How Dare We?

As thousands of world leaders and business elites prepare to fly in — each contributing to the event's massive carbon footprint — it becomes clear that COP30 is less about saving the planet and more about political spectacle. How can a climate conference justify deforestation? How can leaders preach sustainability while enabling destruction? COP30 should have been a symbol of global commitment to the Amazon. Instead, it is exposing the deep contradictions of modern climate politics

- ANGSHUMAN KAR The writer is Professor, Department of English and Culture Studies, and Director, Centre for Australian Studies, the University of Burdwan

As world leaders prepare to gather in Belém, Brazil, for the COP30 climate summit, the Brazilian government is bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest to make way for a massive four-lane highway. The road, spanning over 13 kilometers (8 miles) through once-pristine wilderness, is being justified as a "sustainable" solution to ease congestion. In reality, it is an environmental disaster — one that starkly contradicts the very purpose of the climate conference it is meant to serve.

The destruction is overwhelming. Towering trees, home to countless species, have been reduced to piles of logs. Wetlands are being drained and covered by concrete. What was once a thriving ecosystem, crucial to absorbing global carbon emissions and maintaining biodiversity, is now under assault by those very men who should have taken more care of it.

Many postcolonial eco-critics have repeatedly argued that constructing a binary between nature and humans misleads environmental activism. When nature is destroyed, it is not only nature that suffers but also the people who live in harmony with it and depend on it for their survival.

The highway construction project through the Amazon rainforest is similarly causing immense harm to the people of that region. Newspaper reports have revealed that for locals like Claudio Verequete, who lived off the land harvesting açaí berries, the consequences are devastating. His livelihood has been wiped out, and he has received no compensation for the loss.

Worse still, the highway won't even serve his community — it is separated from the region they live in, and designed for trucks and foreign visitors, not for those who have lived there for generations.

If someone in his village falls ill, they will still have no direct route to medical care. "One day, someone might come with money and say, 'We need this land for a gas station or a warehouse.' What will happen to us then?" he asks.