The Amazon Rainforest is in trouble. Wildfires that started in August are continuously streaming across its vast environment, and they have not yet been stopped. Not only have thousands of habitats been destroyed, but the threat of global warming has escalated with the fires still consuming wildlife and the massive trees that once were homes to massive amounts of animals. 

With this environmental warning, people all around the world are concerned about what that means for the Earth itself. In her article titled “Amazon Rainforest Fires: Everything we know and how you can help,” Shelby Brown quoted Greenpeace, a world organization focused on helping the environment as saying, “In addition to increasing emissions, deforestation contributes directly to a change in rainfall patterns in the affected region, extending the length of the dry season, further affecting forests, biodiversity, agriculture, and human health.”

 Not only are the fires affecting the rainforest, but the people who reside within the region and the individuals who help protect nature across the world. Clifford Krauss, a writer with the New York Times, wrote an article titled “In the Amazon, Fires Steal Breath, but Smoke Smells of Money.” In the piece, he dictates that the natives of the forest and the nature supporters believe “The fires are considered an unmitigated disaster, not only posing immediate health threats but also devastating huge swaths of a forest that plays an essential role in soaking up carbon dioxide and helping to keep global temperatures from rising further.” With this knowledge, humans need to take extra precautions to protect the Amazon Rain forest. If we do not take care of our environment before ourselves, we might have a world that becomes a shell of what it used to be. 

Photo credit: Joao Laet/AFP/Getty Images

In addition, the surrounding political arguments that are taking place in the country of Brazil are impacting the forest in devastating ways. According to the article “Amazon Rainforest Fires: Everything we know and how you can help” at cnet.com, there was a major argument that took place on whether or not Brazil would have aid for the devastation. The article noted when the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, stated some troublesome opinions online about Brazil’s systems of helping the natives in the rainforest, Bolsonaro believed the statements were degrading. As a result, he told France as well the countries of Germany, Canada, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and America that Brazil would not have international help for the fires. 

Although the exact cause of the devastation has not yet been discovered, humans are at the center of the mystery. There are logging and mining businesses that work in the rain-forest who have to burn trees to free sections for working, as well as humans who are farmers or raising animals in the forest.

In order to save the Amazon Rainforest, all of us must consider more than just our surrounding communities; we have to look at the state that our world is in today and find a way to help those who are struggling the hardest for survival.

Pictured above: Fires in the Amazon Rainforest

Photo credits: Nacho Doce/Reuters