Brazil’s second natural wonder next to the Amazon rainforest, the Pantanal, a vast wetland area in the far southwest of the nation, is under threat from environmental destruction.
The Pantanal is approximately 68,000 square miles, nearly 20 times the size of Florida’s Everglades. It is home to an astounding biodiversity that includes rare birds and the world’s largest parrots, marsh deer, the world’s largest concentration of jaguars, tapirs, the world’s largest population of caimans, giant river otters, giant anteaters, and many more rare animals.
But this year nearly 7,000 square miles, an area the size of the state of New Jersey, have been burned by wildfires. Not only have slow moving animals like anteaters been killed, but jaguars, animals that are know for speed and agility, have also been caught by the raging fires and burned into carbonized ash.
These blazes are the worst in the Pantanal since Brazilian authorities began keeping records in 1998, and are worse than the large fires that swept the region in 2020. In recent years it has seen a series of increasingly severe droughts and continued deforestation. When combined with the increasing world temperatures that are part of larger global warming trends, these factors have led to more severe and longer lasting wildfires. The fires are predicted to continue until October, when the rainy season will help extinguish them. One biologist for a conservation group said, “we’re watching the biodiversity of the Pantanal disappear into ash…It’s being burned to a crisp.”
What is happening in the Pantanal, and many other places around the world, are human, environmental and biological tragedies. They are all avoidable.
We can still keep things from getting far, far worse. But we must act now, and we can’t stop at small changes or reforms. We’ve got to look at the root cause of these tragedies and then rid our world of the system that has brought us and our environment to this place.
