On October 25, Brazilians will vote in the second round of their presidential elections. The matter might not be all that suspenseful. The far right-wing candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, is widely favored to defeat the incumbent, President Lula da Silva, especially after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round, which found both him and the members of his far-right movement broadly in the ascendance. His victory will be a catastrophe for many reasons, but there’s one looming disaster that will extend far beyond Brazil’s borders: The fate of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest, hangs in the balance. Its stepped-up destruction will likely dramatically accelerate global warming.
What’s more, Donald Trump has personal ties to one of the Brazilian oligarchs who is most directly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon, and Trump actually hosted him in the White House on August 20.
And yet the mainstream U.S. media is ignoring the rising danger to the Amazon. Ominously, climate scientists have warned that increased destruction will push the vast rainforest toward a “tipping point,” after which recovery will be difficult, if not impossible.
Here, briefly, is the science behind the warnings. The Amazon rainforest is our planet’s biggest carbon sink. Its 2.3 million square miles of thick vegetation pull dangerous carbon dioxide from the global atmosphere, and safely store it in the forest’s thick vegetation. Burn the forest, and carbon dioxide, the worst of the greenhouse gases, remains in the atmosphere, damaging the climate everywhere on the planet.
In recent years, climate scientists point out that some 17 percent of the Amazon has already been burned or otherwise destroyed. Estimates are that 20 to 25 percent would be the tipping point, after which the end result will be treeless savannah and scrubland. Naturally, these predictions are not facts, but as Thomas Lovejoy, the great American scientist and environmentalist who devoted his life to the Amazon, used to say, “Multiply the risk of a catastrophe by its disastrous consequences, and you will see that inaction is impossible.”
Once you witness the aftermath of the rainforest destruction, you will never forget it. Take, for instance, the construction of BR-317, the two-lane highway that runs southwest from the city of Rio Branco in Brazil’s western state of Acre to the Bolivian border. Once, triple-canopy forest reached right to the highway’s edge on both sides. Now, green pasture stretches into the far distance, with occasional dead tree trunks and blackened stumps a reminder of what happened. Once, you would have struggled to peer more than 50 feet into the forest. Now, you can see for miles.
These days, huge herds of dewlapped, humped, white Brahma cattle roam across the huge fazendas, or ranches. Patches of sickly orange-brown soil are the giveaway; the topsoil is actually shallow and not fertile. In the rainforest, falling vegetation from the thick forest cover is regularly recycled into new forest growth. Destroy the original dense tree cover, and the rainforest dies.
Of course, along highway BR-317, the rainforest’s rich and interdependent insect, bird, and animal life has also retreated into the far horizons. From time to time, you might see a couple of parrots; they sometimes fly in matrimonial pairs. On a rare occasion, you might catch sight of a dazzlingly blue morpho butterfly dancing along the highway. But the life form you are most likely to notice is gray-headed vultures.
Xapuri, a small town along the highway, was once the home to Chico Mendes, the legendary environmentalist and rubber-tapper leader who was murdered back in 1988. The local ranchers who later burned the forest killed him first, to get him out of the way. Several books have been written about his life; he is also the subject of an excellent feature film.
Destroying the trees to create pasture for beef cattle is one of the main reasons the rainforest is dying, and powerful cattle ranchers are one of the major supporters of the far right in Brazil. Flávio Bolsonaro, the current candidate, is a stand-in for his father, Jair, who was president from 2018 to 2022 (and is presently in prison for plotting to overthrow the incumbent president, Lula da Silva, who defeated him in the 2022 election). Under the elder Bolsonaro, rainforest destruction had accelerated dramatically, as the fazendeiros, or large-scale ranchers, had demanded. After Lula won, the burning dropped 34 percent in his first six months in office.
Another contributor to rainforest destruction is JBS, the gigantic global foods company that originally started in Brazil but which has now expanded, including into the United States. JBS is the world’s largest meat-processing company. Environmentalists and others have credibly accused it of exporting meat from Brazilian pastures that replaced stretches of burned-out rainforest. JBS denies the allegations, but Senator Ron Wyden held a series of hearings from 2021 to 2023, and he concluded that JBS “was turning a blind eye as parts of its supply chain burn down the Amazon, push the world toward climate catastrophe, and undercut American ranchers who play by the rules on international trade.” Human Rights Watch also reported in 2025 that JBS “may have exported beef ... sourced from illegal ranches.”
It was one of the principal owners of JBS, Joesley Batista, who met Donald Trump face to face in the White House on August 20. Batista apparently successfully lobbied Trump to lower U.S. tariffs on imported Brazilian beef, in an effort to reduce consumer prices in the United States. But you can bet that Trump never raised the fate of the Amazon—nor will he, if Flávio Bolsonaro wins on October 25.
Defending the Amazon rainforest is a dangerous business, and the killing didn’t stop with Chico Mendes. A 2022 report by Global Witness found that more than 1,700 environmental activists had been murdered in the previous decade across the global south. Brazil was in first place, with 342 killings. Indigenous people are among the victims. A remarkable 2022 film, The Territory, actually documented one such murder.
Cattle ranches are not the only threat to the Amazon. High global gold prices have stimulated feverish efforts to invade the forest, as Amazon Watch, the influential U.S.-based environmentalist organization, warned last May. Large mining corporations, and the individual artisanal miners called garimpeiros, are both to blame. Amazon Watch indicted “a predatory logic that turns rivers into sludge, strengthens illegal networks, and deepens violence.”
There is unfortunately yet another threat. Rising global demand for soybeans is also triggering rainforest destruction.
Under President Lula, a Brazilian government agency called IBAMA fought hard to protect the forest. IBAMA agents are authorized to carry weapons, and they do often get into gunfights with forest destroyers. If Flávio Bolsonaro wins, he and his allies in the Brazilian Congress, which will be dominated by the far right, will surely neuter the agency. What’s more, for now the Brazilian Constitution bans industrial mining in Indigenous territories. But the fear is that the incoming far-right majority will change the law.
Amazon Watch’s program director is Christian Poirier. His organization, like the others in the global environmental movement, regards the news from Brazil as a true climate emergency: “The Trump administration is openly sympathetic to the Bolsonaros, and has been working to subvert and interfere in Brazil’s election. We need to vote in a Democratic Congress in November, and then push it to put the brakes on Trump’s pro-Bolsonaro, anti-rainforest moves.”
Andrew Miller is Amazon Watch’s advocacy director, in Washington, D.C. He recognizes that certain progressive members of Congress, like Representatives Delia Ramirez and Mark Pocan, are already taking a direct interest in the Brazil environmental crisis. But he warns that Congress is also afflicted by what is called “climate hushing.”
“It’s crazy,” he says. “Studies show a measurable decline in the number of press releases and public statements about the environment coming out of Congress. The number of congressional interventions on the climate is decreasing—at a time when the actual global crisis is greater than ever, and growing.”
