The Amazon rainforest is one of the largest,
if not the largest in the world.
Rainforests are critically important
for the global climate in many ways.
It regulates temperature and weather cycles
in the Americas, and it actually carries rain
to much of the continent,
which is a bread basket for the world.
They have what are called flying rivers above the jungle.
These bands of moisture that really affect
and regulate weather patterns
far from the Amazon,
and even more critical now with climate change,
the destruction of the Amazon,
which has been accumulating over decades
is accelerating almost at the point of no return.
Scientists are warning that we're getting closer
and closer to a tipping point,
that we may even be there already.
So if we pass that tipping point,
we start seeing the rainforest turning into a savanna,
where you don't have the trees that are able to
pull all that pollution out of the air.
You don't have the ecosystem that's producing the rainfall
that feeds the continent.
Brazil's government says it's working to stop deforestation,
but behind the scenes,
it's actively engaged in a campaign
to prioritize and develop the Amazon.
And it's really being fueled and encouraged
by a government that really believes that the Amazon
is there to be developed, to be privatized,
to be exploited for its natural riches.
Unless we find a way to reduce
the sort of voracious demand in the world
for the commodities that come out of the Amazon,
it's really hard to see how
this cycle of destruction will really ever end.
And eventually, it's gonna be too late.
If you want to know why the Amazon is being destroyed,
it's not because people just want to destroy it.
It's because they're doing it
for the things that we're consuming far, far away.
You have to understand it from the perspective
of certain forces in Brazil,
especially the forces behind ranching and logging.
You really just need to go to your local Home Depot
and look at the hardwoods that are being sold there,
many of which come from Brazil
and many of which come from the Amazon,
and those are going on your living room floor.
Or think about it the next time you have a barbecue
and you're enjoying a really nice steak or you buy a burger.
Well, the beef that you're eating
is part of this global beef system
that starts in the Amazon.
As much as the messaging is that they don't want
people in the Amazon to be burning the Amazon,
what the world is really telling these people
is that we will pay you to burn the Amazon,
because we will buy everything that you're selling us.
The Amazon rainforest, it's lost in the past 40 years,
an area the size of California.
There was progress that was being made
in slowing those burns.
That's changed.
The burns are accelerating this year.
They were at an 11 year high last year.
So why isn't anyone being held accountable?
This was a story that was a year in the making.
And the more I started digging,
it became obvious that everyone in the Amazon region
is seeking a piece of land
and grabbing a piece of public land.
And the government is not only looking the other way,
but in many ways, they're actually encouraging it.
After spending some time on the ground
and talking to dozens, dozens and dozens of ranchers
of enforcers, of park rangers,
of people within Bolsonaro's inner circle,
it becomes clear that everything pushes
these ranchers and these farmers
towards the decisions that they make.
Not only do we have the insatiable demand for commodities,
but it's rooted in Brazil's culture,
and it's rooted in Brazil's history.
In the 70s and 80s, the Brazilian policy
was very much to encourage industrialized farmers
and manufacturers into the Amazon,
because they wanted to develop the Amazon
as Brazil's ticket to first world status.
This was during the Brazilian miracle,
years of extremely high economic growth
when the government was calling people to the Amazon.
A lot of poor Brazilians had been working this land
for decades, and yet they had no claim to this land,
and so the policy shifted from encouraging
the big farmers and favoring the big guy
into let's help the little guy.
And it was one of the biggest social welfare giveaways
of all time, where they started handing out
government land in the Amazon to small farmers,
to poor Brazilians.
You had TV ads, you had radio ads,
you had ads in magazines that drove people to the Amazon
and encouraged millions of people
to move from the coastal cities into the Amazon
and conquer what they were calling the green hell.
And they said it was
a land without men for men without land.
That's what drove this massive migration of people
to the Amazon,
to stake their claim in the Amazon,
to sort of be homesteaders,
to clear a piece of land
and make something of it and contribute
to this rapaciously growing economy of Brazil.
That message several decades later still persists.
It's very much in the Brazilian culture
that in order to prosper, you need to have land.
There's almost a roadmap to how deforestation happens.
It's a very predictable cycle.
In the Amazon, you have a mess of a land management system,
and so there's a lot of public land
that hasn't been designated for a specific purpose.
Typically poor Brazilians will go in,
they're the foot soldiers of deforestation in a lot of ways.
They'll claim this land, they'll band together
and really create these societies.
The hardwoods are always the first to go.
And so the easiest way to sort of survive
is to get cattle and sell it to
the internal market or the global market.
They don't last too long on the land,
'cause it's very difficult to make a living in the end.
And so a lot of these families
are pushed off their land eventually
or bought out of their land.
And it's at that point that the big ranchers
and the big farmers come in
and they start gathering this land
and accumulating land empires,
and they're able to say we didn't clear the land.
We weren't the ones who burned it down.
They build their empires and they start producing
soy beans, coffee, cacao.
In Brazil, these are not small farmer products.
They require irrigation and investment,
and they require a lot of money.
It's typically the big farmers who get into this.
The Bolsonaro administration didn't invent the practice
of turning a blind eye as the Amazon is raided
and granting amnesty afterwards.
However, the government through its actions
is accelerating those land grabs like never before.
They have stripped the regulating agencies
of their manpower,
the budgets have been cut.
The people in charge of land management agencies
are ranchers and farmers who have a direct stake
in making sure that the system keeps running.
And possibly most damaging is that the government
wants to amnesty more recent invasions
and bigger invasions than ever before.
Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade.
President Biden of the United States, again,
to try to sort of pressure Brazil
into doing something to reign in
the destruction of the Amazon,
President Biden invited President Bolsonaro
to a climate summit that was held in 2021.
President Bolsonaro.
He was defiant.
What he pointed to was this idea of an Amazonian paradox.
What he meant by that was that Brazil's rainforest
is one of the greatest resources in the world,
and yet 24 million people who live
around the Amazon region, they're poor.
So he basically said if the United States
or any other richer nation in the world
wants Brazil to stop deforestation,
they gotta pay for it.
Just getting to the Amazon is a hike.
I live in San Paulo.
Just flying there is a really long journey.
There's no cell service, the roads are terrible.
And so anywhere you go is a journey.
We visit one town where this had happened
approximately 20 years ago called Uniao Bandeirantes.
And this is a town that really didn't exist
except in the last 20 years.
It was pure rain forest.
And now it's almost 2,000 families
ended up settling there.
Everywhere you look, you see coffee plantations
and cattle ranches,
and you have thousands and thousands of farmers
who have been living on this land
that they don't have title to.
One of the most surprising aspects
of the journey that we took was that
it's really hard to find clear villains there.
I think from the outside,
you look at the Amazon and you think,
well, you know, monsters
that are tearing down this beautiful rainforest.
When you get there and you start talking to these people,
you realize that some of the decisions they've made
are decisions that other people would have made
if they were in those shoes.
One of the farmers that we spent some time with
is a man named Baiano.
A few decades ago, he traded a motorcycle
for a plot of land.
And 20 years later, he has built a mini empire.
He was a small farmer with 200 hectares or so,
and he'd made the transition from cattle to coffee.
It was something he was very proud of.
One of the arguments that you hear from environmentalists
and from people looking abroad
is that there should be sustainable ways
to live in harmony with the forest.
There's no market for the products that you make
when you are producing from the forest.
Another man who we met was named Everaldo Pandolfi.
He was one of the original settlers
of Uniao Bandeirantes.
He arrived in around 2000 with a few of his brothers,
and it was pure rainforest when they arrived.
Pandolfi recognizes that
to make a living on the land, you have to clear the land.
That's just the way it is.
There's no other way to do it in his view.
He went for the hardwoods first,
because that brings in the fast cash.
He torched the scrub to clean it up,
and then he put cattle on the land.
That's what was repeated
over and over again in this particular town,
and it's been repeated across the Amazon,
and it's really a driving force behind
the deforestation that we're seeing now.
On the other end of this story,
you have the industrialized ranchers and farmers.
Some of these guys have amassed land empires
in the tens of thousands of hectares,
which is possible only if
you were awarded it by the dictatorship,
you bought it up from small farmers
or they're land grabs themselves.
One of the rancher we met, a very successful rancher,
Adelio Barofaldi.
His history is like the history of so many people
that have settled in the Amazon.
He migrated to the Amazon from another part of Brazil
in search of prosperity that he couldn't find at home.
Barofaldi is a staunch supporter of Bolsonaro
as are most of the big ranchers and farmers in the state
and throughout the Amazon.
These are the guys that Bolsonaro says
can solve the problem of deforestation.
And so as Bolsonaro is seeking to amnesty
a lot of these land grabs,
the biggest change that he's proposing
is allowing these big farmers
who have deforested more recently
to apply for official title to this Amazon land.
Over the years, Adelio Barofaldi
has amassed over 40,000 hectares of land,
and he's strived to actually follow the law in Brazil.
He built his cattle ranching empire
on a system that is designed to be gamed in a way.
And he has actually tried, in his view,
is to really follow the rules in Brazil
that do allow you to go in and develop a cattle ranch.
He actually replanted a lot of the preserve
that he's required to have under federal law.
These are the guys that'll say
that are the biggest advocates for privatizing the Amazon,
because they say they have the resources
to protect the Amazon.
And what you're seeing now is the land invasion
sort of flipping on its head
in that you have large property owners
who are still fighting for that land
because they don't actually own title
to a lot of this stuff.
So they're still fighting for this land by smaller farmers
who are trying to break into their reserves
and cut down their trees.
Over the years, the public undesignated land
has pretty much been snapped up.
What's left in the Amazon are protected parks
and indigenous territories.
And so those are the lands that are now under attack.
There are people that are trying to fight
this sort of wave of destruction as best they can.
And one of them is a park ranger.
We met a man named Carlos Rangel.
He's a 72-year-old park ranger.
He's ready to retire.
He's been fighting this fight for 20 years
and he will plain say he's exhausted.
He dreams of retiring
to write the great Brazilian novel,
but he's afraid to leave his job
because he's afraid that his replacement
won't have the same sort of drive
to protect the land.
He oversees a park that is twice the size of Rhode Island,
and he does it with a staff of just a few people.
It's basically been a long campaign to fight back,
to keep back people who want to go into his park
and turn it into cattle ranches.
He goes out into the woods with his rangers
and he's hacking his way through the woods
with the machetes.
It's incredibly difficult work,
because the forest, you go 10 feet
and you can't see the person anymore.
It's easy for them to escape.
Sometimes, it'll take 12 hours to get 20 kilometers.
We weren't able to make those journeys
because it was just so deep into the forest
that they were happening.
Brazil does need to resolve it's land titling system.
It's a system that is so dysfunctional,
that in many cases, you don't know who the real owner is.
A lot of people are making a lot of money
from the dysfunctional land management system
that's in place.
There's an incentive to keep that going,
to not fix this broken system,
because otherwise Brazil would run out of space
to feed the world's appetite for commodities.
It's a really complicated and nuanced phenomenon.
It's just not gonna be solved unless you really recognize
the social, economic, political, and cultural forces
that are behind that drive destruction in the Amazon.