Sparks: Brazil’s election and the battle for the Amazon - podcast

Do not ask who will save the forest; ask instead what you will do when the men elected to save it discover it is cheaper to sell it, and the answer is already written on the ballot.

They call it a national election, as if the forest were contained within a border the way their theology is contained within a single earth, when every tree felled here breathes out its consequence across the whole of the infinite.

When you say the forest is a national resource, do you mean the nation owns it, or that the nation consumes it, and if the second, what precisely is left for the nation that comes after?

The rainforest is called the lungs of the earth by the same men who campaign on the promise to cut it down, which is rather like praising a man's breathing while holding a pillow over his face.

The speeches promise protection for the forest and the communities within it, but the structural fact is that the votes that decide the election are cast in the cleared fields, not under the canopy.

A forest protected only by the goodwill of the elected will be cut the moment the price of timber exceeds the cost of the fine, and no amount of campaign rhetoric will alter that arithmetic.

Things that are hateful: a campaign promise made in the shade of a tree that will be cut before the promise is broken; a ballot cast for the forest by a hand that has never touched its bark.

In Roraima they tell me the election will decide the fate of the forest, and in the market the price of beef does not change, and the two facts are the same fact spoken in different languages.

It is proposed, with the utmost sincerity, that the forest be preserved as a carbon offset for the very emissions that clear it, a circular economy so elegant that the trees will be grateful to be felled.