Editorial: Forest fires and double standards

Fires across the Brazilian Amazon have sparked an international outcry.

Our puny efforts to reduce the rate at which we New Zealanders contribute to the end of the world as we know it have been given a whole new context by the almost 75,000 fires that are reportedly eating into the Amazon Forest. The producer, we are told, of 20 per cent of the oxygen all life depends upon, and that absorbs 25 per cent of the carbon dioxide that is sequestered by all the remaining forests on the planet.

Banning plastic bags with handles and demanding that pastoral farmers reduce their animals' production of methane might well be worthy in terms of saving some species of marine life that are threatened by plastics in their environment, even if plastic shopping bags are such a tiny part of the problem as to be immeasurable, and reducing our minuscule contribution to the gases that are supposedly behind climate change, but these fires must persuade the most ardent planet-saver in this country that anything we do, or can do, is little more than symbolic.

Fires in the Amazon are nothing new. What's different this time is a new global awareness, that this year there seem to be more fires than usual, and they are doing more damage. And however one might view Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's response to international calls to put them out, the rest of the world can quite fairly be accused of demanding that Brazil do more to protect its natural environment than most other countries have done to protect theirs.

New Zealand is one of many countries that have denuded their natural landscape to make possible the pastoral farming that underpins their economies. Now, having destroyed their native forests, they demand that Brazil cease following suit.

The double standards can be quite breathtaking. Last year farmers in this country imported some 2.2 million tonnes of palm kernel extract, about one-third of the world's total production of the stuff, an industry that has long been decried as partly responsible for destroying South-East Asian rainforests, habitat to endangered orangutans and Bornean gibbons.

Rainforests there are being destroyed so more palm kernel can be produced, and we in New Zealand (and others, notably in Europe) keep buying it. Banning PKE in this country might well do more to save the planet than banning plastic bags ever will, although if we don't buy it someone else will. That is fairly compelling logic, and the major hurdle faced by those who are taking up arms against climate change — why should we make sacrifices when nothing is going to change?

Meanwhile, back in the Amazon, some 7000 square miles of forest has been burned so far this 'season,' and that figure is growing daily. And while the world pours scorn on the Brazilian government, which claims, not unreasonably one imagines, that it doesn't have the resources to put the fires out, no one seems to have so far offered to help.

When wild fires get out of hand in Australia or the United States we send crews to help fight them. Brazil seems to be fighting these fires, if in fact it is, alone.

The fires are not solely Brazil's responsibility though. Forty per cent of the forest is in Brazil, but it also extends into seven other countries. In all it's about two-thirds the size of the United States, and it's home to more than 30 million people. A new species of plant or animal, previously unknown, is reportedly discovered there every two days.

At the current rate of destruction it is being reduced by the size of one and a half soccer fields every minute.

According to the experts, 99 per cent of fires — which this year are described as the worst (only) since 2013 — are started by people, mainly farmers and 'ranchers,' who, like their counterparts all over the planet, are looking to increase their incomes.

Perhaps the solution would be for the rest of the world to cease threatening Brazil and start looking for means of providing livelihoods for those people without destroying the environment that, we are told, is crucial to the survival of all living organisms on Earth.

Perhaps rather than berating President Bolsonaro, the world should be looking for a long-term solution that will not only avert what many regard as an impending crisis of global proportions but will put an end to the practice of burning altogether. If the world can't do that, there might not be much point in doing anything at all.

Meanwhile we ponder whether fossil fuel-powered cars should be banned in this country, as Associate Transport Minister Julie-Ann Genter reportedly wants to do, how we should get our groceries home from Pak'nSave and whether we should stop eating meat. At least if we all stopped eating meat and drinking milk there would be no market here for PKE.

The scale of the challenge facing politicians, even here, can hardly be over-estimated. We live in a country where we expect food manufacturers to tell us whether their products are good for us or not, where people are increasingly expected to read food packaging labels that are of no interest, or incomprehensible, to many, when the harm sugary drinks do are still ignored, where the threat of foetal alcohol syndrome doesn't seem to discourage many pregnant women from drinking, where we continue to drive while grossly impaired by alcohol or drugs, and where we continue to murder babies, despite the promise of a gentler society when caning in schools was banned. Some of us recycle our waste assiduously, while 90 per cent of the plastic in the world's oceans gets there from a handful of rivers, most of them in Asia. We look to farmers to reduce bovine flatulence while coal-fired power stations and factories around the world spew more pollutants into the air in a day than we do in lifetime. We ban oil and gas exploration in this country, and import those commodities from overseas.

Very few of us, it seems, are prepared to allow the climate change emergency, if that's what it is, to affect our standard of living. We rely on others to do what must be done, and in terms of our contribution to global emissions, that's about all we can do. The best we can offer is to lead by example, and hope that others who make much greater contributions than we do notice, and are shamed into following suit.

If that's our best hope then we're probably stuffed. Unless the changes we are seeing in our climate are a natural phenomenon, the repeating of a cycle that is much older than mankind. Not that one has any desire to be a climate change denier.

The salient point really is that if politicians could save us from the harmful ramifications of our behaviour, they would have done so by now in much less challenging fields than climate change. The answer to almost every problem, whether it be drink driving or polluting our environment, lies in changing human behaviour. Good luck with that.

We do have the power though. Whether it was the Dalai Lama who said that anyone who thinks they are too small to make a difference should try sleeping with a mosquito, or whether he was quoting an African proverb, he/it was right. As is the philosophy that individual rain drops make an ocean. The problem is explained by the old joke about how many social workers it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is one — but the light bulb has to want to change.

So do we.