1) It is dry season in the region, and wildfires are a normal occurrence. 2) Wildfires are up compared to the same month last year, but still below the historical average. 3) Brazil already has strict environment protection laws which trump even property rights. In the Amazon region, for example, 80% of the area of any property must be preserved with native vegetation. No developed country even comes close.

The reason there is so much hyperbole about the situation in Brazil is both political and economic.

Economically, the current administration has cut funding to questionable NGOs, which used to take the money and do nothing productive, or even worse, engage in biopiracy. This has sparked strong reactions from those used to receive Brazilian taxpayer money. European politicians fake outrage, but their positions can be explained by the recent Mercosur-EU agreement, which has generated a strong reaction by local producers, used to European protectionism.

See France, for example. Macron is simultaneously criticized by both the left and the right, and is trying a political win with local producers and greens, even appealing to a photo of an Amazon wildfire taken 20 years ago by a photographer who died in 2003 to put blame in the current Brazilian administration [2].

Politically, this is only generating such a big reaction because of who's in charge of government in Brazil. The media worldwide tends strongly to the left, and any opportunity to criticize a right-wing administration is not wasted. I'm not saying any government should be above criticism, but things have to be done rationally.

1) If one refers to wildfire monitoring data [3], it can be easily seen that the worst years were in the 2002-2007 range, at levels twice as bad as the recent years. The country was then under a left-wing administration, and the current media and political reactions were nowhere to be seen.

2) Bolivia has much more lax environment protection laws, and is currently facing a way larger wildfire problem, probably the largest in its history. You hardly see anything about it in the media, except sometimes as a footnote in a story about Brazil. No European president is threatening their sovereignty; no one says their president is the destroyer of the Earth.

3) The previous (impeached) Brazilian administration cut environmental protection funds in 2015 from R$ 6b to R$ 1b. There was no outrage. Yet somehow otherwise reasonable people think the Amazon was destroyed in 7 months by the current administration.

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-bra... [2] https://factcheck.afp.com/prayforamazonas-thousands-people-a... [3] http://queimadas.dgi.inpe.br/queimadas/portal/estatistica_pa...