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09 November 19
FOCUS: Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest
Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
Anderson writes: "One day in 2014, Belem, a member of Brazil's Kayapo tribe, went deep into the forest to hunt macaws and parrots. He was helping to prepare for a coming-of-age ceremony, in which young men are given adult names and have their lips pierced."
Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
Anderson writes: "One day in 2014, Belem, a member of Brazil's Kayapo tribe, went deep into the forest to hunt macaws and parrots. He was helping to prepare for a coming-of-age ceremony, in which young men are given adult names and have their lips pierced."
EXCERPTS:
Wildcat mining is less pervasive than logging, but it can be more insidious. Loggers usually harvest valuable trees and leave the rest; miners cut everything. Mercury, used in the refining process, leaves rivers poisoned, and the pollution can spread hundreds of miles downstream. The allure of gold attracts fortune-seekers, who bring prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and violence. “Letting prospectors into the Kayapo reserve is like leaving your children in the protection of a drug gang,” Barbara Zimmerman, a Canadian ecologist who has worked with the Kayapo for three decades, told me. In the past few years, according to environmentalists, several hundred thousand acres of the reserve have been destroyed or degraded by illegal mining and logging.
The destruction of Kayapo land is just part of what Zimmerman calls the “sacking” of the Amazon. In addition to the mining and logging, soy farmers and cattle ranchers have cleared huge tracts of forest, mostly by fire. Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, which tracks the damage, calculates that one-fifth of Brazil’s Amazonian rain forest—the world’s largest remaining “green lung,” which absorbs billions of tons of carbon dioxide—has been destroyed since the nineteen-seventies. Indigenous reserves serve as a bulwark against destruction, green islands amid industrial soy fields and clear-cut ranchlands. But the closer indigenous people live to whites the more vulnerable they are. In these places, all that stands in the way of the destruction of the Amazon is the ability of a few thousand indigenous leaders to resist the enticements of consumer culture. In Turedjam, that battle is being lost. “It’s like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been let loose,” Zimmerman said.
Thomas Lovejoy, an American biologist who for decades has been a preëminent authority on the Amazon, told me that the burning of forests, along with climate change, was disrupting the Amazon’s ability to produce rain for itself. “We’re now seeing historic droughts every four or five years,” he said. “The problem with droughts is that they dry up rivers and cause more fires, leading to more deforestation.” The Amazon, he noted, produces twenty per cent of the world’s rainwater. If the system is pushed too far out of balance, the forest will cease to be able to regenerate itself and turn into a savanna; a carbon sink nearly the size of the continental United States will become a carbon producer. “We’re really close to the tipping point right now,” Lovejoy said.
Bolsonaro, a former Army captain whose followers call him the Legend, is an unabashed racist, homophobe, and misogynist. A climate-change denier, he came to power with a vehemently anti-environmentalist message, supported by a powerful lobby known as “the three B’s”: Bibles, bullets, and beef, meaning evangelicals, gun advocates, and the agribusiness industry. Bolsonaro has complained for years that indigenous protections are a senseless brake on development. “The Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture,” he once said. “How did they manage to get thirteen per cent of the national territory?” Before he was elected, he described the Amazon as “the richest area in the world” and vowed, “I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians.”
During his first days in office, Bolsonaro, emulating Donald Trump, signed a flurry of executive orders dismantling environmental safeguards and protections for minorities. He reduced FUNAI to a subsection of a new family-and-human-rights ministry, led by an ultraconservative evangelical pastor, and stripped its ability to create reserves. (The Supreme Court recently overturned these measures, but FUNAI remains politically disenfranchised.) Bolsonaro also slashed the budget of the primary environmental agency, IBAMA, by a third.
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