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By Raphael Tsavkko Garcia
Rarely has something so precious fallen into such unsafe hands. Since Jair Bolsonaro took the Brazilian presidency in 2019, the Amazon, which makes up 10 percent of our planet's biodiversity and absorbs an estimated 5 percent of global carbon emissions, has been hit with a record number of fires and unprecedented deforestation.
At the same time, those who have proved the most responsible guardians of the forest, are under increasing pressure and threatened by escalating violence. Since Bolsonaro came to power, there has been an increase in invasions of indigenous lands by loggers and miners, and seven indigenous leaders have been killed in land disputes.
In November, a group of Brazilian lawyers and human rights groups asked the International Criminal Court to indict Bolsonaro for inciting genocide against Brazil's indigenous people.
They argue that these communities are at increased risk of violence because "the means of existence of the indigenous peoples are grounded on their relationships to the land, the forest, wildlife and water," and that threats to the forest put them "at risk of falling victim to crimes against humanity."
'Bolsonaro Is Taking Away Our Future'
Bolsonaro, who has compared indigenous people to zoo animals and accused indigenous leaders of working to promote foreign interests in the Amazon, has repeatedly threatened to end the policy of land demarcation, whereby indigenous communities are granted the right to clearly defined territories.
He has also attacked the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) — the governmental agency for indigenous interests — cutting its funding and powers and forbidding its employees from speaking to the press.
At the same time, the right-wing president has scrapped environmental regulations and is set to legalize 300,000 illegally occupied rural properties — 86 percent of them in the Amazon territory and many of them commercial farming or logging operations.
"Bolsonaro is taking away our future," indigenous conservationist Olinda Muniz told DW. "A president who encourages genocide and does nothing to curb environmental disasters is a person who should never represent this country."
Indigenous Lifestyles vs. Economic Development
A recent study comparing Brazil, Australia and Canada pointed to greater biodiversity in areas administered by indigenous peoples and is just the latest research to suggest these communities are exceptionally good at preserving the land they live from.
Yet in Brazil, as elsewhere, their way of life has been under threat since colonialists first arrived from Europe and began exploiting the land's natural resources and imposing foreign ways of life on its people.
Now, the lawyers argue in their action against Bolsonaro that indigenous lifestyles are being portrayed as a problem in themselves, "hampering the national development plans," and "infrastructure projects, mining enterprises, logging activities and agribusiness ventures in forested regions."
Muniz and her husband Samuel Wanderley, both of the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe ethnic group, founded the Kaapora project in the Caramuru Paraguaçu indigenous territory in the Brazlian state of Bahia. They are restoring grazing land back to forest, protecting remaining trees and growing new ones, so the land can once more be a refuge for wildlife.
Now she fears that efforts like hers are under threat. "We have no guarantee of compliance with our constitutional rights," Muniz said. "Social movements are being attacked head-on, indigenous, black, environmentalists, landless workers, fishermen, etc."
The Kaapora project is one of many in Brazil through which indigenous communities, independently or in partnership with NGOs, are helping revive the forest and maintain traditional ways of life in the midst of modernity — combining traditional knowledge with new technologies and increasing independence from markets and governments that have rarely worked in their interests.
The Ashaninka in Acre state, for example, have established cooperatives to grow food and provide for their community. They, and groups like the Pataxó in Minas Gerais state, are also teaching non-indigenous communities about sustainable agriculture. By creating a space for dialogue with the external community, and young people in particular, they hope to pass on their respect for nature.
Staking out Their Own Land
Meanwhile, in southern Brazil, the Kaingang are working to reforest their land with araucaria, an indigenous tree which produces a fruit they can eat and sell, and that supports indigenous wildlife. For Marcio Kokoj of the Kaingang Guarani Indigenous Environmental Association, the Bolsonaro government feels like a throwback to Brazil's military dictatorship that murdered thousands of indigenous people, drove thousands more from their lands, and tortured many and enslaved others between 1964 and 1985.
"The greatest concern today is with the attacks on the demarcations of our lands, we therefore need to make self-demarcation," Kokoj said. "If it depends on Bolsonaro, he will open up areas for large-scale agricultural production, multinationals, mining. That worries us a lot."
Self-demarcation is when indigenous communities draw the boundaries of their own territory, often expelling illegal occupants, such as loggers.
Last July, the indigenous Munduruku from the Tapajós region in the Amazon state of Pará, kicked out illegal loggers who had invaded their territory which they began to self-define in 2014.
The Munduruku were armed with arrows, songs, war paint and "the wisdom of our ancestors," they said in a note to the Indigenous Missionary Council that made clear their intention to continue defending their own land if governmental institutions fail to do so.
Calling on the International Community
Kokoj too says the Bolsonaro government should not expect the forest's guardians to step aside without a fight. "We indigenous peoples, over the years and the governments, have created resistance that is still effective today," he said.
In defense of their land and culture, Brazil's indigenous communities have long allied with broader social movements, called out violations of their rights to international bodies, and above all, insisted on remaining in their territories despite threats and violence. Since Bolsonaro came to power, indigenous activists have taken the streets to assert their land rights and protest their treatment by the right-wing government.
But Kokoj stresses that support from the wider population of Brazil and the international community is vital.
The group of Brazilian lawyers lobbying the International Criminal Court says the prosecutor at the international tribunal in the Hague is expected to investigate their complaint. It remains to be seen if this will lead to an indictment of Jair Bolsonaro — and amount to the kind of international pressure Brazil's indigenous communities hope for.
Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.
- Brazil Moves to Open Indigenous Lands to Mining - EcoWatch ›
- Illegal Loggers Murder Amazon Forest Guardian - EcoWatch ›
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By David Konisky
On his first day in office President Joe Biden started signing executive orders to reverse Trump administration policies. One sweeping directive calls for stronger action to protect public health and the environment and hold polluters accountable, including those who "disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities."
Michael S. Regan, President Biden's nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, grew up near a coal-burning power plant in North Carolina and has pledged to "enact an environmental justice framework that empowers people in all communities." NCDEQ
By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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