False. The 2019 fires are way outside of the average: http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html

Also, what you call average is only the average over the past few years, which means: illegal loggers and ranchers burning the forest on purpose.

The true long-term average is a healthy forest with very few fires.

Can you point out where that page supports that claim?

> only the average over the past few years

That only reinforces in the point; if the numbers changed from the average a few years ago, why the sudden massive response just now?

The fires were man-made back then too and there was uproar about it, and the situation improved a lot. But even then deforestation was still ongoing. So it's a step back, meanwhile the deforestation rate never reached 0.

I heard the fires were up by 87% from last year, no matter the base rate, nearly double seems to qualify as "outside the average"

That article is from over a week ago, and it cites http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon, which has since been updated.

Indeed, people are burning more this year than they did in the past few years – any burning at all has always been unacceptable, but if the current spike is what it takes to finally create some international outrage and put pressure on Bolsonaro, then I'll gladly take it.

> any burning at all has always been unacceptable

It's a traditional farming practice that has been used all over the word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn

The idea is that you can burn a small place, cultivate it for a few years and then abandon it so the natural grow of the forest regenerate it. And some years later repeat the cicle.

When the population is small it's fine because the time between burn and burn was enough for the soil and forest to recover. When the population increase the time gets too small and the forest has not enough tome to recover, and after a few cicles you have problems like reduction of fertility, erosion and desertification.