Deforestation Is a Crime

The world doesn’t agree on many things, but one of them is that global deforestation is a problem. If deforestation were a country, it would be of climate-warming pollution, after the United States and China. (It would also be a terrible place to live—bulldozers everywhere and no shade to speak of.) Parts of the Amazon now emit more carbon pollution than they capture because of deforestation, . Knowing about a problem is, of course, different from knowing what to do about it. Two years ago, the world watched some 40,000 fires , more than twice the usual rate, producing that they darkened the sky of São Paulo, Brazil, hundreds of miles away. The fires risked damaging the roughly 3 million species that live in the Amazon—or, worse still, triggering a feedback loop of dieback in the forest. These fires were mostly man-made: Farmers and ranchers were so that they could expand their cattle operations. World leaders Brazil to end the fires and offered their support, but , the country’s president, .