essential role played by the nutrient cycle in maintaining rainforests. • develop skills in .. Student Resource Page 5 Understanding the rate of deforestation in Brazil. • A data activity to aid . in km2 since Remember should be '0' . then highlight positive and negative – and a summary exercise. Activity. 1.
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- The bloody cost of Amazon deforestation
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- The bloody cost of Amazon deforestation | Benjamin Dangl | Opinion | The Guardian
In , when he was 7, the Surui rose up to drive settlers out of the forest. The hamlet is named after a white settler who built a homestead here in the s. The cleared land was taken back by the Indians in the wake of the revolt; they built their own village on top of it. The demarcation of their territory, however, could not keep out the modern world. And though the Surui were forced to integrate into white society, they derived few benefits from it. A shortage of schools, poor medical care, alcoholism and steady depletion of the forest thinned their ranks and deepened their poverty.
This problem only increased in the late s, when the Surui divided into four clans and dispersed to different corners of the reserve, a strategic move intended to help them better monitor illicit logging. Instead, it turned them into factions. At age 14, while attending secondary school in Cacoal, Almir Surui began showing up at tribal meetings at the reserve.
Three years later, in , at 17, he was elected chief of the Gamep, one of the four Surui clans, and began looking for ways to bring economic benefits to his people while preserving their land. He spent three years in college, but he kept his ties to his people. Almir got his first big opportunity to demonstrate his political skills a couple of years later. Almir and other tribal leaders soon realized, however, that the Indians were receiving almost none of the promised money and material. In , he confronted the World Bank representative and demanded that the lender bypass FUNAI, the intermediary, and give the money directly to the tribes.
In Porto Velho, Almir organized a protest that drew 4, Indians from many different tribes. Then, in , the young chief was invited to attend a meeting of the World Bank board of directors in Washington, D. Twenty-three years old, speaking no English, Almir and another Brazilian rain forest activist, Jose Maria dos Santos, who had joined him on the trip, checked into a Washington hotel and ventured out to find something to eat. They walked into the first restaurant they happened upon and pointed at random to items on the menu.
The waitress laid a plate of sushi in front of Almir and a chocolate cake before his colleague. For the next week, he says, the two ate all their meals at a chicken rotisserie near their hotel. Back home, Almir began reaching out to the press, religious leaders and sympathetic politicians to publicize and support his cause.
Powerful government figures came to see him as a threat. I refused," Almir tells me. He also focused on bringing the Surui back from near extinction, advising families to have more children and encouraging people from other tribes to settle on Surui land; the population has risen from several hundred in the late s to about 1, today, half of what it was before contact. It is not one of poverty versus riches, but survival in the face of annihilation.
Soon after we arrive in the Surui villages to observe the mapmaking project, Almir leads me through a hodgepodge of thatched and tin-roofed structures surrounding an unkempt square of grass and asphalt. A dozen women, surrounded by naked children, sit on the concrete patio of a large house making necklaces out of armadillo spines and palm seed shells. A broken Honda motorbike rusts in the grass; a capuchin monkey sits tethered by a rope.
The bloody cost of Amazon deforestation
A bristly wild pig, somebody's pet, lies panting in the noonday heat. The village has a shabby, somnolent air. Despite Almir's efforts, economic opportunities remain minimal—handicraft selling and cultivation of manioc, bananas, rice and beans. A few Surui are teachers at the reserve's primary school; some of the elders collect government pensions. With the encouragement of Almir and a handful of like-minded chiefs, the Surui have begun exploring economic alternatives to logging.
Almir leads van Roosmalen and me on a trail that wanders past his village; we are quickly swallowed up by the rain forest. Almir points out mahogany saplings that he has planted to replace trees cut down illegally.
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The Surui have also revived a field of shade-grown coffee started decades ago by white settlers. His "year plan" for Surui development, which he and other village chiefs drafted in , calls also for extraction of therapeutic oils from the copaiba tree, the cultivation of Brazil nuts and acai fruits and the manufacture of handicrafts and furniture. There is even talk about a "certified logging" program that would allow some trees to be cut and sold under strict controls. Profits would be distributed among tribe members, and for every tree cut, a sapling would be planted.
After half an hour, we arrive at an Indian roundhouse, or lab-moy , a foot-high, dome-like structure built of thatch, supported by bamboo poles. Almir and two dozen other Surui built the structure in 15 days last summer. They intend to use it as an indigenous research and training center.
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He has no illusions about the difficulty of his task, realizing that the economic alternatives he has introduced take time and that the easy money proffered by loggers is hard to resist. It's the most divisive issue that the Surui have to deal with. Messages have been sent: We all have children that we need to take care of.
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We stop unannounced at an Indian village at the eastern edge of the reserve. A logging truck, with five huge hardwoods stacked in back, is parked on the road. We walk past barking dogs, chickens and the charred remains of a roundhouse that burned down the week before in a fire that was started, we are told, by a 6-year-old boy who had been playing with matches.
Joaquim Surui, the village chief, is taking a nap in a hammock in front of his house. When we inquire about the truck, he fidgets. That lumber truck was the last one we allowed. It's broken down, and the driver went off to get spare parts. Almir Surui doesn't expect much official help.
Although FUNAI, the Indian affairs agency, is charged with protecting natural resources within the reserves, several former FUNAI officials are said to have ties to the timber and mining industries, and the agency, according to indigenous leaders and even some FUNAI administrators, has been ineffectual in stopping the illegal trade. As for Almir Surui, he is on the road constantly these days, his work funded by the Brazilian government and various international organizations, particularly the Amazon Conservation Team.
He says he gets barely four days a month at home, not enough to keep in close touch with his community. But for others, a different kind of progress is necessary if the planet is to survive. As Chico Mendes explained just days before his death in , he wanted to "demonstrate that progress without destruction is possible". In fact, just six months earlier, in November at an environmental conference in Manaus , Brazil, he told the audience: Just two weeks before he was killed, Mendes also spoke hauntingly about the likelihood that he would be murdered for his activism: Amazon rainforest Deforestation Environmental activism comment.
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The bloody cost of Amazon deforestation | Benjamin Dangl | Opinion | The Guardian
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For a decade local photographer Rodrigo Baleia has documented the beauty and destruction of the Amazon basin from above. Call of the wild: