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A string of recent events indicates that Amazonian deforestation and violence against environmental activists are on the rise.

The Brazilian Congress’s lower house approves a bill that weakens protection of the rainforest-which may explain the drastic increase in deforestation, as land clearers anticipate amnesty for their crimes.

Given Brazil’s historical disregard for the Amazon rainforest’s global importance, and the legislature’s evident lack of commitment to resolving the issue, a strong and long-term executive response is urgently needed.

In the last few weeks, a series of major events has signaled the urgent need for constructive change to Brazil’s current policies regarding the Amazon rainforest. On May 19, 2011, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) released satellite images indicating that deforestation increased from 103 km2 in March and April 2010 to 593 km2 in the same period of 2011, a sixfold increase from a year ago.[1] Not long after, on July 1, 2011, the INPE announced that this increase was not just a temporary aberration: deforestation in May 2011 stood at 268 km2, twice the amount of clearing as in May 2010.[2] On May 25, 2011, leading forest conservationist José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva were killed in the Amazon state of Pará; this event was followed by the murders of environmental and land reform activists Adelino Ramos on May 28 and Obede Loyla Souza on June 15.[3] And on the same day as da Silva’s murder, Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, the National Congress’s lower house, voted 410-63 in favor of a bill that would allow individual states to lower the legal reserve requirement, the percentage of land that a landholder in the Amazon is obligated to preserve as rainforest.