| Vanishing Forests, Endangered
People
Audubon Magazine
November-December 1992
An old Indian stands in the rain in northern
Argentina, amid the charred ruins of his village.
His name is Pa'i Antonio Moreira. Over his thin
sweater two strings of black beads crisscross
his chest like bandoliers, signifying that he
is a ñanderú, a shaman of his people.
They are among the last few Guaraní Indians
in this country, part of a cultural group that
once inhabited a forest stretching from Argentina
to the Amazon. Now only remnants of that forest
and its creatures and people are left.
The night before, government men in forest-service
uniforms torched the community's village. The
l,500-acre tract of semitropical woodland where
they lived is only a few miles from Iguazú
Falls, the biggest waterfall in South America.
Once sacred to the Guaraní, Iguazú
is now overwhelmed by tourists. Moreira's village
was burned to make way for yet another hotel.
The next Indian village to the south is also gone,
swallowed by the waters of a new reservoir. The
villages beyond that are no longer surrounded
by black laurel and ceiba trees, which sheltered
the deer and tapir the Guaraní once hunted,
but by silent forests of Monterey pine, imported
from California and planted by a nearby paper
company for its superior fiber content.
The old shaman's kinsmen huddle around a fire,
while the embers of their homes hiss and sizzle
in the rain. The people descend from a stubborn
band of Guaraní who refused to be evangelized
when Jesuits arrived here 400 years a go. Moreira
tells us that these ills curse the Guaranís
world because white men ignore the true way of
God. Only the Indian, he says, remembers how God
intended the world to be.
Then why, we ask, has God allowed the white man
to triumph, and the Indian to suffer?
He gazes at us from beneath heavy-lidded eyes
filled with loss and compassion. "The white
man hasn't triumphed," he says softly. "When
the Indians vanish, the rest will follow."
Throughout the Americas, great changes fueled
by visions of progress have swept away the habitats
of countless plants and animals. But entire human
cultures are also becoming endangered. During
the past two years, we traveled to 15 American
countries, from the United States to Chile, to
document this swift, often irreversible destruction.
Nations with growing, impoverished populations
strike a Faustian bargain with the developed world:
To create jobs and electricity for industry, they
borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign
banks. They build huge dams that flood thousands
of rural poor. To repay the massive debt, they
invite foreign companies to mine their timber,
gold, oil, and coal, or convert their farmlands
to produce luxury crops for consumers in North
America, Europe, and Japan. To ease pressures
on overcrowded lands, they allow poor settlers
to slash and burn their way into virgin forests,
where they clash with the indigenous people already
living there—including some of the last
uncontacted tribes in the hemisphere.
For centuries the Yuquí Indians of the
Bolivian Amazon roamed naked through jungles so
remote they thought no one else existed. Their
word for world translates simply as leaves.
"When we first saw the white people, we
thought they were the spirits of our dead ancestors,"
recalled Ataiba, the last of the Yuquí
chiefs. He recalled how his people had begun to
encounter strange things in the jungle—fresh
fish hung from trees, sacks of sugar, cooking
pots, machetes—all laid beside new trails.
One day, at the end of one of these gift trails,
Ataiba saw light-skinned people watching him.
After many months, the pale strangers, evangelicals
from the Florida-based New Tribes Mission,. convinced
Ataiba that they could offer safe haven from the
growing violence of confrontations with loggers
and settlers. One morning late in 1989, Ataiba
led his people out of the forest forever, to become
permanent wards of the mission village.
Often, on the heels of the missionaries, come
the forces of development. In Ecuador during the
early 1970s, the government contracted with Texaco
to build an oil industry in the Ecuadorian Amazon
and help bring the country into the global economy.
Until then, many natives there had never even
heard of a nation called Ecuador, let alone petroleum.
"We didn't know the sound of a motor,"
explained Toribe, a young Cofán leader.
The Cofán, who live along Ecuador's Río
Aguarico, were still hunting peccaries and monkeys
with blowguns. "We couldn't figure out what
animal could be making those noises." The
sounds were Texaco's helicopters. Soon settlers
streamed down the oil-company roads, changing
life irrevocably for the Cofán.
"With the petroleum companies came epidemics,"
recalled Toribe. "We didn't know flu, measles,
and these other illnesses. Many fled from here.
Those that stayed were finished. It was all contaminated.
There were fifteen thousand of us on this side
of the Río Aguarico. Now we are only four
hundred."
Oil from Ecuador, hardwoods from Bolivia, and
from Honduras to Costa Rica to Brazil, beef cattle
raised for export where forests once stood: We
had stumbled onto another kind of gift trail,
this one leading back to the United States. The
savanna surrounding Bogotá, Colombia, with
some of the finest soil in Latin America, produces
not food but bargain-priced roses, chrysanthemums,
and carnations to sell on street corners and in
supermarkets in the United States and beyond.
To meet the high standards of the international
marketplace, the blossoms, along with the women
who tend them inside plastic-covered hothouses,
are regularly gassed with pesticides. The chemicals
leak into the Bogotá savanna's streams
and aquifers, which are also being depleted as
business grows and more flowers must be watered.
In Honduras, mangrove forests lining the Gulf
of Fonseca's estuaries are threatened by modern
mariculture. Huge shrimp farms restrict local
fishermen's access to the crabs, mollusks, and
small fish they have netted for generations.
In Brazil, the biggest dam in the Amazon, Tucurui,
has displaced thousands of people and created
such mosquito infestations that thousands more
are leaving Tucurui was built to power aluminum
smelters owned by U.S., European, and Japanese
companies. The ore comes from the Amazon's largest
mine, which strips away hundreds of acres of jungle
each year to provide foils and cans.
In eastern Panama, the Bayano Dam was part of
a master plan to bring new industry to the capital
and, via its new road, open jungle frontiers.
Settlers quickly turned the jungle into cattle
pasture, threatening the survival of the forest-dwelling
Kuna Indians and creating massive soil erosion.
So much loose soil washes into Bayano's reservoir
that the dam's manager says eventually its turbines
will stop functioning.
On South America's second-biggest river, the
Parana, we watched men building the longest dam
in the world: Yacyreta, along the Argentina-Paraguay
border. More than $1 billion in World Bank and
Inter-American Development Bank loans was allegedly
diverted from the dam project to finance things
like Argentina's Falklands war. Now there's not
enough money to relocate the 40,000 people whose
cities and farms will be flooded. As much as $30
million was spent, however, on an elevator to
carry fish like dorado, a prized local species,
upstream to spawn. Unfortunately, the elevator,
built by North American dam contractors, was designed
for salmon, which go upstream, spawn and die.
Dorado need to return. And there's no down elevator.
While these huge projects often collapse under
their own weight, even small, well-intended plans
can falter if they don't transcend conventional
models of commerce. The notion that a "green"
market solution will allow both consumption and
conservation may be wishful thinking. In western
Brazil we visited a cooperative founded to save
both the rainforest and its people by harvesting
replenishable Brazil nuts for candy. But when
co-op members, who lack basic sanitation and electricity,
voted to pay themselves a living wage, the price
of their product rose above the world market rate.
In order to keep costs competitive, Cultural Survival,
the Boston-based nonprofit group that devised
the scheme, now buys most Rainforest Crunch nuts
from commercial suppliers who undercut the cooperative.
Our travels did reveal a few signs of hope: a
land-recovery program run by villagers in southern
Honduras, a proposal to put Kuna Indians in charge
of protecting the watershed of Panama's Bayano
Dam. But these projects are exceptions. Alone,
they are not enough to halt the momentous effects
of uncontrolled development. Sustainable development
must be contoured to local needs rather than imposed
from afar by economic forces.
When we reached the Strait of Magellan, residents
of southern Chile showed us great inland sounds
that soon will be dammed to power yet more aluminum
smelters—this time, Australian. On Tierra
del Fuego, they took us to ancient hardwood rainforests,
scheduled to be turned into fax paper by Canadian
and Japanese companies.
Finally, we stood with Professor Bedrich Magas
of Chile's Magellan University at the tip of the
Americas, looking out toward the growing polar
ozone hole. Magas reminded us that the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration had recently
discovered destructive chlorine over the northern
United States—just like that which was found
over Antarctica only a few years earlier. It was
a disturbing reminder of the warning of the Guaraní
shaman: What we do to the lives and lands of others
may ultimately determine the fate of our own. |
|
Selected Works
for
Sandy Tolan
Articles
First-Person Narratives
in Radio
Quintessential
Gloucester
Shoot to Maim
Vanishing Forests,
Endangered People
When
is a Handful of Beans Not Just a Handful of Beans?
Despair Feeds Hatred,
Extremism
Baseball's Chasm Between
Heroes
Audio Clips
 Oil
in Equador's Amazon
Equador's
Resource Battle I
Equador's
Resource Battle II |
