Two weeks ago I blogged about the outstanding cast of rainforest guardians working at Amazon Watch, who over the last few months I have had the opportunity to get to know as an Amazon Watch volunteer. In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, I’d like to tell you about the real rainforest guardians – the indigenous peoples who call the Amazon their home, the people who know the Amazon intimately as a kindred being, not just a place of far off beauty and power. I’d like to tell you why it is important that I, Amazon Watch, and everyone promoting an environmentalist agenda, make the foundation of our activism a strong partnership with the indigenous peoples who still retain an authentic, sustainable connection to the ecosystems we hope to save, nurture and preserve.
It helps if we begin by acknowledging our own relationship with the Amazon out here in the blogosphere: It is as distant as a Google Earth satellite view of South America. As it turns out, however, even miles above the planet, we can deduce the important role indigenous peoples of the Amazon play in preserving the rainforest. If we look at a satellite picture of the Amazon rainforest basin overlaid with a map of indigenous owned land in the Amazon, it is hard not to notice that the indigenous-held land is green with forest while much of the surrounding land is deforested and brown. Fortunately, indigenous territories comprise more than a quarter of the Amazon basin, which means that all this land is in the hands of environmentally competent stewards. Without the many successes in the growing indigenous rights movement establishing indigenous title to many important ancestral territories, the outlook for the preservation of the Amazon might be significantly gloomier than it is today.
The indigenous of the Amazon have been excellent environmental stewards for thousands of years. One of the many challenges that come with living in the Amazon is its notoriously poor soil, which is quickly leached of most of its nutrient value. However, throughout the Amazon basin a different kind of soil, terra preta do Indio (black soil of the indigenous), can also be found, which is extremely fertile. Chemist Bruno Glaser marvels at the pre-Columbian Amazonian indigenous culture that created terra preta: “They practiced agriculture here for centuries. But instead of destroying the soil, they improved it – and that is something we don’t know how to do today.”
Geographer William Woods estimates that terra preta do Indio constitutes as much as 10% of the Amazon rainforest basin, an area twice the size of Great Britain, much of which is scattered on the near hilltops running along the Amazon’s many waterways. The indigenous have rendered all this land sustainable for agriculture by building a soil that, some two thousand years after its creation, continues to build as much as an additional centimeter of depth each year.
Scientists recently made a further discovery that calls to mind the veins of terra preta tracing the rivers of the Amazon basin. In 2008 a team of anthropologists published their discovery of an intricate network of towns and mega-villages connected by a sophisticated grid of roads dating back at least 1500 years. The network is estimated to have been home to thousands of indigenous citizens of what has been described as “one of the earliest urban civilizations.” Thus, prior to the upheaval caused by European colonization and disease, the indigenous of the Amazon maintained sustainable, large scale, settled agrarian societies in the rainforest for thousands of years.
According to Survival International, today indigenous rainforest guardians in the Amazon number 940,000 who together belong to some 350 to 400 distinct tribes. Other estimates set the number at more than 30 million when people from other traditional, rainforest-dependent ethnic groups are included, such as fisherfolk, rubbertappers, Maroons, and Quilombolas. In Bolivia, indigenous people still make up a majority of the population, and in Peru, they make up approximately 45% of the population. However, the disastrous toll on indigenous populations did not end with Conquistadors; in the last century, the Amazon has lost approximately 100 tribes due to the same forces imperiling the rainforest itself. Therefore, while the indigenous represent a significant demographic that is learning to translate its ecological wisdom into political power, the valuable contribution they offer the rest of humanity is as vulnerable to devastating loss as is our natural wilderness.
Given the weight of the indigenous peoples’ history in the rainforest, their deep knowledge of the rainforest ecosystem, their success maintaining sustainable societies within the Amazon, their substantial numbers and landholdings, the indigenous of the Amazon are much more than a good cause – they are a leading force in the movement to achieve balance and harmony in human society’s relationship with the environment.
In Part II of this three-part series, I will offer a couple of examples of visionary indigenous leadership in the global environmental movement and I will also discuss a serious blind spot concerning indigenous rights that we must overcome in building a strong partnership among all human beings in fulfilling our stewardship role in our global and regional ecosystems.
