SÃO PAULO, Brazil — When I first set foot in the Amazon rain forest, in the Anavilhanas Archipelago, northwest of the city of Manaus, I experienced something that can only be described as awe: an overwhelming sense of connection with the universe. Cheesy, I know. But this is something that we rarely feel — only upon seeing a clear tropical night sky, or the ghostly flickering of the northern lights or even the vastness of a French Gothic cathedral.

From the outside, the Amazon is a massive, undistinguished canopy of trees, but once you’re inside it, it is indeed a “monumental universe,” in the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It has a strikingly layered structure: The soil lies beneath an entanglement of roots, mosses and decomposing leaves; pale trunks appear and disappear as they climb up into the lush foliage. The tallest trees can reach up to 200 feet, almost the height of the towers of Notre-Dame. And now it is their turn to burn.

The first sign that the Amazon would not have a good year came this month, when the government sacked the head of the National Institute for Space Research, the physicist Ricardo Galvão, who was unpatriotic enough to release data showing a 278 percent jump in deforestation in July compared with the same month the previous year. President Jair Bolsonaro said that he should have been warned about such evidence, which could cause the country great harm internationally. “This is not a posture from a Brazilian, someone who wants to serve his country and is concerned about Brazil’s businesses,” Mr. Bolsonaro said. He suggested that the agency could be lying to make the government look bad.

By then, however, a number of satellite images had emerged showing truly alarming numbers of fires across the Amazon: dozens of smoldering patches of scorched earth, clouding the dark green landscape. Soon they were followed by a more concrete image of a local firefighter offering water to a thirsty armadillo, prompting outrage across the globe. (Later, in an interview, the firefighter explained that the photo had not been taken in the Amazon, but rather in a nearby grassland region.)