Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
forests remove carbon from the atmosphere, reducing global warming, and keeping
forests intact also protects watersheds and soil quality beyond the areas themselves. As
things stand, neither the Brazilian government nor the inhabitants of these areas receive
any compensation for this, although perhaps in the future new markets in carbon and
environmental services will fill the gap. In the meantime they should be protected, and
the international community should be willing to pay most of the costs toward this,
which to an extent is already happening.
The future
It is actually possible to feel
optimistic
about the future of the Amazon, especially
when comparing the situation now to that of thirty years ago. Deforestation, while
still a problem to be watched closely, is at a manageable level. Crucial players, like the
Brazilian president, the ministry of the environment, the World Bank and the scientific
community inside and outside Brazil, are stressing environmental safeguards and the
importance of reconciling conservation with development, the opposite of their
positions a generation ago. Increasing areas of the Amazon are being put under strict or
partial protection, and, astonishingly, 22 percent of it has been demarcated and ratified
as
indigenous reserves
. Perhaps most encouraging, a state government -
Acre
-
running on an explicitly environmentalist platform has been wildly successful in
attracting investment and resources to a remote part of the western Amazon.
Still, there is some way to go. The murder of American missionary
Dorothy Stang
in 2005 was a salutary reminder that going up against ranchers and illegal loggers in
much of the Amazon is still potentially lethal. Stang was killed because she was trying
to protect local smallholders from ranchers by forming them into an association and
pressing for the creation of a sustainable development reserve. The international outcry
at her murder forced the Brazilian government to act, and her killers, including -
unprecedentedly - the rancher who commissioned the murder, were eventually tried and
convicted a few months later. But Stang's death was an indication of how far there is still
to go when only the international spotlight could make the justice system deliver.
It is still too early to say whether all this will be enough in the long term. Even if
Brazil gets its act together, the fate of the Amazon is not only determined within Brazil.
Global
climate change
is already having an impact in the Amazon. But if things come
as far in the next 25 years as they have in the last 25, and if the pressure is kept up, the
satellite images may in the future be showing recovery, as well as loss.
Indigenous peoples
Today, there are around 300,000 indigenous people living in Brazil's
Indigenous
Territories
(Terras Indígenas), mostly in the Amazon region, spread between more than
two hundred tribes speaking a hundred and eighty languages or dialects. When the
Portuguese first arrived in the sixteenth century, there were probably over five million
indigenous inhabitants, and today over 800,000 Brazilians claim indigenous ancestry.
The opening up of first the centre-west region in the 1950s with the construction of
Brasília, and then the Amazon from the 1960s, was an unmitigated disaster for Brazil's
indigenous peoples. They were dispossessed of their lands, and one of the consequences
of the chaotic settlement of new frontiers was the spread of diseases, which brought
many groups to the verge of extinction. The military regime regarded indigenous
peoples with open racism: the “Indian Code” (Estatuto do Índio), which the military
drew up in 1973 (and which is still technically in force today, although widely ignored),
explicitly said it was a transitional set of legal regulations to be enforced until indigenous
tribes were assimilated, and indistinguishable from other Brazilians. In the Amazon
especially, many non-indigenous people in the areas around indigenous reserves are still
openly racist - a sad legacy of their forebears who migrated there a generation ago.
