San Francisco, CA – Human rights and environmental group Amazon Watch is this month celebrating its 10th anniversary of defending the Amazon rainforest and supporting its indigenous peoples against the impacts of industrial “development” on their lands.
But despite some key victories over the last decade, Amazon Watch Executive Director and founder Atossa Soltani warned that the Amazon rainforest and its surviving native communities are in greater danger than ever. She said: “Global warming, logging, mining, soy plantations, dams and the oil industry’s thirst for new reserves threaten to deforest, and degrade the majority of the Amazon rainforest in our lifetime. The destruction of the Amazon would have devastating global consequences given its critical role in regulating the Earth’s climate.
“National governments and international institutions need to prioritize saving the Amazon before industrial development and climate change push the rainforest’s ecosystems beyond the tipping point. They should start by declaring pristine areas and indigenous reserves in the Amazon basin off-limits to the extractive industries and by supporting environmentally-sound development that values the ecological services provided by the Amazon. The future of the planet depends on it.”
Amazon Watch was established in 1996 with the aim of uniting the environmental movement with the Amazon’s indigenous communities on the frontline of the battle to save the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
Those communities frequently suffer serious human rights abuses and the poisoning of the natural environment on which they depend as a result of oil drilling, mining, road-building and other large-scale commercial “development” on their lands. Deforestation accounts for about one quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the Amazon is in the grip of a second, highly unusual annual drought and scientists fear that the vicious circle of climate change and deforestation may already be having catastrophic repercussions for global weather patterns. By attempting to defend their ancestral rainforest homelands, these humble communities are providing a service to all humanity.
Over the millennia, native Amazonians have developed complex survival systems that allow them to live sustainably and in harmony with the rainforest, efficiently tapping its biological riches for all their needs including food, clothing, shelter and medicine. Scientists have also found that official indigenous reserves provide one of the most effective ways of preventing deforestation. Yet local communities’ views are rarely sought by national governments, transnational corporations and so-called development banks before the initiation of projects which will heavily impact their lives and lands.
Currently, Amazon Watch is working to protect a total of 18 million acres of rainforests, much of it pristine, in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Amazon Watch now has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and recently launched a fifth campaign, to prevent the continued dumping of nearly one million barrels of toxic by-products from oil drilling into a vast area of the northern Peruvian rainforest inhabited by the Achuar people, who until now have had one of the most traditional cultures in the Amazon basin.
Meanwhile, Amazon Watch’s Clean Up Ecuador campaign has helped to bring Chevron (formerly Texaco) to within 12 months of a judgment in a multi-billion dollar landmark environmental trial in Ecuador for similar toxic contamination there. The organization also has named the actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who starred as Pocahontas in the Hollywood blockbuster “The New World” as its Youth Ambassador. Earlier this month, Amazon Watch also held the organization’s most successful ever fundraiser.
Over the last decade, Amazon Watch achievements have included:
• For more than eight years, Amazon Watch has helped local indigenous federations thwart the efforts of U.S.-based Burlington Resources (now part of ConocoPhillips) to drill in pristine rainforests in southern Ecuador;
• Successfully lobbying the U.S. Export-Import Bank to reject $214 million in financing for the Camisea project in southern Peru and pressuring the Inter-American Development Bank to require safeguards as loan conditions and to improve its environmental and social policies;
• Achieving permanent protection for half-a-million acres of the Nahua-Kugapakori Indigenous Reserve and preserving a de facto moratorium on additional drilling associated with the first phase of the Camisea project in southern Peru;
• Leveraging Occidental Petroleum to withdraw from sacred U’wa lands in Colombia, implement a human rights policy, and commit to not entering Achuar lands in Peru;
• Encouraging the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to cancel a $200 million loan for Bolivia’s Cuiaba Pipeline, which bisected the Chiquitano forest, the world’s largest intact dry tropical forest.
The next decade is expected to be critical for the Amazon and its surviving native peoples. Amazon Watch aims to play a key role in protecting the rainforest and supporting its indigenous communities as they fight to protect the planet.
