The
last stand of the Amazon
The
Observer (London) April 3,
2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/03/last-stand-of-the-amazon
The last
stand of the Amazon
Novelist
Edward Docx has spent almost a
decade
travelling
to the Amazon, watching
as
multinational
companies ravage the land he
loves.
Here is his
heartfelt dispatch on the
forest's
final
frontier - still home to as many
as 100
tribes of
uncontacted Indians
By Edward
Docx
In the
forest, there are no horizons and
so the
dawn does
not break but is instead born in
the
trees - a
wan and smoky blue. I twist in
my
hammock.
The total darkness, which has
been
broken only
by the crazy dance of the
fireflies,
is fading
and now shapes are forming -
branches,
fronds,
vines, bushes, leaves, thorns,
the
soaring
reach of the canopy, the matted
tangle of
the
understorey. The crazed clamour
of the night
- growls,
hoots, croaks - has died away and
for a
moment
there is almost hush. This is
also the
only time
of cool and I can see thin
fingers of
mist
curling through the trunks and
drifting
across the
river beyond. A butterfly passes
in
the
quavering grace of its flight.
Then,
suddenly,
the great awakening begins and
the air
is filled
with a thousand different
songs,
chirps,
squawks and screeches - back and
forth,
far and
near, all around. So loud and so
raucous
and so
declarative of life is this
chorus that
nothing
anywhere in the world can prepare
you for
it. I am
camped deep in the Brazilian
Amazon with
my
guide.
Like most
people, the first time I arrived
in the
Amazon, in
2003, I knew almost nothing about
it.
I had only
a vague first-world notion
of
"deforestation"
and this being bad. I did
not
know why,
specifically, it was bad, or for
whom,
or how, or
in what way any of this
actually
mattered.
But in a place called Puerto
Maldonado,
a
forest-frontier town in
south-eastern Peru,
a woman
told me a story about a scientist
who
disappeared
in terrifying circumstances. And
I
knew that I
was at the beginning of a
long
process of
self-education.
In the past
few months, the Amazon has made
a
return to
the news for several reasons.
In
February,
startling aerial footage of
uncontacted
tribes on
the Brazil-Peruvian border,
brought to
us via the
great Brazilian anthropologist,
José
Carlos dos
Reis Meirelles, was released (you
may
have seen
the footage on the BBC's Human
Planet).
A
subsequent letter from the
Peruvian government
"recognised
the situation of the peoples
living
in
isolation and/or initial contact"
and
promised,
for the first time, that five
new
reserves
for indigenous communities were
"in the
pipeline".
We shall seeŠ
In March,
three tribal leaders arrived in
London
to make
their case against several
huge
hydroelectric
dams being built in Brazil
and
Peru, which
they argue will force their
people
from the
land and threaten their way of
life. And
within the
past few weeks, Peruvian
security
forces have
launched an unprecedented
operation
to destroy
the unlawful gold-mining dredgers
that
are now
killing off river habitats by
pumping up
river-silt.
Part of the
reason we struggle to understand
the
region is
that there is so much to take in.
And
because
there has been some (partial)
good news
on the
headline problem - deforestation
- it has
faded in
our collective consciousness in
the past
few years.
So it's worth stepping back
and
reminding
ourselves of some of the
fundamentals.
The area of
the Amazon rainforest - roughly
2.3m
square
miles - is larger than Western
Europe and
the forest
stretches over nine countries:
Brazil,
Peru,
Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador,
French Guyana,
Guyana,
Surinam and Venezuela. There
are
approximately
1,250 tributaries that service
the
main river,
17 of which are more than 1,000
miles
long. The
river is bigger in volume than
its six
nearest
rivals combined and discharges
into the
ocean about
20% of the total freshwater of
all
the rivers
in the world. Roughly a fifth of
the
earth's
oxygen is produced in the
Amazon
rainforest
("one breath in five" as a guide
once
put it to
me) and more than two-fifths of
all the
species in
the world live there. You can
find
over 200
species of tree in a single
hectare of
Amazon
rainforest and one tree can be
home to 72
different
species of ants alone. Over
its
4,000-mile
length, no human bridge crosses
the
Amazon
river.
Ignorant as
I was, the most surprising
discovery
when I
first visited was that oil is one
of the
main
resurgent threats to the region.
Since my
first visit
to Peru in 2003, the amount of
land
that has
been covered by oil and gas
concessions
has
increased fivefold - almost 50%
of the entire
Peruvian-owned
Amazon. This means that
the
government
has effectively sold off half of
the
rainforest
it owns for the specific purpose
of
oil and gas
extraction in return for
taxes,
bonuses,
royalties - 75% is forecast by
2020.
Every time
there is oil exploration, there
is
major
disruption and destruction to the
forest,
starting
with seismic testing and
following
through
with helicopters, roads, oil
wells, crews
and so on;
each development brings a chaos
of
unplanned
settlement and more
deforestation. And
inevitably,
whenever oil is found there
are
catastrophic
spills and accidents. A lawsuit
is
being
brought to court by members of
the
indigenous
Achuar tribe for contaminating
the
region.
Health studies have found that
98% of
their
children have high levels of
cadmium in
their
blood, and two-thirds suffer from
lead
poisoning.
There are
hundreds of Indian groups from
one end
of the
forest to the other - many of
them now
enmeshed in
legal cases or "integration
projects"
or other
demoralising fiascos - but those
that
most often
capture international
attention
(ironically)
are the uncontacted. There's
some
dispute as
to what exactly is meant by the
term.
Beatriz
Huertas Castillo works out of
Lima and
(along with
José Carlos dos Reis
Meirelles in
Brazil) is
one of the people who knows most
about
the
subject, having spent much of her
life
travelling
in, researching, documenting
and
writing
about the very remote areas these
peoples
inhabit.
"The
uncontacted are indigenous
peoples," she
explains,
"who, either by choice or by
chance,
sometimes
as a result of previous
traumatic
experiences,
sometimes not, live in
remote
isolation
from their national societies.
There
are at
least 14 such tribes in Peru. We
think 69
in Brazil.
Maybe 100 in the Amazon area as
a
whole."
The best
way to think about the remaining
tribes
in 2011 is
to imagine a series of
concentric
circles,
all of which interact on each
boundary.
There are
the tribes that stay on their
own
homelands
in the forest (or seek to do so),
but
who have
regular relations with the
outside.
These
retain a strong tribal identity,
but they
are coming
to know the world all too well;
they
will travel
to fight legal battles for
their
territories
and their children will leave for
the
cities.
Then there are a good number of
tribes
(or parts
of tribes) who have been
contacted, but
who have
very circumscribed dealings with
the
outside
world; while no longer in
isolation,
these live
(or try to live) as they always
lived.
Then, in
the heart of the forest, there
are these
few
remaining uncontacted peoples.
They may have
heard
rumours from their grandparents,
but they
are among
the handful of peoples left alive
on
the planet
who have next to no idea of what
the
world has
become. They live as they have
done for
thousands
of years - before the internet,
the
world wars,
the United States, the
Tudors,
Christ,
Aristotle or Abraham.
"I spoke to
Mashco-Piro women when they
were
first
contacted," says Castillo. "And
they were
terrified
of disease, of being slaughtered,
of
their
children being taken into
slavery. In the
past, every
encounter has bought terror for
them
- they have
no immunity to our diseases and
they
were
thought of as animals, even
hunted. And now
they see
the loggers and the oil companies
coming
in a little
further every year. And for them
it's
the same
thing so they flee into
neighbouring
territories."
Then
there's the ongoing damage caused
by illegal
logging,
and of course the cocaine
problem.
Besides the
loss of the trees themselves, it
is
the
incursions and what follows that
have the
most
impact. (Although it's important
to note
that there
has been a victory of sorts in
Brazil
- the
mahogany trade, in particular,
has been
tackled.)
It is estimated by the UN that
coca
plantations
in the area of the Peruvian
Amazon
increased
by roughly 25% between 2003 and
2008.
Leaving
aside all the other issues that
swirl
around
narcotics, the way the cocaine
base is
prepared
leads to the dumping in the water
of
millions of
gallons of kerosene, sulphuric
acid,
acetone,
solvent, and tonnes of lime and
carbide.
The
extraction of gold is equally
toxic because
of the use
of mercury.
But it's
what the explorer, writer and
Amazon
expert John
Hemming calls "the bloody mess of
the
dams" that
is causing the latest round
of
acrimony,
fear and dispute. A series of
new
hydroelectric
dams (more than 100 in total)
are
planned
across Brazil and Peru, including
the
most
controversial of all - the Belo
Monte
Project on
the Xingu river, which is
intended to
be the
world's third largest
hydroelectric plant.
It was to
raise awareness of these that
the
indigenous
leaders toured Europe last
month.
These
really caught me out. Surely a
good idea, I
thought,
but, sadly, it's not so
straightforwardŠ
The
problems, as Hemming explained,
are these
that: they
will flood the territories of
the
tribes; the
dams release vast amounts of
the
greenhouse
gas methane, due to
rotting
vegetation;
they release all the carbon in
the
forest that
is destroyed to make way for
them;
they bring
further roads and colonisation
in
their wake;
they change the flow and run of
all
the river
systems, which affects untold
numbers
of aquatic
species, not least the fish that
so
many people
in the Amazon eat, meaning that
they
will have
to import more food, meaning
more
roads, more
beef, and so grimly
on.
It is
important to acknowledge that
not
everything
is getting worse. Some of
the
campaigning
in the past 20 years has worked
and
there are
cautious grounds for hope and
good
reasons to
continue. When, in 2006, I was
in
Manaus, the
great river city right in the
heart
of the
Amazon, I heard contradictory
accounts of
progress
and regression. Paulo Adario
is
a veteran
ecologist who lives there. He
is
probably
one of the individuals to have
done most
in the
service of conservation alive
today, and
he is happy
to bring me up to
date.
"Since the
2004 peak of 27,000 sq km of
forest
destroyed,
matters have improved with regard
to
deforestation,"
he says, when I call him.
"Last
year we
lost 6,500 sq km. You can
say
productivity
is better with cattle and with
soya.
We're
seeing more yields in existing
areas that
have
already been cut. You can also
say that the
Brazilian
government's approach to
the
uncontacted
people is very enlightened. And
that
- yes - the
satellites have helped combat
illegal
logging:
there have been arrests and maybe
we are
winning the
mahogany battle."
The 6,500
sq km lost last year is still an
area
more than
four times the size of Greater
London.
Adario is
also very worried about
imminent
changes in
the laws in Brazil, which will
once
again relax
the strictures against
forest
development.
"They are going to send out a
big
message
that if a law does not work for
you, then
don't feel
you have to respect it. Only an
idiot
would
follow the rules in the forest if
all his
competitors
were making fortunes by
ignoring
them."
Time on the
river is like time at sea. It's
not
measured in
minutes, but in the way the
light
changes the
colour of the water. At dawn,
there
are mists
and the river appears almost
milky. By
noon it is
the colour of cinnamon. And then,
in
the
evening, when the trees seem
almost sinister
in the
intensity of their stillness, the
low sun
shoots
streaks of ambers and gold from
bank to
bank before
the dusk rises up from the
forest
floor and
the shadows begin to stretch
and
everything
turns to indigo.
One such
evening, we went to visit a
fisherman
whose
grandfather had been among the
first of his
tribe to be
contacted. His own sons were
wearing
football
shirts and his eldest was
training to be
a guide.
Using his son as an interpreter,
he put
it like
this: that the Amazon matters
because
right now
it is where humanity - you, me -
is
making its
biggest decisions: raw, hard,
critical
decisions.
We shouldn't think of these
threats as
"issues",
but rather as daily actualities,
real
and kinetic
and witnessed - actualities that
have
an impact
first on the lives of his
children, but
eventually
on the lives of ours, too. To
have no
view, I
realised as I left, amounted to
much the
same as
being a hypocrite.
I am not
much of an anti-capitalist, nor
am I
much of an
environmentalist. Sure, I
recycle, but
in some
ways I have a great deal of
sympathy for
the
governments of South American
countries. I've
talked to
their officials and - believe me
- it's
all they
can do to stop themselves choking
on
their
fairtrade coffee when they hear
people from
Europe and
North America telling them how to
use
their
country's resources after
centuries of
cutting
down all of our own
forests,
exterminating
Indian populations from coast
to
coast and
drilling for oil. And let's not
forget
that
President Lula actually reduced
Brazil's
poverty
rate from 26.7% in 2002 to 15.35%
when he
left office
in 2009 - that's 20 million
people's
lives
changed.
But the
bottom line is certainly not a
bank - it
is communal
human wellbeing in concert with
the
rest of the
species on the only planet we
have -
or are ever
likely to have. Making profits
while
endangering
people's lives and livelihoods
is
immoral,
and it is happening in the Amazon
today.
It doesn't
have to be that way. We can do
better.
