I have covered the Amazon as a journalist for almost 25 years. It started in 1998, with a trip along the Trans-Amazonian Highway. In 2017, I moved to the city of Altamira in Pará, northern Brazil; it is the centre of the deforestation, forest fires and social devastation caused by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. I moved here because I no longer wanted to be just a “special correspondent to the Amazon”, but so I could describe what was happening to the largest tropical forest on the planet from the inside. Despite this long experience, 2022 was the first year in which I watched the forest burn from the window of my home. I didn’t need to go to the fire, as journalists normally do. The fire had come to me.
The photo I’ve chosen, taken by my husband, is from the night of 27 August. Later, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research revealed that it was the worst August for fires in the Amazon since 2010. Fires and deforestation rose considerably under Jair Bolsonaro who, this year, was narrowly defeated in the presidential election by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, as he is better known.
Watching the forest burn from my window is, for me, like some kind of anti-metaphor. When Greta Thunberg said: “Our house is on fire!”, in the Amazon the image is literal. It already feels like a cliche to say we don’t need to read scientific reports to understand the climate crisis, we just have to open our windows. International agencies list Brazil among the countries with the highest number of murders of environmental defenders, or of people killed in “conflicts” over land. For me, it is more than a statistic. I know people who have died, I have suffered with their families. And I reject the word “conflict”. “Massacre” would be more appropriate.
The lack of difference between the metaphor and the literal demonstrates the need for an urgency that has unfortunately been lacking at climate summits and other global events. This is why calls for the UN’s Cop summit to be held in the Amazon, on the forest floor, make complete sense. It is vital that negotiations advance at the speed the climate catastrophe demands. Knowing – from books, newspapers or scientific reports – is not the same as living. I know that, on a planet in a state of climate collapse, the real centres of the world are where life is found – not where the markets are.
In the global climate negotiations, however, the markets still speak louder than the people who remain among nature. If we have any respect for future generations, it is time for the markets to be silenced and for nature to be heard. We will not escape the abyss that “we have dug with our own feet” (as the Brazilian singer Cartola put it) with the same thinking that has brought us to that abyss. It is obvious, but the obvious has so far been ignored.
What my image here doesn’t communicate on its own is the pain. The forest is not an object and it is not only the trees that burn. The forest is a composition of living beings that exist in a constant state of exchange, in noisy conversation. Every time a tree dies, a world of non-human people burn along with her. I watched that fire and knew that no one would do anything for those who at that moment were suffering excruciating pain before their deaths. And the day after, there was silence. Silence, because this is the sound of the forest in death. This strengthens my conviction that in the 21st century, democracy will only make sense if it also includes the non-human species, from termites to primates, from fungi to corals.
Capitalism, invented as we know and understand it in the country of the Guardian, has corroded the survival instinct of most of humanity. We must recover it. If, in the coming year, urgency is not met with urgency, you can be sure that my photo of 2022 will be yours one day soon.
Eliane Brum is one of the creators of the trilingual news platform Sumaúma and the author of Banzeiro Òkòtó: the Amazon as the Centre of the World, which is published in the UK in 2023. This article was translated by James Young