About a month ago, Brazil's Ministry of Environment and Climate Change released their annual figures on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, showing that between August 2023 and July 2024, the area under deforestation alerts dropped by over 45%. This is the largest proportional drop ever recorded for a 12 month period, down to the lowest level since 2016.
If you compare these figures to the last full year under Bolsonaro, it means that the actions of Brazil's environmentalists, led from the front by Lula, have saved something like 6,000 km² of the Amazon, an area roughly equivalent to the entire Everglades National Park in Florida.
It hasn't been easy. The power of the agricultural lobby runs deep in Brazil, there's been heavy political opposition, internal strikes, cat and mouse games with illegal miners, and to make matters even harder, the worst fire season in the Amazon in 20 years. Nevertheless, it's an important story of progress happening in a place that matters more than almost anywhere else for the future of our planet.
If you go searching for stories about deforestation in the Amazon however, this is not what you will find. Instead, you will see wall to wall coverage about this year's record fires, a consequence of the most intense and widespread drought in Brazil's history. Rainforests are not supposed to burn. We are seeing the very real effects of climate change in real time, and it's scary.
Here's the question: what kind of story should the media be telling the world about what's happening in the Amazon right now? The 'race against time' story, which clearly describes the scale of the challenge, but also showcases progress, and explains what is being done about it? Or the 'we're all doomed' story, which uses apocalyptic language, lists one problem after the other, and finishes with a quote from a political scientist claiming we've reached 'the point of no return'?
One of these stories is disaster porn, and it's the story the whole world is hearing about the Amazon right now.
The other story is solutions journalism, and you'll be lucky if you can track it down.
