Bolsonaro: the new Trump

We all worried when we heard Trump got elected, with his disregard of  any environmental concerns and his love of big money (these, of course, go together like beans on toast). But unfortunately, and just as some of us feared, the politics of the whole world took a lurch to the right, nowhere better personified than in Brazil, with the election of arch-populist Bolsonaro, who early on in his rule said he would be happy to pave over the Amazon if that would aid ‘progress’.

We thought he was joking, but unfortunately for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, he wasn’t. He has allowed legal logging and development of this unique and precious place to proceed apace, and turned a blind eye to the even more pernicious practices of illegal mining projects. In their frantic greed for gold, these people are pouring toxins such as mercury into the watercourses, an agent which is poisonous to all forms of life. Mercury is part of the process of the extraction of gold, and gold fever has gripped Brazil. Who cares, as long as a profit is made? Not the mine owners certainly, and not Senor Bolsonaro either.

I was thinking yesterday that normally we like to think of the world moving gradually forward to a better, more enlightened place. But recent evidence, in Brazil and in a Trump administration that refuses to admit the reality of climate change and human involvement in it, we are actually moving backwards into a new dark age. Don’t say I didn’t warn you...