There is a global national security crisis going on right now, the most urgent in human history. You may not have heard about it, because it hasn’t been mentioned in presidential debates, and there are no prominent op-ed columnists calling for war over it.

It’s not Iran’s nonexistent pursuit of a nuclear weapon. It’s not the array of terrorist groups who kill fewer people a year than childbirth. And it’s not Russia or China, who, for all the malevolence of their governments, still spend a fraction of what the US government invests in its military and meddle in far fewer countries. Rather, this crisis is entirely about extractive industries’ determination to cripple the natural world for profits, and one South American leader’s determination to speed that process up.

The election of far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil last year sent tremors of fear through many communities for a variety of reasons. Among them were environmentalists and climate campaigners, who worried that Bolsonaro’s planned push to further open up the Amazon rainforest to economic exploitation could be disastrous. They warned that his plan to accelerate the deforestation of the Amazon, an enormous carbon sink and cradle of planetary biodiversity, could finally send it past an irreversible tipping point that would see it eventually die off and become a desert. This would not only be catastrophic for all life in South America, but would make it impossible to keep global warming within 1.5°C and would further heat the planet on top of our regular emissions.