Brazilians Create #PrayForAmazonia Hashtag Following President’s Response To Three-Week-Long Forest Fires

Fires that swept through the Amazon region have sparked the hashtag #PrayForAmazonia. Social media users are calling out Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration for its lack of response.

Late in July, a large fire started and eventually took out about 1,000 hectares of an environmental reserve in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, which is located on the border with Bolivia, Newsweek reports. The flames resulted in a blanket of smoke that quickly spread across the state, becoming a detriment to citizens and animals in the area.

Two weeks ago, the state of Amazonas declared a state of emergency in response to an increased number of fires.  According to satellite imagery, several fires have been burning in the state of Mato Grasso. NASA researcher Santiago Gasso reported the fires, and on Aug. 13, he explained they created a smoke layer that covered 1.2 million square miles of the area. Meteorologists said the smoke played a major part in the sky turning dark in São Paulo on Monday afternoon.

“The smoke did not come from fires from the state of São Paulo, but from very dense and wide fires that have been going on for several days in Rondônia and Bolivia. The cold front changed the direction of the winds and transported this smoke to São Paulo,” Josélia Pegorim, a meteorologist from Climatempo, told Globo. “Here in the Greater São Paulo region we had the combination of this excess humidity with the smoke, so it gave this appearance in the sky.”

Even after numerous amounts of data was collected by specialists, Bolsonaro said he did not believe the information the INPE gathered, which was that deforestation in July had increased nearly 300 percent in comparison to the same month in 2018. He said the agency was making up “lies” that could negatively affect the country’s trade deals; he then replaced its chief with a military official. “News like this that does not match the truth causes great damage to the image of Brazil,” Bolsonaro said in a press conference. The INPE data collected by the DETER-B satellite system.  Operations that started in 2015 showed deforestation had increased to the point where more than three football fields of tree coverage were being lost every minute.

Experts say rainforests are dying off so fast that it is getting to a “tipping point” where it may not be able to be restored. The president’s inaction has conjured up online outrage, as Amazonia is home to 60 percent of the forest’s total area within its territory.