By tradition, the Brazilian President is the first leader to speak at the General Debate at the United Nations General Assembly, and on Tuesday morning it was the turn of Jair Bolsonaro, the outlandish, far-right, populist leader, who came to power last January. In what was just his second major address on the world stage—he appeared at Davos three weeks after his inauguration—Bolsonaro gave a predictably defiant defense of his country’s policies regarding the environment, especially the Amazon rain forest, sixty per cent of which lies within Brazil’s borders. For non-Brazilians, hearing Bolsonaro speak on the topic must have been a surreal experience (similar, perhaps, to hearing Donald Trump, yesterday in New York, tout himself as a champion of religious freedom). This summer, the Amazon’s forests went up in flames. But, on Tuesday, Bolsonaro asserted that the forests were “practically untouched,” and blamed a “lying and sensationalist media” for propagating fake news about their destruction. He also decried the notion that the Amazon is “a heritage of humankind.”

The period from June to December is the Amazonian dry season, and fires are a recurring phenomenon in the great South American wilderness, but the sheer number and intensity of the fires this year—there were more than seventy thousand separate blazes—was particularly alarming, seemingly adding sudden weight to the mounting evidence that a drastic cycle of climate change has definitively begun on the planet. Along with the Amazon’s firestorm, forest fires swept through the northern expanses of Siberia, while unusually high summer temperatures were recorded from France to Alaska and a Category 5 hurricane struck the Bahamas. But what makes Brazil’s fires especially troubling is that most of them were man-made—set in order to clear land for cattle ranches and farming—and, moreover, that they appeared to burn with the tacit consent of the Bolsonaro government. Since taking office, Bolsonaro has gutted the agencies tasked with defending the environment, slashing their budgets and severely limiting their functions. In August, he fired Ricardo Galvão, a physicist who was the director of the country’s prestigious National Institute for Space Research, after the institute published a report that concluded that the number of forest fires in Brazil since January represented an eighty-four-per-cent increase over the number recorded in the same period in 2018.

By mid-August, as shock and indignation at Bolsonaro’s inaction spread around the world, provoking admonitions from a number of international leaders, Bolsonaro spoke of the fires with scoffing indifference. He accused N.G.O.s and “greenies”—as he calls environmental activists—of having set the fires in order to “bring attention to themselves” and to “bring problems to Brazil.” It was a typical remark from Bolsonaro, whose leadership style bears comparison to that of Donald Trump, a head of state he admires. One of Bolsonaro’s favored slogans is “Make Brazil Great Again.”

In a number of ways, though, Bolsonaro trumps Trump. Last month, in the run-up to the G-7 summit in Biarritz, France, when President Emmanuel Macron implicitly criticized Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the situation, Bolsonaro told him tersely to stay out of Brazil’s domestic issues, and followed that up by insulting his wife, setting off an unseemly tit-for-tat between the two leaders. (Some of Bolsonaro’s officials joined in. The tourism ambassador, Renzo Gracie, a former mixed-martial-arts fighter, threatened to choke Macron.) And, after Pope Francis invoked the “blind and destructive mentality” of those behind the destruction of the rain forest, Bolsonaro evidently interpreted the remark as being about him, and told journalists, “Brazil is the virgin that every foreign pervert wants to get their hands on.”

Lest there be any lingering doubts about the cartoonishness of the Bolsonaro world view, his foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, who accompanied him to the U.N., claimed earlier this month that the fuss over the fires had been blown out of proportion by a campaign that had been “orchestrated by Brazilian groups that are systematically against the government” and “want to use any tools at their disposal to attack the government, even if this harms the country.” The remark was an allusion to environmentalists and indigenous-rights activists, whom Araújo has said are part of a Marxist plot. Such views are also held by a tranche of Brazil’s conservative armed forces, which has an influential role in the government. Bolsonaro, himself a former Army captain, has expressed nostalgia for the country’s right-wing military dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, and has filled his administration with military men, naming eight former senior officers to cabinet posts. His Vice-President, Hamilton Mourão, is a retired Army general, and although Mourão is more moderate than Bolsonaro on many issues he adheres to the idea that Brazil’s sovereignty in the Amazon must be aggressively defended.

By late August, Bolsonaro’s wisecracking rope-a-dope was not enough to halt the international fallout. Along with several major clothing brands, including the VF Corporation, which owns Timberland and the North Face, and the Swedish company H&M—both of which announced a temporary stop to purchases of Brazilian leather—Norway and Germany announced that they would suspend millions of dollars allocated for the U.N.-backed Amazon Fund, which seeks to fight deforestation and to balance conservation goals with sustainable development. Ireland and France, meanwhile, expressed doubts about ratifying a long-pending agreement between the European Union and the South American trading bloc Mercosur, which is dominated by Brazil. The spectre of economic punishment appears to have given Bolsonaro pause, because a few weeks ago, in a televised address, he expressed his “profound love” for the Amazon, and said that he was dispatching Brazilian troops to fight the fires. In response, Trump tweeted his support for Bolsonaro, whom he said he has come to know well, and who “is working very hard on the Amazon fires and in all respects doing a great job for the people of Brazil — Not easy. He and his country have the full and complete support of the USA!”

Finally, on August 28th, Bolsonaro declared a sixty-day moratorium on setting land-clearing fires in the Amazon. He also said that he thought he had come out well from his war of words with Macron, whose behavior, he said, had “awoken a feeling of patriotism” among many Brazilians. The country would develop its own strategies to deal with the Amazon. Olavo de Carvalho, an ultra-conservative philosopher and climate-change denialist who now lives in the Virginia countryside but is seen as Bolsonaro’s political guru, offered his approval. “No one knows what goes on in the Amazon,” he said. “It’s just too big to control. The only thing that works is what he is doing—sending the Army there. Legal measures, monitoring, none of that has any effect. It has to be occupied militarily. Amazonia is ours, and we have to assert national power there. End of story.”