agriculture and industry. Its soils, in their native condition, are geologically very old and poor; but with the right fertilizer and lime applications, the agro-climatic potential is vast. The temperature regime for much of the Cerrado will permit two, and sometimes three crops a year.
It is a priority development area of the hemisphere, which requires first-rate infrastructure development (waterways, rail, urbanization, health and sanitation infrastructure, and more). New infrastructure should include the building of a trans-continental railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific, to facilitate both cargo and passenger transport and boost trade, including to Asia.
For years, however, the Cerrado has been dominated by large multinational cartels such as Cargill, Bunge, and Archer Daniels Midland, and the global financial institutions they partner with, whose main focus is twofold: monoculture production, such as soybeans or livestock processing, and land grabs to exploit and export raw materials or other resources, to keep the global speculation bubble afloat. Less than half of the soy crop goes for domestic consumption, for example.
Solution: Science and Classical Culture
As Lyndon LaRouche wrote in his Sept. 11, 1987 EIR article, “Design of Cities: in the Age of Mars Colonization”:
We know that the maintenance of highly productive biomass, in the forms of crops, pasturage, water management, and well-managed woodlands, is essential to maintaining the general environment. The best way in which to accomplish this, is to entrust this work to entrepreneurial farmers, continue this maintenance of cultivated farm, pasture, and forest land as part of the necessary cost of agricultural production as a whole.
The more fundamental issue to be addressed is the actual science of biogeochemistry as discussed by the great Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, whose concept of the Noösphere emphasizes the central role of science and human creativity. There are many fundamental issues of science posed by the role of the Amazon River and Basin in the entire biosphere, and possibly also in weather formation. These must be approached, however, from the standpoint, not of the hysterical pseudo-science of “climate change” peddled by today’s green Malthusians, but by pursuing hypotheses such as those of Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, who studies climate change as a function of variations in galactic cosmic ray flux, with changes in solar activity being the controlling factor over decade- and century-long timescales.
Given the centrality of space science, one immediate objective for the Amazon region would be to develop Brazil’s Alcântara Launch Center located on the northern Atlantic coast near the Equator, as well as the European Space Agency’s Kourou Space Center in French Guiana, as centers of hemispheric space science, with the potential of participating in a Four Powers Moon-Mars mission.
As in the period of the Black Death, the solution to great crises facing mankind is not mass self-flagellation and hedonistic debauchery (two sides of the same coin), but rather engagement in science and classical culture as the Renaissance brought to 14th and 15th Century Europe.
