04 January 23
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Taiwan, North Korea, Iran and Palestine are all potential flashpoints that could distract western attention from the invasion in 2023
The main reason for 2022’s blinkered perspectives is, of course, Ukraine, Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945. This is not to say war-torn Tigray or Guatemala, strangled slowly by corruption, would otherwise have made global headline news. Hard truth: western interest in developing-world conflicts is generally limited.
Yet Ukraine, as viewed from Europe and North America, and trumping other strategic and humanitarian crises, has monopolised political and media attention, aid and assistance efforts, and the popular imagination to an unprecedented degree. Knock-on cost of living increases ensured the war hit home in the west.
All the same, other international crises, actual or looming, will demand increased attention and resources in 2023. Three geopolitical battlegrounds in particular may be harder to ignore: China’s domineering behaviour in east Asia, the Middle East quagmire, and US-Europe tensions.
Whether extraneous events and shifting priorities will ultimately undermine Ukraine’s ability to resist and defeat Russia is unknowable at this point. That they will do so is surely Vladimir Putin’s best hope. For all their admirable courage, Ukrainians are more dependent than ever on unstinting western, principally US, support going into a second year of war.
Could they find themselves increasingly sidelined, especially if the war descends into prolonged stalemate? Rising military tensions in east Asia require particular attention, as illustrated by Japan’s stunning decision to roughly double defence spending.
Japan is ninth in the world in military expenditure. It now prospectively moves up to third, behind the US and China. More significantly, this shift marks a sharp break, if not an end, to Japan’s post-1945 pacifist tradition, which forbade, for example, involvement in overseas conflicts. Remarkably, polls suggest strong public support.
What is driving this change? The same factors that have induced South Korea and other regional countries to raise their game militarily, prompted the formation of Aukus ( the Australia, UK and US security pact) and are feeding deeper cooperation within the Quad (the US, India, Japan and Australia).
All these countries harbour a common fear: China. Beijing is aggressively extending its regional military reach. It is pursuing old territorial disputes with neighbours, including Japan and India, and creating new ones in the South China Sea. Last week, its forces again laid aerial siege to Taiwan.
Well-founded worries that China could attempt, in 2023, to make good Xi Jinping’s threat to seize Taiwan by force keep Pentagon wargamers busy. Could the US realistically take on China as well as Russia, effectively defending Taiwan and Ukraine at the same time?
When Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, recently suggested Ukraine consider peace talks, this nightmare scenario of war on two fronts was possibly on his mind. Perhaps he, like Japan, was also thinking about a third potential adversary – North Korea and its proliferating nuclear-capable missiles and drones.
The Middle East, for decades at the heart of US foreign policy, has been relatively neglected since George W Bush’s Iraq debacle and Barack Obama’s Syria cop-out. Yet 2023 could be the year when a host of problems arising from this American distancing comes to a head.
Benny Gantz, Israel’s outgoing defence minister, last week predicted further, bloody escalation in the occupied West Bank resulting from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to give ministerial authority over the area to his anti-Arab coalition partners. Violence involving the Israeli army, Jewish settlers and Palestinians hit record levels in 2022.
Iran is near boiling point, too, owing to sweeping anti-government protests – and because nuclear talks with the west face imminent collapse. Even if Iran makes dramatic concessions, it is hard to see the US president, Joe Biden, cutting a deal with a regime that actively murders and tortures its young women.
Head-on (as opposed to covert) Israel-Iran military confrontation could be one result of a final western rupture with Tehran. That in turn could draw in Iraq and Syria – more unfinished US business – as well as Russia. Meanwhile, Turkey’s electorally challenged leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, may attack Syria-based Kurds again – to distract attention from his domestic blunders.
Ukrainians wondering what 2023 may bring have good cause to worry about US-European unity and staying power, too. Splits among EU countries over negotiations with Russia may widen as the war grinds on. And there’s growing resentment in Washington that the US is taking most of the risks in Ukraine and paying the lion’s share of the costs ($48bn and counting), while the Europeans supposedly revert to piggybacking.
More broadly, transatlantic ties are being tested anew by protectionist elements in Biden’s landmark trade and tech legislation that have outraged Brussels. A more fundamental, surprising question, as the 2024 presidential election looms, concerns the robustness and integrity of American democracy in the Donald Trump era.
Who knows? Perhaps Putin will be ignominiously deposed. Perhaps Biden and Xi will kiss and make up. Perhaps peace in Palestine is not a mirage after all. One thing is certain in 2023. Ukraine will still receive more support and attention than Afghanistan and dozens of poorer, similarly embattled, less strategically important countries put together.
As the big powers fight their global battles, misery and mayhem in these less favoured nations will persist, largely unchecked and unnoticed. Happy new year!
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Demonstrators protesting the killing of Patrick Lyoya gather in front of the Grand Rapids Police station on April 15, 2022, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
1,176 people were killed in encounters with police last year, a third of them during a traffic stop, mental health and welfare check, or non-violent offense.
Mapping Police Violence’s 2022 tracking found that 1,176 people died during encounters with police last year, the highest number the organization has ever recorded. Samuel Sinyangwe, the creator of the project, said the number includes anyone who was killed by police, be it by shooting or other forms of force. According to Mapping Police Violence, police killed the equivalent of 3.2 people per day in 2022—and there were only 12 days in the whole year when a deadly police encounter was not reported.
More than a third of those killed by police encountered the authorities during a traffic stop, a mental health and welfare check, or a non-violent offense. All three of these causes for a police stop have been targeted for reform in multiple states because of how deadly they can be for civilians, particularly those who are not white. Elected leaders in Minnesota, California, and Pennsylvania for example, have passed legislation or enforced new policies de-prioritizing non-public safety traffic stops. Aurora, Colo. has seen a significant push to reform how police interact with the mentally ill, and to give them the tools to deescalate these situations at risk of becoming violent.
As has been true for the last nine years, Mapping Police Violence’s data shows that Black people made up a disproportionate chunk of those killed by cops in 2022, accounting for 24 percent of those killed, despite making up just over 13 percent of the population. One in three people killed by the police was fleeing the cops when they were killed, with Black, Hispanic, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders at least five to eight percent more likely to be killed while running or driving away compared to their white counterparts.
Perhaps the most alarming is how little accountability there has been as the number of police killings continues to grow. Though some of the highest profile instances of police violence saw a conviction in recent years, including that of Derek Chauvin in 2021, the overwhelming majority of officers still face no legal consequences when they take a life. According to the data, 98.1 percent of officers involved in the death of a citizen between 2013 and 2022 faced no charges. Less than 0.3 percent of officers were convicted.
The five departments in the country with the most deadly incidents were also located in some of the densest cities. The Los Angeles Police Department topped the list with 15 killings last year, followed by the Houston Police Department with 14 and the New York Police Department with 13. Members of the Albuquerque Police Department and the Phoenix Police Department killed 11 and 10 people respectively.
While 2022 was a record year, data shows that police violence has been on the rise nationally since 2019. Last year 1,140 people were killed by police, just five deaths short of the previous record high set in 2018.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin took part in a ceremony via video conference to mark the launch of the warship. (photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/Reuters)
The Admiral Gorshkov frigate will sail to the Atlantic and Indian oceans, Moscow says.
Putin took part in a ceremony via video conference on Wednesday to mark the launch of the Admiral Gorshkov warship.
Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, and Igor Krokhmal, the frigate’s commander, were also involved.
“The ship is equipped with the latest hypersonic missile system – ‘Zircon’ – which has no analogues,” Putin said before ordering it to begin combat service
“I would like to wish the crew … success in their service for the good of the Motherland,” he added.
Shoigu said the frigate would sail to the Atlantic and Indian oceans and Mediterranean Sea.
He added it was capable of delivering “pinpoint and powerful strikes against the enemy at sea and on land”, saying the hypersonic missiles on board could overcome any missile defence system and had a range of more than 1,000 kilometres (620 miles).
Hypersonic weapons race
Hypersonic weapons can travel at more than five times the speed of sound.
Russia has test-launched the Zircon from warships and submarines this past year as the race to develop hypersonic weapons heats up with the United States and China.
“The main focus of the mission will be countering threats to Russia and supporting regional peace and stability together with friendly countries,” Shoigu said.
“In exercises, there will be training for the crew on deploying hypersonic weapons and long-range cruise missiles.”
The high-profile tests have come despite Moscow suffering heavy losses of men and equipment in its near year-long invasion of Ukraine, which has seen relations between Russia and the West plummet.
Despite their name, analysts have said the main feature of hypersonic weapons is not speed – which can sometimes be matched or exceeded by traditional ballistic missile warheads – but their manoeuvrability.
The weapons are seen as a way to gain an edge over any adversary as they can potentially evade missile shields and early warning systems.
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An activist holds a placard demanding a $15/hour minimum wage and tips for restaurant workers at the House Triangle of the U.S. Capitol in February. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty)
The biggest increase: Nebraska
As Nebraska Public Media reports, voters decided in November to increase the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026, in increments of $1.50 per year. That brings the state to $10.50 an hour for this year.
Smallest increase: Michigan
According to Michigan Radio, the state's first increase, which went into effect at the start of the year, raised the state's minimum wage to $10.10, up just $0.23. But there's a chance of a second increase that could raise the state's minimum wage to $13.03. Michigan Public Radio Network's Rick Pluta has details.
Highest minimum wage: Washington state and Washington, D.C.
In November, voters in the District of Columbia decided to phase out the region's tipped minimum wage over the next few years to match the District's $16.10 per hour for workers. As DCist's Amanda Michelle Gomez explains, "the measure's success also comes four years after the passage of a nearly identical initiative and its subsequent overturn by the D.C. Council."
Meanwhile in Washington state, not only has the state's minimum wage gone up by $1.25 to $15.74 an hour, but as KUOW reports, the city of Seattle has raised the minimum wage for small and large employers by $0.75 and $1.42, respectively.
States where minimum wage is tied to cost of living saw a bigger bump than in years past
As a result of the recent high inflation, minimum wage increases in states where cost of living is taken into consideration were greater than in years past, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Those include: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont and Washington state.
Plus:
— Minimum wage is expected to increase to over $13 an hour across New England in 2023, except in New Hampshire, where it has stayed at $7.25 for over a decade.
— The Columbus, Ohio, city council is raising minimum wage for workers at companies receiving economic incentives from the city to $20 an hour.
View the underlying data on epi.org.
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Middle school teacher Danielle Weigand stands in protest in front of the Hillsborough County Schools District Office on July 16, 2020, in Tampa, Florida. (photo: Octavio Jones/Getty)
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the American working class faced a paradox: workers were told they were “essential” and touted as “heroes,” yet they were often treated as sacrificial lambs.
Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong collaborator, coined the term “social murder” to refer to a situation in which the ruling class places workers “in such a position that they inevitably meet an early and an unnatural death.” The pandemic was just such a case.
Uniquely positioned between a vulnerable public and a ruthless ruling class, essential workers were celebrated for their contributions to keeping the country running, even as they faced extraordinary workplace risks, hazards, and exploitation — a set of factors that transformed their understandings of themselves as a class of workers. Class consciousness is not a simple recognition of facts about workers’ position in the economy and society, but the outcome of a process that includes external factors that shake them from relative quiescence and spur them to realize their affinity with other workers — and the potential power they hold. Over time, this shared experience led essential workers to see themselves as a group.
During the pandemic, the cognitive dissonance between essential workers’ popular designation as heroes and their actual treatment as sacrificial servants inspired collective action and a distinct awareness of their class interests.
At the same time, differences among essential workers strained unity on the front lines. The classic sociological dividing lines of race, gender, and immigration status were in some sense less significant barriers than were other pandemic-specific obstacles: mass unemployment, the ability to telecommute, occupation, political differences and voting behavior, and popular recognition of one’s essential status. Across the country, whether essential workers cohered as a group or were rent asunder depended on their ability to overcome the deep barriers that divided them from each other.
The process of making and unmaking the frontline class is perhaps the main way we can grasp the relationship between labor and capital during the pandemic.
Scholar Benedict Anderson argued that nations form as “imagined communities.” The members of a particular region might not know each other or ever meet, yet “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Imagined communities don’t simply form automatically but emerge through shared norms, language, values, cultural codes, and common enemies. A similar dynamic happened among essential workers during the pandemic.
Likewise, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that what he called the “labor of categorization” is a “forgotten dimension of the class struggle.” In other words, the struggle to decide who is “in” and who is “out,” in effect, is an important aspect of how classes form.
At times, pandemic essential workers pursued the formation of an imagined community of frontline laborers by organizing across professional and occupational lines. Early on, proximity to risk was the minimum price of entry into the class of real frontline workers, as well as the basis for excluding those who didn’t share that proximity.
Yet there were exceptions. School teachers, who mostly taught remotely in 2020, were often included as “true” members of the essential working class because their labor was considered socially indispensable and their jobs were crucial to allowing others the ability to work. At other times, certain kinds of in-person workers were excluded.
I interviewed hundreds of frontline workers during the pandemic and encountered widespread discrimination against fast-food workers by many other low-wage frontline workers, a reflection of long-standing falsehoods about the intelligence, work ethic, and employability of that labor pool. Even in the same workplace, like a hospital, it was common for workers to construct a hierarchy of essentiality, from emergency room nurses at one end to specialized technicians who didn’t interact with as many patients at the other.
Most workers I interviewed derived a sense of pride from being a frontline worker. They saw how public sentiment favored them, probably for the first time, and got a renewed sense of satisfaction and purpose from their roles. Many remarked on the ways they were treated with greater levels of respect on the job yet regretted that it took a global pandemic for customers and policymakers and the general public to see service workers as deserving of appreciation. Early in the pandemic, this positive change in the public’s perception of them led many essential workers to feel a stronger sense of solidarity and community with each other.
Others appreciated the honorific of being called essential, but their resentment toward their working conditions gave them a more ambivalent view of what “essential” actually meant in practice. “Guinea pigs,” “lab rats,” “crash test dummies,” “human shields,” “sacrificial lambs” — many essential workers used these terms to describe their status in the social hierarchy. These metaphors of disposability reflect the deep bitterness and indignation workers experienced.
“There was an awakening,” Tre Kwon, a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, told me. “Sometimes it just takes a spark. People realized that all of us out there working shared something, a common experience. It was uneven and imperfect, but it happened.”
A Pandemic Class for Itself
The pandemic provided the spark, spurring frontline workers to understand themselves as a group with common interests. Forged in the crucible of the crisis, a class “for itself” emerged in fits and starts.
Newly radicalized, essential workers across the nation launched protests for better working conditions, with and without the support of unions. As the pandemic went on, essential workers increasingly joined forces. Teachers spoke up for food workers, grocery clerks for delivery drivers, meatpacking workers for farmers, doctors for nurses, and nurses for students.
During an April 2020 rally by teachers to oppose reopening public schools, Jillian Primiano, an emergency room nurse from Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn, called attention to the way nurses understood the plight of teachers being forced back into dangerous classrooms. “As nurses, we know you will be short on supplies and staff as billionaires continue to not pay taxes, throwing us small donations here and there and patting themselves on the back,” Primiano told the crowd. “We know that you will bear the brunt of idealistic policies that only look good on paper. . . . They’re gonna call you heroes while they don’t give you what you need to do your job.”
Yet even as frontline workers expressed support for each other, forging broad working-class unity proved to be messier and more complicated. Risk and exposure to the virus separated frontline workers from so many others in the working class, most notably the unemployed. Frontline workers’ attitudes toward the unemployed evolved dramatically over the course of the coronavirus crisis. Early in the pandemic, many essential workers sympathized with those who were laid off and viewed their struggles as coterminous. As the pandemic progressed, however, essential workers increasingly doubted that their struggles resembled those of the unemployed.
From March to July 2020, my interviews featured no anti-unemployed stigma. It was clear to all that those applying for unemployment insurance were suffering along with everyone else, and that joblessness or destitution in some cases was hardly a balm for not having to work on the front lines.
As the economy slowly rebounded, however, and the virus rippled through communities in wave after wave, frontline workers’ resentment against the unemployed, who were increasingly portrayed as avoiding risk in much the same way as those working from home, grew.
Bashing the jobless has long been a national pastime, built upon the idea that some people get something — a generic idea of welfare — for nothing. The pandemic inspired a new take.
In part because the frontline class was so multiracial, it became harder to link grievances about race and unemployment together. The content of these new complaints wasn’t that the unemployed were lazy but that they were unfairly safe. The typically flaunted work ethic was supplanted by a substitute ideology of risk-taking.
This resentment was magnified after the Biden administration extended unemployment benefits in early 2021, guaranteeing a $300-per-week unemployment relief check. In many ways, it paid to stay home. The relief programs were necessary and good, and, in many cases, still not enough. But they also served to fracture the working class, dividing frontline workers from the unemployed and preventing broad class solidarity.
“No way somebody sitting at home deserves more than someone out there on the front lines,” said Francisco, a slaughterhouse worker from Colorado. “When we say we’re essential workers, we mean the people actually working.”
“We’re not all in this together,” Caroline, a nurse from Buffalo, New York, told me. “Some of us are working our butts off and some of us are sitting on them.”
There was a parallel movement among the public too. As the pandemic progressed, many Americans shifted from supporting “our essential heroes” to decrying that “nobody wants to work anymore.” This rapid change in temperament exposes how flimsy and superficial public support for essential workers actually was, underscoring why the cognitive dissonance of those workers was so intense and justified.
Tectonic shifts in class politics both formed and dissolved an essential working class during the pandemic. The hero status that workers earned conferred a rare degree of respect and appreciation, but it wasn’t enough to secure them the kinds of actual benefits they needed to do their jobs safely and with dignity.
“We don’t know how to effectively treat COVID-19 yet,” Primiano, the nurse, said at the April teachers’ rally. “But we do know how to prevent it. Every time rank-and-file workers stand up to demand policies that prevent the spread of COVID-19, you’re saving lives that medicine cannot save. If you teachers don’t get what you need, you should strike, and healthcare workers and other essential workers should stand behind you . . . and demand that the working class stop paying for this pandemic with our lives.”
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Iranian prominent actress Taraneh Alidoosti, center, holds bunches of flowers as she poses for a photo among her friends after being released from Evin prison in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2023. (photo: AP)
Authorities in Iran have released a top actress who was arrested last month after expressing solidarity with anti-government protesters.
The 38-year-old star was freed on bail after being accused of "posting inflammatory content".
She had posted a picture on social media without a headscarf and condemned the first execution of a protester.
Many Iranian actors, musicians and other celebrities have publicly backed the protests against the clerical establishment.
They erupted almost four months ago following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained by morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab, or headscarf, "improperly".
Authorities have portrayed the protests as foreign-backed "riots" and responded with lethal force.
So far, at least 516 protesters have been killed, including 70 children, and 19,250 others arrested, according to the Human Rights Activists' News Agency (HRANA). It has also reported the deaths of 68 security personnel.
Two protesters were executed last month after being convicted of the vaguely-defined national security charge of "enmity against God".
Human rights groups condemned their trials as gross miscarriages of justice. They were reportedly tortured into confessing and deprived of access to lawyers of their choosing.
Days before her own arrest on 17 December, Ms Alidoosti had urged people to speak out in response to the execution of the first protester, Mohsen Shekari.
"Every international organisation who is watching this bloodshed and not taking action is a disgrace to humanity," she wrote on her Instagram account, which had millions of followers before it was disabled.
In November, she had posed with her hair uncovered, holding a sign saying "Woman, life, freedom" - the main slogan of the protest movement.
Iran's state news agency, Irna, reported that Ms Alidoosti was arrested for failing to provide "any documents in line with her claims".
Ms Alidoosti is one of Iran's most successful actresses. She starred in The Salesman, which won an Academy Award in 2016 for the Best International Feature Film.
She has paused her career to support the families of protesters killed in the crackdown and has previously vowed to remain inside Iran at any price.
Two other Iranian actresses, Hengameh Ghaziani and Katayoun Riahi, were arrested in November for supporting the protests. They have also been released on bail.
In a separate development on Wednesday, the Iranian government vowed to give a "decisive response" after the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a series of cartoons mocking Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a Shia Muslim cleric who has the final say on all state matters.
Charlie Hebdo said it had received more than 300 such cartoons and "thousands of threats" after it launched a competition last month in order to "support the struggle of Iranians who are fighting for their freedom".
"The insulting and offensive action of a French publication in releasing cartoons against [Iran's] religious and political authority will not be left without an effective and decisive response," Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian tweeted.
Meanwhile, Iran's Supreme Court upheld death sentences handed to two men who were convicted of "corruption on Earth" over the alleged killing of a paramilitary member in Karaj in November.
The court rejected the appeals of Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, who have both alleged that they were tortured into making false confessions. Retrials were ordered for three co-defendants sentenced to death in the same case, including Hamid Ghare-Hasanlou.
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It could be a matter of decades before 'well over' 50% of the Amazon rainforest is transformed into savannah. (photo: Unsplash)
Some Brazilian scientists fear that the Amazon may become a grassy savanna — with profound effects on the climate worldwide.
Not that it was all bad. As the frenetic port of Manaus receded, the canopy spread out below like a shaggy carpet, immaculate green except for the pink and yellow blooms of ipê trees, and it was one of those moments — increasingly rare in Gatti’s experience — when you could pretend that nature had no final border, and the Amazon looked like what it somehow still was, the world’s largest rainforest.
The Amazon has been called “the lungs of the earth” because of the amount of carbon dioxide it absorbs — according to most estimates, around half a billion tons per year. The problem, scientifically speaking, is that these estimates have always depended on a series of extrapolations. Some researchers use satellites to detect changes that indicate the presence of greenhouse gases. But the method is indirect, and clouds can contaminate the results. Others start with individual tree measurements in plots scattered across the region, which allows them to calculate the so-called biomass in each trunk, which, in turn, allows them to work out how much carbon is being stored by the ecosystem as a whole. But it’s hard to know how representative small study areas are, because the Amazon is almost as large as the contiguous United States, with regional differences in rainfall, temperature, flora and the extent of logging and agriculture. (One study even warned of the risk of “majestic-forest selection bias.”)
Gatti’s solution was to measure the carbon in the air directly. Which led to the least pleasant part of the flight. The pilot had removed the plane’s back seats to make up for the weight of a special silver “suitcase” donated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Inside, a thick layer of foam cradled 17 glass flasks with valves that opened and closed at the flick of a switch. Each one was supposed to capture a liter and a half of air from a different altitude, starting at 14,500 feet and going down to 1,000. To ensure that collection always took place above the same point on the map, the pilot had to descend in tight spirals, banking so hard that the horizon went near-vertical.
In a healthy rainforest, the concentration of carbon should decline as you approach the canopy from above, because trees are drawing the element out of the atmosphere and turning it into wood through photosynthesis. In 2010, when Gatti started running two flights a month at each of four different spots in the Brazilian Amazon, she expected to confirm this. But her samples showed the opposite: At lower altitudes, the ratio of carbon increased. This suggested that emissions from the slashing and burning of trees — the preferred method for clearing fields in the Amazon — were actually exceeding the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon. At first Gatti was sure it was an anomaly caused by a passing drought. But the trend not only persisted into wetter years; it intensified.
For a while Gatti simply refused to believe her own data. She even became depressed. She had always felt a deep connection to nature. As a kid in a distant town called Cafelândia, she would climb a tree in front of her house, spending hours in a formation of branches that seemed custom-made to cradle her arms, legs and head. In later years, no matter how many times she flew over the Amazon, she never got used to the sight of freshly paved highways, new dirt roads always branching off them, forming a fish-bone pattern. Sometimes she soared past columns of beige smoke that rose all the way to the stratosphere.
Back at her laboratory, which is now housed at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Gatti ultimately spent two years refining her methodology. She wanted to know just how much carbon the rainforest was losing — and even more important, how representative these results were. The whole point of her project was that, by capturing air from such high altitudes, it could provide an empirical and comprehensive picture of the Amazon’s so-called carbon budget. So she worked up seven different ways to calculate the effect of wind flows and the composition of air from over the Atlantic Ocean, gradually perfecting her method for subtracting the background noise. Finally she felt confident that her “regions of influence” captured what was happening across 80 percent of the Amazon. The net emissions averaged nearly 300 million tons of carbon per year — roughly the emissions of the entire nation of France.
When Gatti published her findings in Nature in 2021, it sparked panicked headlines across the world: The lungs of the earth are exhaling greenhouse gases. But her discovery was actually much more alarming than that. Because burning trees release a high proportion of carbon monoxide, she could separate these emissions from the total. And in the southeastern Amazon, air samples still showed net emissions, suggesting that the ecosystem itself could be releasing more carbon than it absorbed, thanks in part to decomposing plant matter — or in Gatti’s words, “effectively dying more than growing.” The first time I spoke to Gatti, she repurposed a lyric by the Brazilian crooner Jorge Ben Jor. How could this be happening, she asked, in a “tropical country, blessed by God/and beautiful by nature”?
The Amazon is a labyrinth of a thousand rivers. They are born at 21,000 feet, with seasonal melts from the Sajama ice cap in Bolivia, and they are born in the dark rock of Peru’s Apacheta cliff, as glacial seepage spraying white from its pores. They are born less than 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean; they are born in the middle of the South American continent, in Brazil’s high plains, savannas and sandstone ridges. Most are just tributaries of tributaries, headwaters for much larger rivers — the Caquetá, the Madre de Dios, the Iriri, the Tapajós — any of which, on its own, would already be among the largest rivers in the world. Where these tributaries empty, just south of the Equator, they form the aorta of the Amazon proper, more than 10 miles wide at its widest point. From the Amazon’s farthest source to its mouth in the Atlantic, water flows for 4,000 miles, almost as long as the Nile. Measured by the volume it releases into the ocean — the equivalent of a dozen Mississippis, one-fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the world’s seas — the Amazon is the largest river in the world.
The consensus used to be that ecosystems are merely a product of prevailing weather patterns. But in the 1970s, the Brazilian researcher Eneas Salati proved that the Amazon, with its roughly 400 billion trees, also creates its own weather. On an average day, a single large tree releases more than 100 gallons of water as vapor. This not only lowers the air temperature through evaporative cooling; as Salati discovered by tracking oxygen isotopes in rainwater samples, it also gives rise to “flying rivers” — rain clouds that recycle the forest’s own moisture five or six times, ultimately generating as much as 45 percent of its total precipitation. By creating the conditions for a continental swath of evergreens, this process is crucial to the Amazon’s role as a global “sink” for carbon.
Many scientists now fear, however, that this virtuous cycle is breaking down. Just in the past half-century, 17 percent of the Amazon — an area larger than Texas — has been converted to croplands or cattle pasture. Less forest means less recycled rain, less vapor to cool the air, less of a canopy to shield against sunlight. Under drier, hotter conditions, even the lushest of Amazonian trees will shed leaves to save water, inhibiting photosynthesis — a feedback loop that is only exacerbated by global warming. According to the Brazilian Earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent of the original area, the flying rivers will weaken enough that a rainforest simply will not be able to survive in most of the Amazon Basin. Instead it will collapse into scrubby savanna, possibly in a matter of decades.
Much of the evidence for this theory — including Gatti’s air- sample studies — emerged thanks to a groundbreaking initiative led by Nobre himself. When Nobre started trying to forecast the impact of deforestation back in 1988, he had to do it at the University of Maryland, because his home country lacked the computing power for serious climate modeling. Brazil was so strapped for resources that foreign researchers even dominated Amazon fieldwork. But Nobre spearheaded a program that, in the words of a Nature editorial, “revolutionized understanding of the Amazon rainforest and its role in the Earth system.” Established in 1999 and known as the Large- Scale Biosphere- Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, or L.B.A., it united disciplines that usually did not collaborate, bringing together chemists like Gatti with biologists and meteorologists. While funding mostly came from the United States and Europe, Nobre insisted that South Americans play leading roles, thus giving rise to a whole new generation of Brazilian climate scientists.
Until recently, Nobre was working under the assumption that the Amazon would not become a net source of carbon for at least another few decades. But Gatti’s research is not the only sign that, as he put it to me over Skype, “we are on the eve of this tipping point.” The rain machine is slowing. Droughts used to come once every couple of decades, with a megadrought every century or two. But just since 1998 there have been five, two of them extreme. The effect is particularly acute in the eastern Amazon, which has already lost a staggering 30 percent of its forest. The dry season there used to be three months long; now it lasts more than four. During the driest months, rainfall has declined by as much as a third in four decades, while average temperatures have risen by as much as 3.1 degrees Celsius — triple the annual increase for the world as a whole in the fossil-fuel era. In some parts, jungles are already being colonized by grasses.
Losing the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, would be catastrophic for the tens of thousands of species that make their home there. Rising temperatures could also drive millions of people in the region to become climate refugees. And it would represent a more symbolic death, too, as “saving the rainforest” has long been a kind of synecdoche for modern environmentalism as a whole. What scientists are most concerned about, though, is the potential for this regional, ecological tipping point to produce knock-on effects in the global climate. Because the Amazon’s flying rivers circulate back over the continent, the impact may already be reaching beyond the rainforest. In 2015, Brazil’s populous southeast was hit by historic water shortages; in 2021, quasi-biblical sandstorms swept the region. If the flying rivers peter out entirely, it could affect atmospheric circulation even beyond South America, possibly influencing the weather as far away as the western United States.
But even these consequences pale next to the fallout from putting the Amazon’s carbon back into the atmosphere. For all the slashing and burning of recent years, the ecosystem still stores about 120 billion tons of carbon in its trunks, branches, vines and soil — the equivalent of more than three years of human emissions. If all of that carbon is released, it could warm the planet by as much as 0.3 degrees Celsius. According to the Princeton ecologist Stephen Pacala, this alone would probably make the Paris Agreement — the international accord to limit warming since preindustrial times to 2 degrees — “impossible to achieve.” Which, in turn, may mean that other climate tipping points are breached around the world. As the British scientist Tim Lenton put it to me, “The Amazon feeds back to everything.”
In May I joined Gatti on a trip to the northeastern Amazon. Though it was not exactly part of her research, she wanted to visit the Tapajós National Forest, a 1.4-million-acre conservation area that held clues to the rainforest’s mysterious emissions, and to the transformation predicted by Nobre. First she flew from São Paulo 1,500 miles north to Belém, at the Amazon’s mouth in the Atlantic. From there she flew to Santarém, 400 miles upstream, where the Amazon’s muddy brown waters are met by the dark blue Tapajós River. In the dry season, tourists come from across Brazil to the Tapajós’s white-sand beaches. Now it was raining heavily, the beaches under water. The river lapped at Santarém’s sidewalks.
Santarém is one of Brazil’s oldest cities, founded by Jesuit missionaries at a time when the only local commodity was Indigenous souls. Its fortunes rose with the rubber boom of the 19th century, and fell with the bust of the 20th. More recently, it has been transformed by China’s growing demand for soybeans, which are used as livestock feed and cooking oil. Gatti pointed out the long narrow barges docking at a terminal run by Cargill, the American commodities-trading giant. It began operating in 2003, the year before Gatti started running flights from Santarém’s tiny airport. As we drove south on the BR-163, also known as Brazil’s “grain corridor,” Gatti recalled how, back then, so many of the fields were grass for grazing cattle. Of all the deforested land in the Amazon, more than two-thirds is pasture. Here, though, Gatti watched as the grass gave way to a “sea of soy.”
Before our trip, Nobre had warned me to keep a low profile, because Gatti had become a public face amid the buzz around her discoveries. Just a few weeks later, the Indigenous-rights advocate Bruno Pereira and the environmental journalist Dom Phillips would be murdered. Profit makes its own law in the Amazon. In the Tapajós region, landowners must preserve 50 percent of their property as rainforest. But Gatti noticed how farmers and ranchers continued to expand their fields, ever so gradually, in long, thin strips meant to evade detection by the satellites of her own employer, INPE. In 2006 the soy industry agreed not to plant in newly deforested areas. But there are ways around this, too. Some farmers bribe local officials for falsified documents. Others transfer land to front men so that they can violate the moratorium without sullying their name. As we drove, Gatti noted violations to report, even though one of her own former colleagues once received death threats for this. She did not hide her affinities, favoring T-shirts with toucans and macaws on florid backgrounds.
Gatti, now 62, has always had a rebellious streak. When she was in college in the late 1970s, some fellow students were arrested for protesting the dictatorship. Outraged, she joined an underground political party and stopped attending classes for a while. Though she was scarcely aware of this at the time, it was the military regime that oversaw the first modern effort to colonize the rainforest. One of its most ambitious projects was the Trans-Amazonian Highway, which pierced 2,600 miles west from the coast and now forms the southern border of the Tapajós National Forest. The goal was partly to fill what the generals saw as a “demographic void,” keeping foreign powers like the United States from moving in. They also hoped to relieve pressure on ballooning cities by uniting “men without land in the northeast and land without men in the Amazon.” Never mind that the forest was already occupied by a multitude of Indigenous groups; they, too, would be made into productive citizens.
The military regime had also built the BR-163, which branches off from the Trans-Amazonian, forming the Tapajós’s eastern border. As we sped along it, signs advertised land for sale, a store called House of Seeds, a World Church of the Power of God. To our right, the Tapajós was a looming wall of green. To our left were private lands where forests were interspersed with croplands. It was the tail end of the soy harvest now, when many landowners started a rotation of corn; tractors rolled through, long metal wings spraying pesticides. Gatti pointed out a freshly cleared area; the trunks lay scattered like a game of pickup sticks. Even when landowners followed the law, what was once a seamless ecosystem became an archipelago, fragments of forest hemmed in by flat expanses. At one point we passed a lone Brazil nut tree, inanely protected by Brazilian law even amid the monoculture. “Here lies the forest,” Gatti declared.
As she spoke, Gatti gesticulated so vehemently that both hands sometimes came off the steering wheel. She betrayed no affection for Jair Bolsonaro, the former army officer who spent four years as president pushing to develop the Amazon. Claiming (baselessly) that his own government’s deforestation numbers were a lie, he strangled INPE’s funding to the point that it reportedly had to shut off its supercomputer. He also slashed budgets for protecting Indigenous people and the environment. Predictably, deforestation accelerated; in 2021, a thousand trees were cut down every minute. Gatti sometimes thought about quitting, moving with her German shepherd to an eco-villa in the countryside. With Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva back in the presidency, though, she is feeling hopeful for the first time in years. The last time he was in office, from 2003 to 2011, deforestation fell by two-thirds — and now he has promised to halt deforestation entirely. The question is whether that will be enough to halt a process that may now have a momentum of its own.
Eventually Gatti pulled off to the right, through a tunnel of overhanging branches and into an open area where tall trees shaded a research base built as part of Nobre’s L.B.A. The base resembled an eco-lodge, with low-slung wooden buildings topped by clay-tiled roofs. Night was falling, the roar of frogs competing with the distant howl of monkeys. We were met by a 39-year-old biologist, Erika Berenguer, who wore an old white T-shirt, overlarge and dirty. Her specialty, she said, was desgraça — calamity. It turns out that deforestation numbers actually understate the problem of the Amazon, because a fifth of the standing forest has been “degraded” by logging, burning and fragmentation. Now based in Oxford, Berenguer has spent the last 12 years studying how these ills affect the Amazon’s ability to store carbon. As she would explain, though, even she was shocked by what happened in 2015, a critical turning point in the health of the ecosystem.
At the time Berenguer’s project was to measure every single tree in a few dozen plots in and around the Tapajós National Forest, at regular intervals, to calculate the weight of all the organic matter, or biomass, which serves as a proxy for carbon. At first, when she noticed flames inside the conservation area, she just kept doing her work — gathering up leaf litter, fixing tape around centuries-old trunks, tagging each one with numbered scraps of metal sliced from beer cans. As Berenguer’s colleague Jos Barlow likes to point out, outside observers usually fail to distinguish between deforestation fires (intentionally set to clear freshly clear-cut areas) and wildfires (when the flames accidentally spread to standing forests). Now it was August, the height of the dry season, when ranchers and farmers in the Amazon clear fields with fire. Almost every year, embers floated across the BR-163 highway, igniting leaves on the forest floor. But the forest itself remained so damp that the flames could not spread far.
Berenguer, a native of cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro, made a point of sweating alongside her assistants, local men with nicknames like Xarope (Syrup) and Graveto (Stick), whose families had settled by the BR-163 as part of the colonization push of the 1970s. They were not too concerned, either. As subsistence farmers, they also used fire to maintain their lands. It is a tradition that dates back to the region’s oldest inhabitants, Indigenous people who discovered that ash fertilizes the nutrient-poor soils. Outside the rarest of megadroughts, they never had to worry about losing control of the flames. Researchers have found areas of the Amazon that, according to sediment core samples, went 4,000 years without a single burn.
As Berenguer worked through September, however, the smoke from disparate fires coagulated into a permanent, indistinguishable haze. It permeated everything — their truck, their clothes, even Berenguer’s bra. When they kicked away dead leaves, they noticed that the soil beneath was cracking. The little plants of the understory wilted. Soon everyone was coughing; people took turns breathing mist from a nebulizer, and her own snot turned black. Each morning, she and her assistants had to clean a layer of fresh soot from the windshield of their truck. They turned the brights on, turned the emergency lights on and edged onto the highway. They drove slowly but couldn’t see vehicles ahead until they were nearly colliding with them. The sky was hidden. The sun was a red suggestion. Ash fell like alien snow.
The fires were escaping to crop gardens, to pastureland where cattle grazed, to the thatched roofs of houses. And the fires were doing what they should not: spreading inside the rainforest. Splitting her time between Britain and the Amazon, Berenguer had come to know her research plots as intimately as her old neighborhood in Rio. She thought of her favorite places as rainforest versions of her local coffee shop, her local bakery. There were the fallen logs where she and her assistants returned day after day so they could sit and eat lunch. There were the tall, thin buttress roots that acted as a makeshift bathroom stall, hiding her from view when necessary. In one plot, a thick loop of liana hung from the canopy, making for the perfect swing. Now she wanted to save these places.
Among the great old trees of the Tapajós, the flames rose a mere foot from the ground. Berenguer and Xarope could stamp them out with their boots. But their efforts were in vain. The flames consolidated into a thin, uninterrupted arc that stretched for miles into the forest. It advanced slowly, a thousand feet per day; in its wake, the rich perennial green was left brown and gray and charcoal-black. Berenguer watched as animals fled from the fire line — butterflies, deer, thumbnail-size frogs. One day she surprised a snake. It leaped onto a smoldering trunk, accidentally immolating itself, and Berenguer heard a sizzling sound, like buttered bread hitting a griddle plate.
Across the Amazon, more forests ultimately burned than in the largest California wildfires in history, putting half a billion tons of carbon back into the atmosphere — the equivalent of more than one year of emissions by Mexico. It was the Amazon’s worst wildfire season on record. Subsequent years have not been as dry, but wildfires have mostly remained well above the average of previous seasons — yet another sign that the ecosystem is losing its natural resilience, entering an alternate feedback loop. In Gatti’s samples, the 2015-16 drought also marked the moment when, as she put it to me, “the southeastern Amazon went to pot,” and the forest itself started consistently releasing more carbon than it absorbed. Fire does more than destroy trees. It also accelerates the transformations predicted by Nobre’s tipping- point theory.
Just about every researcher I spoke to for this article was careful to emphasize their deep respect for Nobre, who has done so much to advance Amazon climate science. But some have reservations about his theory. Partly this is because his earliest simulations showed that, with less rain, the Amazon would give way to the Cerrado, a savanna that covers much of central Brazil. The Cerrado, though, is a carbon-rich patchwork of grasslands, marshes and forests that is itself endangered by global warming and expanding agriculture. How could such a vibrant ecosystem represent ecological collapse? Other researchers, having studied the Amazon up close in mucky fieldwork, object to the use of computer models that apply uniform assumptions to this multifarious biome. Still others express a more pragmatic concern — that the way Nobre communicates his theory is demobilizing. “Carlos gives the impression that the entire forest is going to collapse at the same time, water will stop circulating and it will all become a big savanna,” Berenguer told me. Gatti’s article, she added, actually led to some misunderstanding, too. Attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021, she even heard people say that if the Amazon was now a net emitter, why bother saving it?
Nobre himself is aware of these qualms. Now he hastens to clarify that the transformation will take different forms in different regions, and that any end state will be more of an impoverished scrubland than a Cerrado-style savanna. He also predicts that the Amazon’s western forests, which are rainier throughout the year because of their proximity to the Andes Mountains, would survive a tipping point. His theory, though, is no longer confined to computer simulations; in the southeastern basin, it may already be playing out. In one study, a team led by the researcher Paulo Brando intentionally set a series of fires in swaths of forest abutted by an inactive soy plantation. After a second burn, coincidentally during a drought year, one plot lost nearly a third of its canopy cover, and African grasses — imported species commonly used in cattle pasture — moved in. Brando also participated in an observational study, led by his colleague Divino Silvério, of the region’s enormous Xingu Indigenous Park. Indigenous lands are home to much of Brazil’s best-preserved rainforest. But after repeated wildfires, the Xingu’s grasslands — traditionally maintained as a source of thatch — nearly tripled in size in less than two decades, to 8 percent of the total area. In the central Amazon, meanwhile, naturally occurring white-sand savannas are taking over seasonally flooded forests — again, largely thanks to fire.
It is tempting to think of climate change as a process that, absent human emissions, would only happen gradually. But as Tim Lenton points out, our planet is naturally prone to “threshold behavior.” In a widely cited 2008 paper, Lenton brought the catchy language of tipping points to the arcane revelations of Earth systems science and paleoclimatology. Throughout our planet’s history, in individual ecosystems as well as the wider climate, small, incremental changes have started to reinforce one another until — sometimes suddenly — one feedback loop was replaced with a radically different one. What Lenton calls the most “iconic” examples are the Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last glacial period, when temperatures in Greenland repeatedly shot up by as much as 15 degrees Celsius in the span of a few decades, before cooling again. The causes are intensely debated but most likely involved changes in ice-sheet coverage and the circulation of seawaters.
There is already evidence that our current era of global warming is shifting the borders of various biomes. In Alaska, for example, white spruce trees are moving into areas of tundra for the first time in thousands of years. But humans may have triggered ecological “regime shifts” even before the fossil-fuel era. The Australian Outback was probably lush and green until around 40,000 years ago, when people hunted grass-eating megafauna to extinction, leaving more fuel for fires, which apparently disrupted the continent’s own “flying rivers.” On Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, deforestation is thought to have amplified the drought that toppled the Maya. Then there is the Sahara. Ten thousand years ago, the area resembled temperate South Africa, but livestock grazing may have helped turn it into a desert. As the NOAA scientist Elena Shevliakova, who has modeled the global impacts of Amazon deforestation, put it to me, “If a green Sahara is possible, why not a savanna in the Amazon?”
The Amazon has survived ice ages. It may not survive humans. By hastening the demise of its flying rivers, cattle ranchers and soy farmers may be endangering their own livelihoods too. But thanks to what climatologists call teleconnections — weather anomalies linked across thousands of miles — they also threaten agriculture much farther afield. In the El Niño teleconnection, an unusually warm Pacific Ocean pulls the jet stream south, bringing drier conditions to Canada and the northern United States (as well as to the Amazon region). According to a study led by the Notre Dame researcher David Medvigy, a similar pattern could emerge if the Amazon stops recycling its own moisture, as the dry air would travel north in winter. This could halve the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, a crucial source of water for an already-drought-stricken California.
A growing number of scientists worry that one tipping point can trigger another. In some cases the influence is direct. If Greenland’s ice sheet disappears, the circulation of Atlantic seawaters could be drastically altered, which would, in turn, wreak havoc on weather patterns across the globe, making Scandinavia uninhabitably cold, warming the Southern Hemisphere, drying out forests. The impact of Amazon dieback would be to release tens of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere — which is more diffuse, but no less dangerous. When Lenton and his colleague David Armstrong McKay recently compiled the latest evidence on an array of global climate thresholds, they found that even a very optimistic 1.5 degrees of warming since preindustrial times may be enough to trigger the gradual but irreversible melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, and to thaw methane-trapping permafrost.
It is difficult to predict how all these shifts might interact, as most models assume, for example, that Atlantic seawaters will always circulate according to known patterns. But in a 2018 paper, Lenton and the American Earth system scientist Will Steffen warned that a dominolike “tipping cascade” could push the global climate itself beyond a critical threshold, into an alternate feedback loop called “hothouse Earth,” with hostile conditions not seen for millions of years. It can feel like doom-mongering to contemplate such a scenario. There is no way to put a number on it. Even if it is improbable, however, Lenton argues that the consequences would be so dire that it must be taken seriously. He sees it as a “profound risk-management problem”: If we focus only on the most likely outcomes, we will never predict anomalies like 2021’s unprecedented “heat dome” in the Pacific Northwest. Or last year’s winter heat wave in Antarctica, when temperatures jumped 70 degrees Fahrenheit above the average. Or, for that matter, the proliferation of wildfires in the world’s largest rainforest.
Berenguer wanted to show Gatti how the 2015 megafires had altered forests in the northeastern Amazon. So Xarope picked us up from the research base in the morning, and we got back onto the BR-163. Here and there along the highway, Berenguer pointed out “tree skeletons” — dead trees whose sun-bleached branches poked from the otherwise lush green canopy of the Tapajós. Fire did not always kill them right away. When Berenguer was back in Britain, her assistants would send her updates by WhatsApp. You know Tree 71? one message might say, referring to a centuries-old specimen in one of her plots. So, it just died. It could take a few years more for it to fall to the ground. Some of the carbon in Gatti’s air samples, then, could be a delayed consequence of past fires. But as we would see inside the living forest, something stranger was happening, too.
Eventually we exited the highway for an unmarked dirt track that ended in a wall of vegetation. Machete in hand, Berenguer led us onto a tight path. Just a few days earlier, she and her assistants spent hours clearing the way for us, but new vines were already reclaiming the space. “You can see it’s a mess,” Berenguer said. An impassable thicket of reedy bamboo hemmed us in on either side; the canopy was low above our heads. To me it looked normal enough, as far as jungle goes. In reality, though, a healthy rainforest should be easy to walk through, because the largest trees consume so much light and water that the understory lacks the resources to grow very dense.
We walked over fallen trunks. Unlike in the southeastern Amazon, Berenguer still saw no evidence of savannalike vegetation moving in. But the balance of native species was now out of whack, as opportunistic “pioneers” occupied the spaces left by dead giants. In some areas, fast-growing embaúba trees stood so uniformly that they resembled the stems of a wood-pulp plantation. In others, hundreds of newborn lianas formed a kind of snake nest. (Berenguer’s team had to measure each one individually, a hellish task.) She pointed to a tall, proud tree that had somehow survived the blaze. Because all of the other nearby individuals of its species had been killed, it was unlikely to reproduce; Berenguer called it a “zombie.”
A University of Birmingham researcher named Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert has found similar changes across the Amazon. Even in the absence of actual “savannization,” trees that can withstand drier conditions are proliferating, while those that need more water are dying in greater numbers. The dominance of embaúba is particularly worrisome because the trees are hollow, storing far less carbon than a slower-growing species like mahogany. Their life cycle is also relatively short, leaving more frequent gaps in the canopy. The end result of this transformation is unclear, but Gatti’s numbers have only continued to get worse. According to her latest five-year averages, the Brazilian Amazon is already giving off 50 percent more carbon than it was in the first five years of her project — and even the historically healthier western forests are sometimes emitting more than they absorb.
Eventually we came into a clearing. I began to sweat. The sun was searing hot; Berenguer said that unshaded ground can reach 176 degrees Fahrenheit here. Clearings are a natural part of the Amazonian cycle, as large trees inevitably die and other species gradually take their place. But even logging could not match the power of fire to turn the forest into “Swiss cheese.” Berenguer never used to need sunscreen because the canopy was so thick; now she gets sunburned here. And the profusion of holes sets off a vicious cycle. The sun dries out the vegetation; trees shed leaves to preserve water; the litter becomes fuel for the next fire. The gaps also create a “wind corridor,” allowing strong drafts to penetrate deep into the forest during storms. Perversely, with their heavy trunks, the largest, oldest trees are especially vulnerable to being knocked over.
“This used to be a beautiful forest,” Xarope said.
“Some days it makes me sad,” Berenguer said. “Other days it pisses me off. This is one of those days.”
Berenguer had hoped that the misfortune of the megafire would at least provide an opportunity to study how a rainforest recovers from such desgraça. But she worried that she would never find out, because it would never get the chance. Among scientists who study the Amazon, the notion of multiple tipping points, specific to each region’s ecology, has increasingly taken hold. And some now speak of an even more urgent “flammability tipping point,” past which an ecosystem that never evolved to burn starts burning regularly. During the drought of 2015, wildfires also ravaged another nearby conservation area, the Reserva Extrativista Tapajós-Arapiúns. Because it was left so degraded, with so much dried-out fuel on the floor, there was a much more intense conflagration in 2017, even though that was a wet year. This time the flames were not the foot-tall ones that are usually seen in the Amazon but reached all the way to the canopy.
Though her mainstay was ecological calamity, Berenguer also wanted us to see what well-preserved old-growth forest looks like. In strictly scientific terms, it was a control, a necessary point of comparison with the messed-up forests, as she called them (though she used a more colorful word that cannot be printed here). She also let on that she welcomed the rare excuse to traipse around a more “David Attenborough” setting. So we drove south on the BR-163 until we hit the 117th kilometer marker, where we re-entered the Tapajós.
We were walking for only a few minutes before the difference became obvious. It was cooler and darker. The flora was far more varied, forming distinct layers as you lifted your eyes to the sky. The canopy was far more closed, the understory far more open; Berenguer and Xarope didn’t even need to prune the trail for our visit. There were lianas here, too, but they were few and large. One was as thick as a tree; Berenguer said it was probably centuries old.
It’s hard to shake a popular image of scientists as rigorously rational, unemotional about their work. But Berenguer was not embarrassed to admit that, as she put it, she and her colleagues have their own personal tipping points, too. For a while after the 2015 fires, she lost her sense of purpose, the hope that her work could make a difference. The flames had even ravaged the plot where she used to swing on that perfect loop of liana. “Your whole reference system is being destroyed, and you’re powerless,” she said. “It’s hard to explain without sounding like a tree-hugger. Not to say I don’t hug trees, because I do.” Some trees were too big for that, though. Here was an urucurana, with its winglike buttress roots taller than my whole body. Here was a soaring strangler fig, which surrounds another tree’s trunk as it grows, eventually killing its host. “What a dirty trick!” Gatti exclaimed.
At one point we came upon a low tree bearing a yellow fruit that neither Berenguer nor Xarope could identify.
“Is it poisonous?” Gatti asked.
“I don’t know,” Xarope said. Then he plucked one from a branch and bit into it. We did the same. There was not much pulp around the stone but the flavor was sharp and rich.
Berenguer remembered a past research trip to track frugivores — fruit-eating creatures. She and her colleagues had to remain absolutely still and silent for hours to avoid spooking them. I suggested we try it out for a minute, just to hear what an old-growth forest sounds like without humans tramping around.
We stopped walking; Berenguer sat on a log. As our chitchat faded, the racket of birds swelled as if someone had suddenly turned the volume dial on a stereo. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I looked again, Berenguer’s eyes had narrowed to slits, her lips curled into a faint smile. Earlier, describing what she felt in this place, Berenguer used the word grandeza, which literally means greatness, but also bigness. The rainforest made her feel small, and she liked this.
Gatti had spoken about feeling, at least temporarily, not so separate from the natural world — almost as if she were a kid again, ensconced in that tree in front of her house. Now she stood with her eyes shut, palms open at her sides as if she were at a religious revival, as if she were receiving something.
I glanced over at Xarope; he looked amused. Then the spell was broken by the more familiar sound, distant but unmistakable, of a semi truck shifting gears.
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