The Amazon is still on fire & haunted biscuits can't help
Hello,
I hope you all had an excellent summer.
It seems a long time since I sent out the last newsletter when it was super hot. Now we’re struggling not to turn the heating on and bankrupt ourselves.
If you’re like me, you may be longing for the warm sunshine, though I won’t be looking back fondly on the day in Spain when it reached 44.5 degrees. It’s always been hot in August but the normal temperatures of low 30s felt like heaven compared to that brain-boiling day.
Though spare a thought for the residents of Porto Velho, in Rondonia, an Amazonian region in Brazil, who are being smoked like kippers and experiencing a spike in temperatures thanks to the rainforest arsonist extraordinaire President Bolsonaro. There was a particularly excellent article in The Mirror last week where the reporter interviewed a hospital doctor. The forest is being burnt to such an extent that children are being hospitalised with breathing problems and the reporter’s childhood asthma returned with vengeance.
I’ve visited Porto Velho and it’s probably one of the hottest places I had ever been on earth, well, before Spain this year. I can’t imagine how hideous it is for its population of nearly half a million to breath in pollution in the extreme heat.
It was refreshing to see the UK media covering the build up to the election in Brazil and what it means for all of us in terms of climate change if Bolsonaro gets voted in again. The rainforest is now on the tipping point of becoming a carbon polluter instead of a carbon sink. The world’s lungs will be breathing out pollution instead of taking it in. Let’s hope the Brazilian people give their vote to Lula on October 30 or else we really are in trouble. If this current level of destruction isn’t reversed in the next 20 years? We are completely fucked, say the scientists looking at data collected from satellites.
The data give us insight into how quickly the forest is being destroyed - two football pitches every minute of every hour of every day at the moment. I still can’t take that in. Another startling statistic is that 18 per cent of Brazil’s Amazon territory has disappeared over the last 40 years due to cattle farming, logging, soya production (to feed to animals to feed humans) and gold mining. But the bad news (as if it can get any worse) is that climate change is now causing forest fires. So now we can pat ourselves on our backs for coming full human idiot circle.
Perhaps it’s time to pray God? Indeed, the Menonnites, a Christian community, have the fourth largest colony in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest so have no fear. No doubt, their Christian values are stopping everyone from chopping down the forest around them. But wait. What? According to the satellite data, they’re ravaging the forest too so they can… create the fourth largest colony in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.
But there is a little light at the end of the tunnel. The World Wildlife Foundation recently announced a $245 million initiative called Heritage Colombia that will help to safeguard 32 million hectares of land and marine areas over the next 10 years in Colombia which includes 12 per cent of the Amazon.
In other heartening, though less world-saving news, I visited several primary schools over last two weeks to show them photos of my travels in the Amazon and read from The Missing Fur series and it’s fantastic to see children as young as eight being taught about rainforests in the school curriculum.
Children are consistently amazed by these two facts:
1. How huge the Amazon rainforest is at 28 times the size of the UK and how quickly it’s being destroyed.
Rubber used to be collected from the forest trees and was once more valuable than gold.
In totally unrelated supernatural news, the biscuit poltergeists are stepping up their campaign of terror before filming starts this Friday. If you’re on Instagram, have a look at the terrifying spectacle of a chocolate finger on the rampage in my kitchen.
Finally, if you’re looking for some ghostly and creepy tales for Halloween, please look now further than Homecoming Queen & Other Twisted Tales!
Thank you for reading.
Michele
The Missing Fur series includes The Macaw of Doom and The Mystery of the Missing Fur available from Waterstones and other bookstores.