By Guilherme Wilbert for the Saker Blog

The imperialists want your riches South America!

The environment is one of the key pieces for the development of any nation, with the so-called “green economy” becoming a protagonist in recent years. And while this discourse is increasingly inflamed by its enthusiasts within NGOs (which generally do not enjoy the public prestige they did a few years ago), the lack of management with environmental protection is still seen.

Countries in Europe such as Portugal, France, and Italy are literally feeling the heat of this European summer, with the largest river in the third country running almost dry. Residents of Greece and the UK face fires reaching residential areas.

The Brazilian CNN reports that: “The European Forest Fire Information System put 19 European countries on “extreme danger” alerts for forest fires on Wednesday, in a span that stretches from Portugal and Spain in the southwest, to Albania and Turkey in the southeast.”

Some climate establishment analysts like to push the Global Warming discourse as one of the causes for events like forest fires and huge heat waves that were not felt years ago, but they usually sin in their reasoning because they disregard simple elements that explain what is happening without the Global Warming alarmism.

It so happens that forest fires in Europe now are happening because the European summer happens precisely in the driest time of the continent, which allows big fires to appear in some countries. And it is curious to note how some (of the few) forests in Europe that are on fire are not being considered for internationalization, as is being seen in the attempt to do the same in the Brazilian Amazon.

All the events we are watching now in Europe are being treated in a very different way than when the media wants to talk about the Brazilian Amazon (depending on who is in government), for example.

Jair Bolsonaro, the current president of Brazil, a person who occasionally appears in my texts, has become persona non grata for some WWF enthusiasts and other organizations because he tried to make it more flexible during his government for miners to use Brazilian lands for mining, which causes a political-judicial imbroglio in some areas because they are of indigenous demarcation.

While Lula, the country’s former president who is currently trying to return to the post, was seen as a “friend” of the green economy only because his discourse fit the media establishment of his time.

And this causes arguments such as the above-mentioned “internationalization” to start popping up in the air, as seen when Macron openly said that the “Amazon is not only Brazilian,” with some more committed analysts explaining that Macron was referring to the Amazon region of French Guiana, bordering Brazil, which also carries the biome.

But it would be too naïve to believe this explanation at this point of the championship.

It is worth pointing out that the Brazilian Amazon is a humid forest, which does not allow, even in the driest times in Brazilian territory, large-scale burning. What does happen in the Amazon are burnings that are usually criminal or provoked by regional citizens as an attempt to clear their land, be it for animal husbandry, planting something or the like. And these burnings are not seen as criminal because they are part of a kind of “tradition” to those who apply the tactic.

And also the argument to be used about “deforestation” of the Amazon usually carries sad numbers, which do not always appear from Brazilian institutes, it is worth pointing out, but also not the way they say, since much is done by the Brazilian Government until today to preserve the forest, which just within the state of Amazonas in the country, carries the size of Mongolia in territory (in almost perfect territorial measurement).

The so-called “Legal Amazon”, a term coined in Brazilian Federal Law (Federal Law 1.806/1953), is a region within the Brazilian state where the entities of the Brazilian federation that carry the biome are located.

At the level of territorial comparison, it would encompass entire countries such as the aforementioned Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Angola, Venezuela, Italy, New Zealand, Laos, and English Guyana.

So you can understand the magnitude of the Amazon.

The only thing is that, even if the evils they say were happening in the Amazon, they don’t have the right to even consider the idea of “internationalizing” the Amazon. This hurts Brazilian sovereignty.

How it would hurt the European if the opposite happened.

The Northern Empire’s divide and conquer tactic has been known for a long time and various ways are seen to provoke an ethnic regional imbroglio in Brazil (because indigenous people live there) and ordinary Brazilians. In what later, if successful, could become a country within the internationally administered Amazon, reducing the Brazilian territory by 60%.

For the anachronism: they did it in Sudan (with due proportions), with the country having separatist regions to the South of its territory today after a series of inter-ethnic and religious civil wars.

So the media, which carries the chance to inform the people directly of what is happening, ends up hiding some facts and pushing what is convenient for them.
As in the parallel drawn with the fires in Europe and in the Amazon, where in the Amazon case, with the arguments already known being treated in a much more delicate way and with an imperial (colonial) look than in the case of Europe, which doesn’t have a very large forest area, besides being losing the little it has to fire.

In the Brazilian case, it is always seen as an incapacity of administration and destruction and the solution would be to let foreigners take over this region (according to them). While with Europe, which also suffers basically the same problems alleged in the Amazon (including deforestation with European forest areas practically disappearing), it is not considered to hand over the administration of their lands to foreigners.

On the contrary, Europeans claim that they can and will use their lands as they wish, the most practical example I can think of being Germany’s recently, which entirely destroyed a 12 thousand year old forest region for charcoal extraction. There have been reactions from groups that fight for environmental preservation.

And, not to forget that there has never been any talk about turning forested or inhospitable regions (with a great variety of fauna and flora) into international regions or countries in Europe: in 1918, a presidential advisor to Woodrow Wilson, former American president, openly said that in place of the great Russia, five other countries could emerge: one in Siberia (precisely the inhospitable and forested region of Russia) and another four in the European part. Which obviously did not occur. And it never will.

Just as it will not happen in the Amazon. And just as it will not occur in the forests (which still exist) of Europe.

Each country is also sovereign to dictate its environmental policies, respecting the appropriate treaties and conventions, but always preserving the national interest allied to the green economy movement, so far beneficial to all.


Guilherme Wilbert is a Brazilian law graduate interested in geopolitics and international law.