Today the news of the Amazon fire is the title of almost every newspaper in the world, in the most varied languages. In addition, it is a trend topic with more than 1.5 million tweets combined between the three variants of the theme on Twitter.

The lung of the planet has been burning for 16 days and has not yet been controlled. Yesterday the city of Sao Paulo was obscured by smoke at 3:00 in the afternoon, despite being located 3,000 km from the fire. But the influence of the health or disease of the Amazon reaches much greater distances.

I have been writing and alerting for ten years what could happen with the largest rainforest in the world. Unfortunately, the carbon copy of what happened in Borneo between 1970 and 2000 is happening in the Amazon today. It seems that Homo sapiens does not learn from the experience of others or listen to science.

What is the cause of these fires?

The main cause is the felling of trees to supply the timber industry. Sometime after an area is deforested, it is the cleaning of roots and weeds that have remained, since the unoccupied land is generally used for three purposes: sowing of oil palm, soybeans and grass for raising cattle.

The most used method for these cleanings is the so-called “controlled fires”, but that often get out of control, with devastating effects, as happened so many times in Borneo and perhaps also the source of the current fire of our beloved Amazon.

In the years of the great deforestation of the former rainforest of Borneo, NASA came to photograph up to 2000 focuses of these “controlled” fires in a single day.

SGK-PLANET is having since the dawn of this day 21-8-2019 record number of visits. The public and search engines have recognized us for years as good providers of information on environmental issues. Look for “Amazon lung of the world” and you can check it out.

My last article, written on March 22: “Ask in the Forest Day: Who is the owner of the Amazon Rainforest?” Comes as a ring to the finger for what is being reviewed today. But the true radiography of our Great Rainforest, with capital letters, is in the Climate Magazine “All about Amazon Rainforest”, made with many images, videos, infographics, maps, statistics, causes and consequences and many other information and explanations.

There you will find that the Amazon is about 7 million km2, it is 12 times the size of Spain, it has 80,000 kinds of trees, 140,000 species of plants, 20% of the world’s species, the longest and largest river in the world, with a volume that contains between 15 to 20% of the world’s fresh water and a delta that is 240 km wide.

What is happening today in the rainforest, accompanied by the media effect, should serve to make humanity aware of what is at stake. In the first place, we who live in South America are the ones who must defend the Amazon and press for its destruction to cease. There are nine countries that share the Amazon. Their governments, instead of shearing their portion, must become their rangers. It’s your obligation.

Sandor Alejandro Gerendas-Kiss