Xingu National Park, Brazil
IN 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish
slavery — a profound moral stain for a nation that prides itself today on being
a multiracial democracy.
During the long 19th-century struggle against slavery, at a time when
abolitionists in Britain were protesting the forced transfer of millions of
Africans from their homelands, Brazilian leaders denounced the global
abolitionist movement for interfering in the country’s internal affairs.
More than a century later, the same right to noninterference in
internal affairs is again being invoked, this time by the agribusiness
interests defending Brazil’s right to strip and burn what remains of the
planet’s tropical rainforests.
Brazil did not ban slavery for moral or ethical reasons. It did so
because the emergence of capitalist manufacturing made slavery more expensive
and inefficient than wage labor. But today, there is no attempt to rethink an
economic model based on destroying forests — and emitting greenhouse gases — to
produce and export livestock and minerals.
On the contrary, Brazilian agribusiness, thanks to powerful
congressional representation and the neglect of the executive branch, is
pushing for a new forestry law that would condemn vast areas of rainforest to
extermination.
The law, currently under consideration by a committee in Brazil’s
Senate, would represent an ecological calamity.
The Amazon region, which seemed infinite only a few decades ago, is
now facing the prospect of extinction. Grim scientific prognoses have come to
pass in the form of disasters like the unthinkable droughts of 2005 and 2010
and the great floods of 2009. And in the last two years, the country has been
plagued by a record number of forest fires, which not only reduce the forest
area but also dry out the air and expose even more areas to the risk of fire.
That’s what happened with the Xingu National Park, in the state of
Mato Grosso, in the center of the country, where more than 10,000 forest fires
were recorded in 2010. Preliminary statistics indicate that as much as 10
percent of its forest area may have been destroyed in the last two years.
In only a few minutes, one such fire completely destroyed the Kisedje
village where, a few years before, the supermodel Gisele Bündchen and the actor
Leonardo DiCaprio explored the rainforest and showed their support for river
preservation.
When Xingu National Park was established in 1961, its founders placed
the headwaters of the rivers outside the park’s boundaries. At the time, nobody
suspected that the forests could be destroyed. But in only 50 years, the
impossible has come to pass: almost 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has
been destroyed and even more has been severely degraded.
The park, home to Brazil’s first large Indian reservation, was meant
to project an idealized image of a nation able to protect ethnic diversity;
today it is evidence of the country’s incapacity to protect its natural
heritage.
Xingu has become a green island surrounded by soybean farms and cattle
ranches. The process has made the area’s climate hotter and drier. This has
created fires incomprehensible to the Indians, whose ancient culture depends on
agriculture by means of controlled fires. But they no longer have any control.
“Fire escapes now. It doesn’t stop,” Chief Auaulukumã, the leader of the Waura
Indians, one of 16 ethnic groups who live in the park, told me in September.
The burning of the forest has a profound impact on the Indians’ lives.
“The forest is our supermarket, where we find everything: wood for building our
houses, thatch for our roofs, sticks to make arrows, fruit and animals for our
food,” Chief Auaulukumã said. “And it’s all getting farther and farther away
because the fires are killing the forest near our village.”
Projections that seemed apocalyptic at the end of the 1980s — that the
forest would disappear by 2030 — are now coming true. According to the World
Wildlife Fund, at current rates of deforestation, 55 percent of the Amazon rainforest
could be gone by 2030.
Meanwhile, government officials in Brasília are on the verge of
slashing government programs to recover damaged forests and preserve existing
ones. The congressional majority, representing the agribusiness elite, accuses
the environmental movement of being subservient to foreign interests and of
trying to reduce the competitiveness of Brazilian commodities.
Like the attacks on abolitionists more than a century ago, the
criticism of outside interference in Brazil’s affairs is today being cynically
used to protect an immoral law.
The confrontation is paralyzing the country and delaying the adoption
of laws and practices that would permit sustainable development and economic
growth.
Back then, political paralysis delayed the end of slavery by decades.
Now it is allowing the destruction of the last great equatorial forest on the
planet, with consequences for Chief Auaulukumã and the Indians of Xingu but
also for temperatures and rainfall throughout Brazil and across the region.
It’s history repeating itself, the second time as tragedy.
Leão
Serva is a journalist and a former editor in chief of Diário de São Paulo. This
essay was translated by Benjamin Moser from the Portuguese.
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