The Brazilian Amazon Rainforest is Burning With No End In Sight

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Unprecedented fires are sweeping through Brazil's Amazon rainforest and causing record-setting deforestation in the area. Scientists all over the world are sounding the alarm and warning that this could have disastrous implications for the rainforest and even the global environment.

These are the worst fires seen in the region since the establishment of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the country's space research center. The center began tracking such statistics after it was opened in 2013, and the organization has said that this is the most serious fire situation that they have seen in the rainforest.

The center reported that there have been roughly 72,843 fires in Brazil this year. More than half of those fires have occurred in the Amazon region, which is an 80% increase when compared with last year's numbers.

These statistics are extremely disturbing, especially considering how important that amazon rainforest is to the global ecosystem. As the largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon has many times been called the lungs of the earth, because the region produces about 20% of the oxygen in the planet's atmosphere.

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Photos and videos released by the international media show the grim scene on the ground in the Amazon, with huge clouds of smoke rising up from the burning treeline.

Witnesses have reported that the smoke has already traveled all the way to Sao Paolo, which is more than 1,700 miles away. Residents of the city are facing pitch-black skies in the middle of the afternoon, and they aren't even anywhere near the fire.

According to the INPE, more than one and a half soccer fields of Amazon rainforest are being destroyed every single minute of every single day.

The state of the Amazon has been a contentious issue in Brazilian politics, especially since the recent election of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro has been especially hostile towards native tribes who have a claim to land in the Amazon, and he also seems to have a close and comfortable relationship with the corporations who are looking to exploit the Amazon for personal profit. Bolsonaro actually ran on the campaign platform of using the resources of the Amazon to restore the country's economy.

Since coming into office, Bolsonaro has significantly cut funding for the rainforest, while simultaneously rolling back regulations that protected the region from miners and loggers. The budget for Brazil's environmental enforcement agency was cut by $23 million on Bolsonaro's orders and their operations have been scaled back to the point of ineffectiveness shortly after the new president was sworn into office.

Earlier this year, the environmentalist group Greenpeace said that Bolsonaro and his government were a threat to the environment and warned that these policies would ultimately backfire, and would result in a "heavy cost" for the economy of Brazil.

Many experts and organizations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are concerned that the Amazon could soon be reaching a tipping point, in which the region will turn into a dry savannah and be unable to recover, according to CNN. If this happens, it could have disastrous results for the ecosystem.

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Mark Horowitz is a graduate of Brandeis University with a degree in political science. Horowitz could have had a job at one of the top media organizations in the United States, but when working as an intern, he found that the journalists in the newsroom were confined by the anxieties and sensibilities of their bosses. Horowitz loved journalism, but wanted more freedom to pursue more complex topics than you would find on the evening news. Around the same time, he began to notice that there was a growing number of independent journalists developing followings online by sharing their in-depth analysis of advanced or off-beat topics. It wasn't long before Horowitz quit his internship with a large New York network to begin publishing his own material online.