Taming fire let humans thrive. Now man-made flames in the Amazon threaten us all

The Amazon is burning, because of human actions. And once it's gone, we can never get it back.

A fire burns trees and brush along the road to Jacunda National Forest in Brazil.

And yet, we still seem so indifferent. The fires in the Amazon, cumulatively, have received less media coverage than the fire at Notre Dame in France this spring, for instance: Media Matters reported that the fire at Paris' historic church got 15 times the coverage that the burning rainforest has.

On Monday morning, the Group of 7 leaders agreed to fund firefighting measures with a budget of $20 million. Notre Dame raised 1 billion euros in a matter of days. Perhaps Notre Dame is an easier place to grieve: It's a human-made place of worship, a marker of a time in history, a work of art. It's an easy place to understand. The Amazon, though, is a dense, lush, sprawling landscape that spent millions of years evolving, home to indigenous people and a diverse ecosystem and, most important, one that many people never get to see in their lifetime. That's much harder to relate to. But maybe our ability to look away from disasters like this is a symbol of our own ambivalence about doing anything to fight the climate crisis in general.

Read the opinion piece from The Age by Shannon Stirone - “Taming fire let humans thrive. Now man-made flames in the Amazon threaten us all."