I hope you all like dogs as much as you say you do online, because they’re going to be one of the few animals we have left. Jair Bolsonaro’s election is a disaster - for the Amazon rainforest, and obviously, (or what should be obvious) us. Often referred to as the lungs of the planet, the Amazon is under threat by a guy nicknamed the ‘Trump of the Tropics’. His election, and the effect he will have on climate change, is the equivalent of going from smoking a 20 pack a day to a Shisha a day.
With just 12 years remaining to prevent catastrophic climate change and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, electing a guy who wants to privatise the rainforest, put a bloody pavement through it, mine the shit out of it, and log the habitats of one the most biodiverse areas on the planet- is quite possibly the worst thing we could have done. Brazil has pretty much voted for planetary suicide. And they’re happy about it. There has been overwhelming support for the far right authoritarian populist, but everybody seems to love voting for super villains lately, so while its terrifying, it is not surprising.
[pullquote]They have voted in a man who will set in motion the genocide of the natives of the Amazon[/pullquote]My issue is, don’t people want to live? Don’t people care? More importantly, have people not paid one ounce of attention in GSCE science? The rainforest is literally vital to our breathing; it’s the biggest source of trees we have that filter the carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere, and y’know, make it liveable. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wear one of those ugly air pollutions masks. And I also don’t want to live in a world where up to half of our plant and animal species face extinction, because of climate change caused by big corporations and evil men like Jair Bolsonaro, a man who isn’t just bad news for the planet we all live on, but the people of Brazil.
They have voted in a man who will set in motion the genocide of the natives of the Amazon, a man who has compared homosexuality to paedophilia, a man who notoriously said to a congresswoman in 2014 ‘I wouldn’t rape you because you’re not worthy of it’, one who openly says he wouldn’t pay a woman the same as a man on live television, one who wants to stop current motions to allow elective abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.
We seem to moving backwards, not forwards during one of the most tenuous times we have faced globally as a planet. A better world is possible; let’s just stop bloody voting for idiots who don’t believe in basic science.
