The 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires season saw a year-to-year surge in fires occurring in the Amazon rainforest and Amazon biome within Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru during that year’s Amazonian tropical dry season.
Fires normally occur around the dry season as slash-and-burn methods are used to clear the forest to make way for agriculture, livestock, logging, and mining, leading to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.
Such activity is generally illegal within these nations, but enforcement of environmental protection can be lax.
The increased rates of fire counts in 2019 led to international concern about the fate of the Amazon rainforest, which is the world’s largest carbon dioxide sink and plays a significant role in mitigating Global Warming.
The facts
As of August 29, 2019, INPE reported more than 80,000 fires across all of Brazil, a 77% year-to-year increase for the same tracking period, with more than 40,000 in the Brazil's Legal Amazon
About 60 percent of the Amazon can be found within Brazil’s borders, which gives the nation a massive amount of influence over the region
Crimson-bellied parakeets are one of 1,500 bird species found in the Amazon rainforest. As fires rage at an unprecedented scale, the implications for wildlife could be severe.
Jair Bolsonaro has made things a lot worse by weakening the environment agency, attacking conservation NGOs and promoting the opening of the Amazon to mining, farming and logging
Milton’s titi, a monkey discovered in 2011, has only ever been documented in a part of Brazil in the southern Amazon that’s currently beset by fire
We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb not only the carbon dioxide that we exhale, but also the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit.
These aren’t like the wildfires that have hit California and Siberia. In the Amazon, wildfires are fairly rare because it is a rainforest, which means it is damp most of the time and acts as a giant firebreak across much of South America. The Amazon fires are nearly all man-made.
In July 2019 73 sq km of the Amazon rainforest was cleared every day. For scale, that is an area of London that stretches from Hyde Park to Tower Bridge
Brazil has had more than 72,000 fire outbreaks so far this year, an 84% increase on the same period in 2018
I CARE. I DRAW. I SUPPORT.
HERE IS HOW YOU CAN
£175 is what Tommy’s awesome featured print will cost you but above all what will be given to his chosen charity – Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Here is what Tommy has to say about it all –
“I did not set out to paint about the Amazon fires and certainly did not choose it as a topic, I started painting and it materialised into the painting you see.
I had been watching news reports on the fires for a few days before. When I start painting my sub-conscience takes over and I try not to think to much about what I am including. When I stepped back and looked at what was on the canvas I can piece together the narrative.
When I looked at what I had painted and thought about my influences over the past few weeks it was clear what the influence was.
I am keen on environmental issues supporting Greenpeace & Sea Sheperd and the preservation of our planet, specifically the ocean. The forest fires relate back to a capitalist way of modern life and are a sad reminder that greed and corruption are so present. ”
Tommy
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