It’s so easy for us to think we are well-read and knowledgeable about other parts of the world and suddenly we can understand that we know so little. That’s how I felt when I read a recent article about farming in Brazil in one of the other farm papers.
I often thought Brazil was a big part of the problem of world-wide climate change, accepting images of farmers there clearing and burning Amazon forests. I got a new  understanding when I read the observations of Matt McIntosh, a Canadian travelling to the country as a Nuffield Scholar.
McIntosh said I was not wrong when I pictured Brazilian landowners clearing the jungle so they could plant crops but the reality is more complicated. During the latter half of the 20th century there were periods of high levels of deforestation. But he also notes that for many years now the Brazilian government has enforced regulations to preserve significant levels of the natural landscape. In the Amazon basin, landowners are required to keep a minimum 80 per cent of their land under forest. 
In the super productive province of Mato Grosso do Sul, 20 per cent of land must be covered by forest. There are also requirements to protect areas along slopes, waterways and mountaintops.
Despite the restrictions, Mato Grosso do Sul is one of the most productive areas of the world with a long, hot growing season that produces multiple crops each year and a productive area for growing beef cattle.
More than one speaker at the conference the Nuffield Scholars attended, highlighted Brazil’s  biodiversity as well as significant investment in biofuels. Indeed, McIntosh said, several times carbon was identified as a “northern hemisphere” issue.
It got me thinking of my own country and its story. As I look out my window, there are open fields where once the landscape was covered by trees. My own great-great-grandfather, as a 17 year-old settler, helped clear the land on his farm north of here on the southern edge of Bruce County. 
The land around my house was cleared by other Scottish settlers. They didn’t have bulldozers in those days 160 years ago. They cleared the land a few acres a year with axes, cutting trees and piling them to burn. Over time the land became bare. 
Eventually some realized that the land they had cleared should have been left in trees. I remember one hilly area near our farm north of Lucknow being reforested when I was just a lad. Yet in Ontario, municipal prohibitions against clear felling met consistent and fierce resistance, McIntosh points out.
As well, criticisms of carbon-specific policies are persistent. One of the most popular policies of Conservative Leader Pierre Polievre, for instance, is opposition to the carbon tax that the Liberal government has declared. People oppose the tax because it increases the price of filling up the gas tank on their car, even though most of us (not farmers, to be sure) get more money back in cheques or direct deposits in our bank accounts.
It’s late fall now, yet as I write this column on Halloween, the temperature reads 20 degrees. This is pleasant but it’s not natural. During the summer large parts of northern Canada have burned. This never gets mentioned by people like Polievre and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith who seem to think climate change is not a problem.
It’s been easy to shift the blame for climate change to Brazil, but if Ontario (and much of the U.S.) had never been cleared of trees would we have climate change today? 
What McIntosh’s observations show is that we need to look at our own situation before we blame others. ◊