The War on Brains

We’re living in a world of fragile ignorance.

Jessica Wildfire
5 min readJul 15, 2021

The lungs of the world have cancer.

No, the Amazon rain forests don’t really produce 20 percent of the world’s oxygen. That’s a myth. Still, they pull huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Scientists describe them more like giant air conditioners keeping the planet cool. Without them, we’re done.

It’s actually more accurate to say the rain forests used to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. New studies show they’ve been emitting more carbon than they consume over the last ten years.

That’s bad.

You might wonder why the current president of Brazil has blasted ahead with deforestation despite common sense, clearing land for cattle and soy. Like everyone who makes decisions that defy logic on the surface, he’s motivated by money and power. The consequences don’t matter to him. It doesn’t even matter that soy farming in Brazil actually loses money when you account for the damage it does to agricultural potential in general.

Anyway, it’s not just Brazil. It’s everywhere.

Ignorance is on the rise.

We’ve declared a war on brains.

It’s hard to define what it means to be ignorant these days. After a lot of thought…

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