NEW YORK - The world’s largest rainforest is on fire, and this “burning season” is even worse than last year’s.

The first week of September saw more fires in the Brazilian Amazon than in the entire month of September 2021. Last month, the fires were the worst in a decade.

These are not natural fires. They are part of an intentional – and overwhelmingly illegal – deforestation process to permanently convert forest to pastureland.

Over the past four years, the Brazilian government has been assisting this criminality by weakening environmental law enforcement agencies, undermining their ability to effectively sanction environmental crime and detect exports of illegal timber.

Who benefits? Powerful multinational businesses that source their agricultural commodities from ranchers and loggers operating illegally.

Who loses? Local communities sickened by smoke and displaced from their land, with their land rights defenders often threatened and even murdered to shut them up.

Readers may ask: how can I help?

Brazilian beef, leather, and timber sourced from illegal operations in the Amazon are laundered and sold on the legal market, and exported around the world. Your first thought may be to try to avoid certain products.

That’s fine when possible, of course, but ending our participation in this destruction is not really so much a matter of the individual purchasing choices we make. This is a large-scale problem, and the solutions have to be large-scale, as well.

It’s more about policy decisions than personal decisions. We need to push our countries’ governments to adopt and rigorously implement legislation to restrict the import of agricultural commodities linked to deforestation and rights abuses.

In other words, our political action is needed more than our shopping carts.