His specialty, usually, is speed records over long distances. The Italian Paola Gianotti, for example, holds the record for the fastest round the world cycling: 29,430 kilometers in 144 days approved in 2014. But this time, with this trip to Brazil, she did not try to beat any record: she wanted to use her notoriety to show something else to her tens of thousands of subscribers on Instagram.
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She wanted to show what is happening in the Amazon, this drama that we often watch from the sky, with satellite images: the massive deforestation of the lungs of the planet, a deforestation that nothing seems to stop.
The latest published figures, those for February tell us that that month, 322 km² of forest were still razed in the Amazon, this is 62% more than a year ago in February 2022. To make these figures concrete , Paola Gianotti therefore embarked on the bike4brasil operation, an operation which consisted of traveling 1,200 kilometers in the state of Mato Grosso, in the Amazon, one of the most affected by deforestation.
At the start, she left with her racing bike to show the forest, the deforested, cut-off areas, this is what she did moreover daily via her Instagram account, telling the story of the snakes which cross under her wheels, the fields of soybeans as far as the eye can see, the deep ruts left in the ground by the monsters which cut down the trees in four seconds flat. And then over the days, it was the people she showed, the inhabitants, those who have lived in these forests, and these forests for generations, centuries, and who have not waited so long to oppose although harm to bulldozers.
She describes, for example, her meeting with the Xavantes Indians who speak of these white men who arrive, take the land, set up huge farms there and produce to export to us, to Europe, enough to feed the quantities of beef and chicken that we eat. “With this experience, I understood in my flesh how much the choices we make have an impact thousands of miles away. I understood to what extent each of us has in his life, his movements, his diet, his consumption in general, the power to act. A way of telling the most pessimistic that we are not condemned to be spectators.