Fire in the Amazon, climate change, and the limits of national sovereignty

Quinta Jurecic, Who Owns the Amazon?, NYTimes, Aug. 27, 2019:

The Amazon fires are a test case of sorts for how the climate crisis will strain the usefulness of seemingly simple concepts — like national sovereignty. Before calling up the military, Mr. Bolsonaro accused countries donating money to preserve the rainforest of wanting to “interfere with our sovereignty.” He also declared that the international condemnation he faced spoke to a “colonialist mentality,” criticizing what he saw as Mr. Macron’s encouragement for the G7, which does not include Brazil, to grapple with the problem on its own. These remarks speak to Mr. Bolsonaro’s nationalist politics — he came to power in part by decrying globalism — and they are overly simplified. But it would be a mistake to write them off completely.

The traditional understanding of the nation-state demands that — up to a certain limit — each nation has control over its own affairs. Climate change poses a problem for this framework: The burning Amazon affects not just Brazil but the whole world. (The portion of the Amazon in next-door Bolivia, for example, is also burning.) Does it really make sense, then, to defer to the sovereignty of the Brazilian government in addressing the problem? [...]

The problem is that, from the perspective of Brazil — and the other countries that may feel the brunt of this logic — this brave new paradigm risks becoming a very familiar story: The more powerful nations muscle their way in over the less powerful. [...] One of the puzzles of the current age is how a cadre of nationalist leaders are both struggling with the reality of crises spanning national boundaries and doing their best to double down on the idea of borders in the first place.