“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
—Mahatma Gandhi
I’ve been wondering, and quite a lot lately, why it is that national governments do not listen to the indigenous people within their borders, especially when it comes to matters of the environment and the way human interaction is affecting those ecosystems. What I mean is, when we are sick we go to a doctor, when our car needs a repair we go to an auto mechanic, and when we need a haircut we go to a barber. Why then, when our environments are in such grave danger, are we not seeking the counsel of the indigenous people, whose vast knowledge on these environments goes back tens of thousands of years?
Modern climatologists have much to say about this too, they have the hard science on their side, but it is really the indigenous people of the planet who we should be listening to the most, those with the deepest knowledge and experience in the places where they have lived for millennia. We, the industrialized nations, are tearing up the planet at an astronomical rate, meanwhile the indigenous people who truly understand what’s happening are left sitting on the sidelines. This is about as wrong as it gets.
In May of 2018, my wife and I headed back to the Peruvian Amazon, exactly 14 years since my first trip in 2004 when I worked with the Shipibo shamans in the Upper Peruvian Amazon. They are a matriarchal culture, that is to say, the women pretty much run the show in the villages, and it is a magnificent show to watch. The women practice their indigenous medicine while singing their healing songs known as Icaros, but they also find time to weave and embroider the Icaro song patterns into a visual cosmology that is unique in the world. These song patterns are some of the most intricate and elaborate designs in the indigenous world, and you can see them for yourself by doing an Internet search for “Shipibo Song Cloths” and you’ll immediately see how magical these woven songs are.
On this most recent trip, we recorded yet another album of healing Icaros from the Flores-Agustin-Fernandez family of shaman/singers. They are a beautiful, gentle, and magical people, and their village is full of similar families. But there was a darkness hanging over the Shipibo in the months before we arrived, because of a Canadian trafficker who fell afoul of a local shaman. The Canadian shot and killed the shaman, and was himself immediately killed by a mob in the frontier town of Pucallpa, about an hour up the river from our village. To my mind, that’s just frontier justice—if you come to a foreign country and kill one of their elders, you’ll most likely get a similar response. This is a place where the police never go, but now they are swarming the villages, largely because the trafficker was a white Canadian. “This could hurt tourism,” they say, as they label the Shipibo “savages.” The Peruvian government has also put it in their gun sights to seize the Shipibo’s ancestral land, with a plan to redistrict it and sell it to the highest bidder.
Of course there are many cultural differences in Latin America compared to the United States, Canada, and Europe, not the least of which is how we communicate our beliefs and practices. The Shipibo are a very old shamanic culture that resides deep in the rainforest where they speak a dialect of the ancient Panoan language. The West, by contrast, is young, inexperienced, Judeo-Christian, and very naïve about most things indigenous and environmental. All of this aside, it is clear that in Peru, as it is in Brazil, the indigenous people are treated as less than citizens and are frequently abused and murdered without police investigations or proper judicial review. They are pushed to the marginal fringes of their shrinking domains, yet they are threatened with violence if they dare protest any of this abusive treatment.
All of this is very wrong, every way you look at it, because the Shipibo are peaceful and globally renowned for their remarkable healing abilities. People with terminal illnesses come here from all over the world, to this village in particular, to be healed in ways that Western medicine simply cannot address. Add to this their spiritual wisdom and biological knowledge of the plants, herbs, and animals in this region, and there is no other group more knowledgeable or capable of understanding and maintaining the health of the Upper Amazon ecosystem. As the largest tribal group in the area, the Shipibo are, quite literally, the greatest experts on everything around here.
Unfortunately in Peru, and most egregiously in Brazil, these countries have ignored the repeated requests of its own citizens and many foreign governments to protect their halves of the Amazon Rainforest and the many indigenous peoples who reside there. Add to this a newly elected, far-right president in Brazil, who has literally promised to destroy the Brazilian Amazon, and it becomes quite clear that the real savages in this battle are the politicians—not the indigenous people. The question for the rest of us then is, what actions can we take as global citizens to protect the greater Amazon Rainforest and her people, when these irresponsible host countries will not? Here are a couple things you can do, which are rooted in your economic power.
Let’s say you are like me, a person who loves a hamburger or a steak from time to time, but didn’t pay much attention to where the beef came from. I learned quite a while ago that most fast-food beef is now coming from South America, and specifically the Amazon region, where it’s cheap to raise and has very few health regulations overseeing it. That’s not good, for our personal health or the health of the rainforest, so if we all cut our beef consumption by half or more, it makes a huge difference. The Rainforest is continuously being cut down to create pastureland for fast-food beef to graze on before slaughter, and the cattle in turn create massive amounts of methane gas as a result (pork creates methane the same way). Methane is a far more dangerous greenhouse gas than all the emissions vehicles around the world, and although this is a staggering fact, it’s a true piece of science. These are the kinds of weird things that start to happen when you breed farm animals in the astronomical quantities we’re talking about. Just cutting your consumption of beef and pork, by half or more, is one of the most powerful things you can do for the planet. Really, it’s not that hard to do.
Let’s also take the darker angle that you really don’t care about the Rainforest because you believe that forests are meant to be cut down. Well, I came from a family of loggers so I’ve had this very conversation. Of course, some forests are grown and harvested for timber and that’s legitimate forest management. Right before I finished writing this story, I bucked up two alder trees in my friend’s backyard, my point being that I have personally cut down trees myself. The hard reality in the Amazon, however, is that the scale of destruction is causing a massive increase in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide because there are fewer and fewer trees to convert those gasses into oxygen. Combine that with the increase in methane from cattle and pork farming, plus the ancient methane that is being released from the Arctic permafrost, and we are breathing an increasingly toxic cloud of carbon gasses. And that cloud isn’t just lingering at the Equator or in the Arctic—it’s going everywhere, right into your backyard. So you see, we need the Rainforest just to breathe clean air.
Those two things—eating far less beef and pork, combined with protecting the world’s last great Rainforest are two of the most important things you can do prevent this global destruction. If we added the introduction of more affordable electric vehicles and radically more efficient gasoline vehicles, we might be able to stop, or at least slow the devastating effects of climate change.
These last 3 stories—from the Amazon, to the Arctic, and back to the Amazon, are looking at two very different ecosystems with radically different terrains, yet the inherent truths are the same: the plants and animals in these regions are inextricably connected to the land, the people, and the delicate balance of our planet. The melting of Arctic sea ice and permafrost, and the razing of the Amazon Rainforest, is just as detrimental to those in a city as it is to the people who live in those regions. Even if you don’t see it with your own eyes, or don’t feel a noticeable change in temperature, it’s still taking oxygen out of the air you breathe, and it’s going to get hotter and hotter as the waters continue to rise.
History has shown that when we ignore the wisdom of our indigenous people, it is always at our own peril. We can no longer take any corporation at their word, nor can we trust that they will abide by international or even moral law—they never have in the past and they won’t in the future. This must be stopped by individual decision making, by using your wallet as an economic ballot, and perhaps most importantly, by voting for people who recognize these environmental truths and advocate for strong action.
In contrast to all of these stories of destruction, there are also some very good things I have seen that show how people can have a very positive impact. Progressive people (some of whom are even politicians) in both the Amazon and the Arctic are promoting good, responsible eco-tourism, where people can travel within the Amazon Rainforest and the Arctic Refuge to learn about these magical places. There, people can interact with the wildlife in a safe way, learn the teachings of the indigenous people, and gain a deeper appreciation for the immense diversity of these places. I have stayed in eco-lodges in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon and I saw the river by boat, which employed local people and supported a regional tourist industry. Our boat captains spoke at least 3 different languages (probably more) and they were extremely informed in describing every part of the river we explored. This is just one small example, but it’s a big step towards making these huge areas accessible, safe, and most importantly, protected.
I also think it is entirely possible for these delicate environments to be maintained with small, sustainable micro economies, all of which are overseen by the people who live there, indigenous and non-indigenous alike. Economies that honor and protect the landscape, that do not allow oil, timber, or meat corporations to decimate them, can go on indefinitely. The extractive industries cannot do this, because they take finite resources and leave only destruction in their wake. What I have seen is an entirely different way to use the Rainforest and the Arctic, one that moves away from the extractive, corporate method, and moves towards a regionally controlled, sustainable economy. Perhaps there should also be a world body that is specifically assigned to look after these global resources, which would supersede the countries in which they happen to randomly exist? These are global resources after all, we all breathe the same air, and that air should not be destroyed by private countries or their corporations.
All intelligent people know that we are at a critical juncture in human history, where we must come to realize the interconnectedness of all life, and of our sacred relationship as stewards of the land, the sea, and each other. Places like the Amazon Rainforest, the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, the Central African Rainforest, the Southeast Asian Rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, and other delicate environments around the world must be protected from multinational corporations whose reckless abandon is literally destroying our planet, its animals, and our future as a species.
We must come to the realization that coal, oil, gas, and other fossil fuels are not the way a 21st-century world can function. Nor can we continue to consume toxic, industrial meat and think that our bodies are not being damaged by that as well. We won’t even make it to the end of this century if we don’t change quickly, and radically. That is the hard reality we must all face, together.