Do you remember when you learned at school how the Conquistadores disembarqued in Latin America and began to end whole civilizations of aborigins? How they exchanged little mirrors for precious stones or resources, brought in deseases that killed the locals, used the superiority of weapons to conquer, emprison, enslave, kill, or push them into other lands?
Do you remember when you learned how the Native Americans were persecuted, pushed out of their lands, killed, emprisoned?
Are you thinking thanks God this is over, that such a thing belongs to the past, and let's see how we can repair the damage done, honoring the few remaining ones, may be doing postal stamps with their images, showing their handcrafts in art galeries, providing them free zones so they can run casinos?
Well, I have some bad news.
I just learned that what I thought was business of the past centuries - is actually very current. Happening today.
According to Amazon Watch, a environmentalist organization, there is illegal logging in four of the five indigenous reserves set aside for uncontacted peoples in Peru. These indigenous tribes by choice have not been in regular contact with the outside world. The common cold or flu is often fatal to them because they have not had previous exposure to the diseases and have not developed the appropriate immune defences. Illegal loggers brought such diseases to the Nahua tribe in the 1980s and more than half of them died. While logging is the most urgent threat to these isolated indigenous communities, oil and gas exploration has also become a significant problem.
Last month the Inter-Ethnic Association for Peruvian Jungle Development, AIDESEP, applied to the courts for a ban on oil exploration and drilling in parts of the Peruvian Amazon inhabited by uncontacted tribes. Enforceable land rights would go a long way to helping indigenous people in Peru. But keeping extractive industries like loggers out is an enormous challenge for any country. Brazil has struggled with this, largely unsuccessfully, for decades. "Logging is a multi-billion dollar industry in Brazil -- 80 percent of which is illegal, according to the government," says Bill Laurance, a tropical forest ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution, in Balboa, Panama.
Deforestation rates have slowed in the past couple of years because of a crackdown on illegal logging, Laurance told Tierramérica. That crackdown came after the 2005 murder of U.S.-born nun Dorothy Stang, who had been helping local people oppose illegal logging in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. More than 100 people were arrested in a multi-million-dollar illegal logging network, including 40 people working for IBAMA, Brazil's federal environmental law enforcement agency.
Slowing deforestation in the Amazon is an enormous challenge. The rise of so-called "carbon markets" offers some real hopes, if a country like Brazil can obtain credits for "avoided deforestation" and the corresponding reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, according to Laurance. Brazil is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases resulting from deforestation. The World Bank recently announced a 250-million-dollar pilot fund to pay tropical countries like Brazil for preserving their forests. Avoided deforestation is an inexpensive and simple way to slow climate change and brings additional benefits, including preservation of ecosystem services and biodiversity.
