As has now been widely reported, the Amazon rainforest is on fire due to a mixture of fires started for land clearance and the effects of climate change. People start fires to clear out rainforest so as to use the land for other purposes, such as cattle ranching and farming. It’s a crime against the rainforest, but also against the indigenous people who live there and whose land it arguably is.
Destruction of the Amazon is not new – it’s been happening for decades. But this time the scale is different, with the fires are being furthered by a fascist government. However, it’s important to understand that the burning of the Amazon is not actually exceptional; it’s just a spectacular example of the normal way that humans dominate, plunder and destroy Nature all around the world.
As Capra and Mattei set out in their book The Ecology of Law, our politics, economics, law and culture have long been based on the idea that humans are the only thing that matter. We see ourselves as separate from the rest of Nature, defining it as our environment instead of anything in its own right. Humans are the near-exclusive focus of our politics and economics, and when we measure success, we focus on reductionist metrics like GDP while ignoring anything like sustainability.
