Prompted by an emailThis week I received an end-of-year email from Avaaz, showing the 2020 protests and projects with which the movement has been involved. Avaaz is a world wide protest community to which I belong. If you'd like to see what it's about before you read any further just click here. I looked especially at the segment about the pandemic's affect on the indigenous tribes of the Amazon, because I had taken part in a protest and fund raising project about that. I also wrote a post about it – Friday 9 September. Please click 'September 2020' in the archive list if you'd like to look. Covid hotspots and Avaaz reliefIn the Avaaz email was this map. The red dots are Covid hot spots. The blue areas show Amazon territories where Avaaz has given, and may still be giving, practical help. What sort of practical help? You may remember this picture set from my earlier post. (Please click a picture to enlarge it.) Looking furtherI decided to update and look a bit further into the Amazon-fires-covid-indigenous peoples issue. When dealing with groups like Avaaz I always search for some outside corroboration. About fires, first I went to Rainforest Partnership, a group working with local communities to preserve rainforest in South America. I read, 2020 Fire Season: the Amazon is Still Burning, a report written 3 December 2020 by Amalia Llano. Illustrating it is this break-your-heart fireground photo, followed by a NASA satellite picture depicting all the fires burning in the two previous weeks. And here's a bit of the text. 'In 2020, obscured by the ongoing pandemic, there has been next to no coverage or public alarm about this year’s fire season. But the fires in the Brazilian Amazon were up by 13% this year, making this the worst fire season in the area in a decade. Other Amazonian countries also report a rise in both the number and severity of fires this year. At the start of October, there were a staggering 28,892 active fires active in the Brazilian Amazon alone. These fires are burning deforested areas and farmland but, most worryingly, they are increasingly affecting protected areas. In Bolivia, one of nine Amazonian countries, more than 25% of this year’s major fires have burned in protected lands.' All that deforestation! Not good news is it? More lookingAfter searching a Mongabay story by Rhett Butler, (see the chart above) I next consulted VoxEU.org, the website of the Centre for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR). There I read Deforestation in Brazil is spreading COVID-19 to the Indigenous peoples by Humberto Laudares. He wrote it on the 3rd of November 2020. Here's an extract. 'The over 300 Indigenous peoples living within Brazil’s borders are at the crossroad between COVID-19 and deforestation, mostly in the Amazon region. NGOs have been vocal in arguing that deforestation, along with illegal mining, land grabbing, timber logging, cattle ranching, and even health workers and missionaries, are transmitting COVID-19 to native populations. In the first semester of 2020, coronavirus infected more than 20,000 and victimised more than 800 indigenous people.' There is a real scrap going on in Brazil between those who want to protect both the rainforest and the indigenous tribes who live in it, and the government and it's supporters who want forest clearance to allow industrial and profitable agricultural development such as palm oil farming. The original protest still openThe original protest, which was high focus in September and which I wrote about then, is still open. Here is what one of the leading Brazilian protesters has to say. President Bolsonaro is desperate to close a multimillion-dollar trade deal with the European Union, but with the forest ablaze, EU leaders are considering last-minute changes to build Amazon protections into the deal. This would force Brazil to clean up its act to trade with some of the world’s biggest economies. Let’s not leave the Amazon to burn -- add your name to call for Europe to act, and when this is huge, we’ll launch opinion polls and deliver our voices to key decision makers and the media. Diego Casaes To go to the protest site please click here. From afarI suppose the fact that I who live in far-off New Zealand and have not been to any part of the Amazon, should be emotively involved with an issue far beyond my shores may seem strange. And certainly I'm aware of an irony. My country was all temperate rainforest. Then European colonisers, my ancestors, cleared the land and farmed it, in the process often treating the indigenous Maori cruelly and unjustly. Now I'm protesting that Bolsonaro and his supporters are doing much the same. Acknowledging the irony and wishing my ancestors had behaved differently both to Maori and to the forest, I still want to protest and encourage others to do so. I worry, with all the emphasis on the new COVID surges in Europe, Britain and the US, that the harm being done to indigenous people of the Amazon will go unnoticed. Those indigenous peoples who have lived in the Amazonian rainforest for hundreds of years know how to live there in ways which are not destructive. They have developed their own cultures which death by pandemic and environmental destruction may well wipe out. Moreover there is the huge affect that such a vast area has on climate. Diminishing that, so many scientists say, will accelerate climate change with all its consequences. As this new year starts and continues, I will wish and protest, and hope others will do the same. □ New Year Greetings! John McInnes Friday New Year's Day 2021 References: click on a line of text Amalia Llano: 2020 Fire Season: the Amazon is Still Burning: 3 December 2020, Rainforest Partnership Rhett A Butler, 28 December 2020: How the pandemic impacted rainforests in 2020: Mongabay.com , Humberto Laudares: Deforestation in Brazil is spreading COVID-19 to the Indigenous peoples: VoxEU CEPR ##########
0 Comments
|
Welcome
|