Rainforest Resources

Amazon River Dolphins Being Slaughtered for Bait

2010-07-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

Amazon river dolphins being slaughtered for bait
AP –

By BRADLEY BROOKS, Associated Press Writer – Sat Jul 10, 4:01 pm ET

RIO DE JANEIRO – The bright pink color gives them a striking appearance in the muddy jungle waters. That Amazon river dolphins are also gentle and curious makes them easy targets for nets and harpoons as they swim fearlessly up to fishing boats.

Now, their carcasses are showing up in record numbers on riverbanks, their flesh torn away for fishing bait, causing researchers to warn of a growing threat to a species that has already disappeared in other parts of the world.

"The population of the river dolphins will collapse if these fishermen are not stopped from killing them," said Vera da Silva, the top aquatic mammals expert at the government's Institute of Amazonian Research. "We've been studying an area of 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) for 17 years, and of late the population is dropping 7 percent each year."

That translates to about 1,500 dolphins killed annually in the part of the Mamiraua Reserve of the western Amazon where da Silva studies the mammals.

Da Silva said researchers first began finding dolphin carcasses along riverbanks around the year 2000. They were obviously killed by human hands: sliced open and quartered, with their flesh cut away.

The killings are becoming more common, researchers and environmental agents say. Even the government acknowledges that there is a problem. It's already illegal to kill the dolphins without government permission — as with all wild animals in the Amazon. But little is being done to stop it.

Less than five agents are tasked with protecting wildlife in a jungle region covering the western two-thirds of Amazonas state, which is more than twice the size of Texas, according to the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), the enforcement arm of the Environment Ministry.

"It's a matter of priority, and right now the government is focusing on deforestation," said Ibama's Andrey Silva. "The killings of these dolphins exists — it's a fact."

The dolphins are attractive to anglers for their fatty flesh that is a highly effective bait for catching a type of catfish called piracatinga.

Consumption in neighboring Colombia is driving the slaughter. Some 884 tons of the fish came from Brazil in 2007, according to the Colombian Institute for Rural Development. That jumped to 1,430 tons in 2008 and spiked to 2,153 tons in 2009.

Simple economics exacerbates the problem: Killing dolphins is free, and their meat is valuable. Using the flesh from one carcass, fishermen can catch up to 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of piracatinga. According to da Silva and other researchers, they can sell the catfish for 50 cents per kilogram, translating into $550 for just a few nights' work — about double Brazil's monthly minimum wage.

"It's attracting a lot of poor people to this region to kill the dolphins and make easy money," said Antonio Miguel Migueis, a dolphin researcher with the Federal University of Western Para since 2005.

So far it's impossible to quantify the exact impact fisherman are having on the river dolphins — little research has been done to study the killings or even the overall population of the dolphins in the Amazon.

But activists warn that waiting for exhaustive studies could mean the dolphin population would be irreversibly devastated by the time the work is complete.

"This is most definitely a threat to the future of this river dolphin species," said Alison Wood, with the England-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. "This is a relatively new threat, but clearly an extremely serious one."

Migueis said he warned Ibama and other authorities numerous times about the dolphin slaughter, but his reports fell on deaf ears.

Growing up to 8 feet (2.5 meters) long and weighing as much as 400 pounds (180 kilograms), Amazon river dolphins are the largest of four species known to exist in South America and Asia.

Their genetic siblings have already died off elsewhere: The Yangzte river dolphin in China was declared functionally extinct in 2006, the victim of pollution, overfishing and increased boat traffic.

Meanwhile, the International Union of Conservation of Nature lists the Ganges river dolphin in India as endangered, and the Irrawaddy river dolphin in Bangladesh as vulnerable.

Scientists believe river dolphins likely arrived in the Amazon during the Middle Miocene era 16 million years ago, when ocean levels were high around the world, and the sea inundated what is now lush rain forest.

For centuries they have been revered by locals and protected by myth. According to one tale, the dolphins transform into handsome men and leave the water at night, seducing and impregnating local women before returning to the river. Many simply consider it bad luck to kill them, given their supposed magical attributes.

But today, the quick payoff is trumping legend and superstition.

"Killing the dolphins is a fast and easy way for the fisherman to make money. It costs nothing but time," Vera da Silva said. "It's ugly because these dolphins have a folkloric value in the Amazon, and all that is disappearing for the sake of using them as bait."

___

Associated Press Writers Jessica Lleras in Bogota, Colombia, and Stan Lehman in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.

(CNN) Social Media Can Help Save the Planet

2010-06-13T15:38:00.000-07:00

May 24th

Greenpeace is well-known for taking direct action in the name of saving the environment, but key to its campaigning now is the collective power of the Internet and social media, says Greenpeace's executive director, Kumi Naidoo.

Naidoo was talking to CNN about a recent campaign to stop Nestlé using palm oil sourced from plantations that it says are responsible for deforestation, primarily in Indonesia.

Palm oil is used in a variety of consumer products, from chocolate to washing powder, and is used by numerous companies across the world, not just Nestlé.

According to Greenpeace and other activist groups, rising demand for it has led to virgin rainforests being cleared to make way for new plantations.

Central to the Greenpeace campaign was an online video posted in March -- a mock Kit Kat chocolate bar advert that shows an office worker biting into a bloody orangutan's finger instead of a piece of chocolate.

The video got more than a million hits, drawing attention to the issue and public scrutiny of Nestlé policy. Naidoo says the attention was in part because the company at first tried to ban the video for copyright infringement.

The Swiss multi-national subsequently received numerous complaints about its palm oil policy on its Facebook and Twitter pages.

Less than a month after the video was first shown, Nestlé stopped all purchase of palm oil from Sinar Mas, one company Greenpeace claimed was causing deforestation in Indonesia.

Nestlé made the announcement in an April letter addressed to Greenpeace, and also reiterated its existing green credentials: a commitment to a moratorium on the deforestation of rainforests, its commitment to use only certified sustainably sourced palm oil by 2015 and a pledge not to use suppliers that provide blends of palm oil from non-sustainable sources.

Naidoo says in future Greenpeace will continue to work with companies, not just chastise and shame them through public campaigns.

"We've got lots of dialogue going on with a range of companies. Even with Nestlé we had been talking with them, but if talk does not deliver the results, we have to create the possibility for millions of people who care about the environment to send a clear message," said Naidoo.

"Those [companies] that don't have products that are sold to the public, the challenge there is slightly different, but when you have a company that sells a product directly to the global public you have a greater ability to leverage things more quickly."

Rainforest Clash in Panama signals larger debate

2009-05-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

By David Ariosto

CNN

KUNA YALA, Panama (CNN) -- Hunched over a campfire in eastern Panama, Embera tribesman Raul Mezua chanted a song his grandfather taught him when he was a boy. The words are memorized, passed down from an aging generation to a new group of tribal youths. "The song means a lot to me," Mezua told CNN, the fire's dying embers splashing a red glow across his face. "But I don't know what it means." It's not just the song but their language and culture that Mezua and his tribe fear losing as deforestation from logging and cattle ranching threatens the rainforest that is part of their identity.

But recent trends could usher in a welcome reversal for Mezua and his tribe. Rural workers are migrating toward cities in search of jobs, and forests are re-emerging where now abandoned farms and cattle ranches once flourished, according to a 2009 report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Such "secondary" forests in the tropics can rapidly grow in areas once cleared for logging and cattle ranching if left alone, said Joseph Wright, senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "After about 20 years (of being left alone) the forest will be about 60 feet tall," he said.

Deforestation and re-growth in Panama may reflect a snapshot of a bigger picture involving rainforests throughout Central America. With more than three-quarters of people across the region now living in urban centers, the United Nations expects rural farming and population growth -- the usual culprits behind deforestation -- to dwindle.

Some call forest re-growth a victory in the climate crisis. Trees consume carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat within the Earth's atmosphere. "Biology is the only way we can remove carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere," Wright said. "There's no way to do it faster than to let tropical forests re-grow on abandoned land."

Others say threats to primary forest, or original jungle, is the real issue and that its loss can cause irreparable damage to the surrounding ecosystem.
"Places in Colombia, places in Central America, places in Mexico, places in many of the Andean countries are the last bunkers, the last bastions of hundreds of unique species in each place," Lider Sucre, director of Panama's Museum of Biodiversity, told CNN. "If you replant 10 times as much forest but you lose these last large pockets, you lose a huge amount of biodiversity forever and ever."

The value of primary and secondary forests is a debate heating up within the environmental community as new woodlands begin to wrap themselves around barbed-wire fences that still dot cattle-driven landscapes across Panama.

"We have to make that distinction, that fundamental difference, between re-growth and the original forest," Sucre said. "Re-growth is only a shadow in terms of the diversity of life within it." In places like Panama's Kuna Yala, a semi-autonomous tribal region and the country's largest tract of rainforest, new growth can bridge gaps between the remaining pockets of pristine old growth forest.

"Because of its size, because of the health of the entire ecosystem, it has an extraordinary potential to serve as a kind of a Noah's Ark -- a place that can safeguard biodiversity and the full complement of species," Sucre said.
Recently, a scientific expedition unearthed 10 new amphibious species on both sides of Panama's mountainous border with Colombia, according to Conservation International, an environmental advocacy group based in Washington.

At least 25 percent of the area is being deforested, putting the rich biodiversity in jeopardy, the group said. Across the region, the United Nations says tropical rainforest land is still being lost at an alarming pace.
More than 7 million hectares of forests were destroyed globally each year between 2000 and 2005, the U.N. says. Slightly less than one-fifth of the world's carbon dioxide emissions stems from the effects of deforestation in poor countries, the U.N. said -- a figure comparable to the total output of the United States and China.

For indigenous tribes -- who rely on the rainforest for everything from medicine and food to homes and artwork -- the reality behind the figures is staggering. "The rainforest is something we depend on," Kuna tribesman Toniel Edman said, standing beside a thatched hut made from rainforest wood.

"The problem is actually with the farmers and ranchers," Edman said. "They invade our land and deforest it for their own gain." But here, cattle is king. "We don't have another way to support ourselves," rancher Oriel Gonzalez said, overlooking cow pastures where rainforest once dominated.

"We go looking for work elsewhere but there isn't any. We don't know how to do anything else." He added that loans for raising cows are just easier to come by than financing for crops or other livestock. "It's partly tradition. The banker is used to lending money for cattle -- that's what he's always done," said Wright, the Smithsonian scientist.

Wright noted that for lenders, there is inherently less risk with raising cattle. "We have droughts. We have plagues of microbes. Plagues of insects. You can have a 100 percent loss with a row crop," he said. "That just never happens with cattle. You can always get the cattle to market and sell them."
For lawmakers, striking a balance between preservation and the "need for people to grow the land" comes with "difficulties," Panama President Martin Torrijos told CNN.

Torrijos highlighted his country's recent successes in combating deforestation; Panama recorded drops in rainforest loss during the 2000 to 2005 period, the U.N. reported. But he also recognized a brewing conflict between indigenous tribes and the ranchers, farmers and loggers who encroach on tribal land. "Every now and then, issues occur and we deal with it," Torrijos said.

Part of the problem is "unclear ownership of the land," said U.N. Forestry Officer Merilio Morell. "By law, the indigenous own the comarca (tribal district). But exercising ownership is not easy," he said. "They cannot patrol ever single meter of land ... and the borders aren't marked."
Scientists say efforts to promote carbon trading -- a process intended to get companies that exceed their allowed CO2 emissions to buy credits from groups that pollute less -- could provide the mechanism needed to slow deforestation.

Earlier this month, delegates from donor and developing countries around the world met outside Panama City to address carbon trading amid the fallout from a global recession. Environmental consequences from the economic crunch are still uncertain.

But U.N. projections show a growing global demand for rainforest products like fuel and timber. That demand could thwart the resurgence of the rainforest.

Rare Uncontacted Tribe Photographed in Amazon

2008-05-30T06:36:00.000-07:00

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Amazon Indians from one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.

The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.

"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Jose Carlos Meirelles was quoted as saying in a statement by the Survival International group.

One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (http://www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on. Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.

"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.
Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.

(Reporting by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Sandra Maler)

Oil Exploration in Amazon Threatens "Unseen" Tribes

2008-03-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

Kelly Hearn in Jose Olaya, Peru
for National Geographic News
March 21, 2008

Driving along an oil company road in Peru's northern Amazon, Patricio Pinola Chuje looked out the window. He nodded beyond a green wall of rain forest. "I don't know if they are in this area, but I know they are farther south in other places," said Pinola, an Achuar Indian. "They come out by the rivers."

"They" refers to unseen Amazon Indian tribes said to live in voluntary isolation in the western headwaters of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador. Global energy prices have fueled oil and gas booms across oil-laden Amazonian lands. But supporters of native groups say the boom is a bust for remote Amazon Indians, who suffer both physically and socially when exposed to the modern world. "Isolated Indians are especially vulnerable to any contact, because they have no immunity to outsiders' diseases," said David Hill, a spokesperson for Survival International, a London-based group that defends the rights of uncontacted tribes.

Other groups add that Indians' rights to their traditional lands are increasingly being violated by development-hungry governments. Now civic groups and native organizations are pushing governments and the courts to rein in oil development. In December, a coalition of groups announced it would petition the Organization of American States to protect the Cacataibo, said to be the last uncontacted tribe in the central Peruvian rain forest.

Meanwhile, complicating an otherwise typical development clash, Peruvian officials have publicly asked: Do unseen natives really exist? "It is like the Loch Ness monster," Cecilia Quiroz, lead counsel of Peru's oil and gas leasing agency, told The Washington Post in July. "Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there is no evidence."

How Many "Unseen" Tribes Are There?

Guevara Sandi Chimboras, an Achuar Indian environmental monitor, wipes sweat from his cheeks in the sweltering heat of an Amazon afternoon, not far from the Ecuadorian border. After traipsing through a grassy field, using donated satellite-positioning tools to help document oil spills, he doesn't hesitate when asked about unseen tribes. "Yes they exist," he said. "I know people who have seen them. They are seen when they go to river banks to find turtle eggs."

The elusiveness of some rain forest tribes, coupled with the threat of infection posed by outsiders, makes getting an accurate census near impossible, activists say. But Survival International estimates that some 15 uncontacted tribes live in the Peruvian Amazon alone.
Spotting them is rare. But in October, a plane searching for illegal loggers managed to photograph 21 natives standing near palm shelters on the banks of the Las Piedras River in Peru's southeastern Amazon.

Days after the photos ran on international news wires, Peruvian President Alan Garcia suggested in a newspaper editorial that unseen tribes were largely a ruse used by groups opposing development. "Against petroleum, they have created the figure of the 'unconnected' wild native, which is to say, something not known but presumed," Garcia wrote in an editorial in the newspaper El Commercio. Officials with Peru's leasing agency and its Ministry of Energy and Mines declined to comment for this story.

"Is There Something Bothering You?"

Despite official doubts that uncontacted tribes exist, oil companies apparently take threats of encounters seriously. Last summer, U.S. oil firm Barrett Resources and Spain's Repsol-YPF submitted plans to Peruvian officials describing how their workers would respond during encounters with isolated tribes. (Barrett Resources was recently acquired by the international oil company Perenco). The two documents, obtained by National Geographic News, advise workers to be on the lookout for footprints, spears, arrows, and other signs of humans.

The Barrett manual advises workers that uncontacted natives might become curious about noises, helicopters, and lights, causing them to leave items that signal a desire to make contact with workers. Such items may include "vessels containing valuable seeds or plantain drinks, necklaces, baskets, snails, gourds, feathers or other objects used for exchange," the document says. Both plans prohibit workers from having any contact with natives or giving them food or other objects.

The documents order workers to treat Indians peacefully, making efforts to protect them from illnesses. If unintended contact is made, the manuals instruct guides to initiate communication with natives in local tongues. If peaceful dialogue cannot be established, according to the Repsol document, workers should attempt to make loud noises with whistles, shouts, and megaphones.
A section of the Barrett manual entitled "sequence of messages of introduction, health and peace," tells guides to say: "We are people like you; We are workers passing through; We aren't going to stay, We have women and children far from here; We have houses and farms far from here."

The document also provides a list of questions field managers should ask Indians through their guides: "Where do you come from? How many moons and suns have you traveled? … Have you seen people like us? … Is there something bothering you?"

Self-Imposed Seclusion?

Padre Ricardo Álvarez Lobo, a Dominican priest who has worked with remote tribes for five decades, said that few if any Amazonian tribes have had no contact with outsiders. More likely, he said, their ancestors had contact with rubber barons who killed or enslaved them in the early 20th century. "The ancestors came into contact with evangelicals or rubber barons and had bad experiences," he said. "So they have built up myths within the group that makes them fear outsiders."

In recent years, extremely isolated tribes in Brazil and Colombia have emerged from the jungle, as developers and armed insurgents came closer to their traditional territories.
In one case, the Nukak, a tribe in southern Colombia, was driven from its extreme isolation by the insurgent group FARC. (Read related story: "Drug Wars Threaten to Wipe Out Amazon Nomads" [April 27, 2007].)

Last June, uncontacted natives made contact with Kayapo natives in central Brazil.
And in recent weeks, across the Peruvian border in Ecuador's Yasuní National Park, Taromenane tribesmen were blamed for spearing an illegal tree logger to death.

Can They Be Protected?

As development continues to encroach on tribal territories, activists are buckling down.
Native-rights groups like Peru's Racimos de Ungurahui note that in recent years fatal illnesses have beset tribes like the Nahua, Nanti, and Kirineri after they came into contact with oil workers. Racimos has threatened to sue oil companies for genocide if they enter areas where isolated groups are said to live.

Meanwhile, a native rights group based in Lima called AIDESEP is calling for the establishment and protection of government-protected parks for uncontacted natives. Last August, AIDESEP petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene to protect two tribal reserves in northern Peru. The commission is an organ of the Organization of American States that monitors and investigates human rights violations and can litigate cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The cases are still pending before the commission.

Pressures Build on Amazon Jungle

2008-01-19T02:14:00.000-08:00

Pressures build on Amazon jungle
By Gary Duffy BBC News, Brazil

Inspections are being stepped up to try to stem deforestation. The Amazon is not just a precious resource for Brazil but for the entire world, and the year ahead seems likely to produce important indications of what the future holds for this vast rainforest.
The scale of the challenge is widely acknowledged.

In the past 40 years, close to 20% of the Amazon has been cut down.
Land cleared for cattle is the leading cause of deforestation, while the growth in soya bean production is becoming increasingly significant. Illegal logging is also a factor.
Deforestation and forest fires are now responsible for nearly 75% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions.

In the past three years the Brazilian government has celebrated a 59% cut in the rate of deforestation, but there are now signs of problems ahead. In December, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said there had been a 10% increase in deforestation between August and November 2007 and announced a range of measures to try to stem this.

"I would easily say [2007] was one of the worst years I have seen in 11 years living here." John Carter, director, Alianca da Terra. The president signed a decree imposing fines for buying or trading goods such as beef or soya planted illegally on deforested properties.

Several hundred federal police are to be sent to the area to help combat environmental destruction, joining more than 1,600 inspectors already there.
In recent years the government says it has carried out numerous inspections, seized more than one million cubic metres of wood, cancelled thousands of land registrations and arrested hundreds of people, as well as creating large conservation areas.
At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, last month, Brazil also announced the creation of a voluntary fund to protect the Amazon, due to be launched in 2008.

On a broader international front, it was also agreed at Bali that forest conservation would be included in discussions about a future agreement on global warming. The new measures may be a sign of growing government concern, and it will only become clear in the months ahead just how effective they will prove to be in the struggle to protect the Amazon.

Greenpeace says more needs to be done to protect the rainforest.
Environmental groups, while welcoming the government's efforts, say the response is simply not good enough. Critics had already warned that recent falls in deforestation could be explained by a drop in market prices for products such as soya and meat, and that once these rose again land clearance would start to increase.

"We have a national plan to fight deforestation that, historically, was a good plan on paper but lacked implementation both due to political will and due to resources," said Marcelo Furtado, campaigns director for Greenpeace in Brazil. "Although the government could celebrate in recent years a decrease in deforestation, the fact is that structurally this didn't change.

"The environment ministry still lacks funding. You still have situations where the police don't have a helicopter to fly over a certain area or there is no fuel in the truck to go to verify if an area is being deforested or not. You still have a problem with availability of maps," Mr Furtado said.

"The tools to decrease deforestation and monitor implementation of the law are still not good enough."

That concern is reflected by John Carter, director of Alianca da Terra, a group that promotes environmental awareness in land management.

"What is important to do is to share out responsibility for illegal deforestation ."
Andre Lima, Brazilian environment ministry

Mr. Carter says, "Most of the environmental groups are concentrating on the law and why the law is not being upheld and they mysteriously forget this is a frontier and no-one ever upheld the law in any frontier in Europe or the United States, anywhere," he says.
He believes giving producers incentives to reduce the impact on the forest will prove more effective than traditional conservation methods. The results of failure can be seen in the thick smoke of forest fires being used to clear land.

"I would easily say [2007] was one of the worst years I have seen in 11 years living here," said Mr Carter, who was born in the US but moved here with his Brazilian wife. "I flew with several different people at several different times in September and October and I couldn't see the end of my wings, I couldn't see the ground. "I tried to land in the Xingu park [in Mato Grosso]... I couldn't... I couldn't see the runway. I was flying 300 ft (91m) above the forest and couldn't even see it."

Andre Lima, a senior official at the environment ministry with responsibility for the Amazon says it will be difficult to keep deforestation in 2008 down to the level achieved in 2007, especially given the growing market pressures.

The rainforest is susceptible to market pressures, but he believes the presidential decree will force a wider range of people to address these concerns. "What is important to do is to share out responsibility for illegal deforestation," he says. "The responsibility is not only with the farmers involved at the forefront, but it is the chain of production that buys from them as well. The big soya companies, the meat storage plants that have set up there and know there is no authorisation for deforestation in the area. "They have to assume a share of the responsibility."
The next few months will be a test of that resolve, but there seems to be a growing recognition on all sides that the Amazon faces another testing period.

One Laptop Per Child Project in Peru

2007-12-27T11:14:00.000-08:00

ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) -- Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops -- people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books -- can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them -- if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines. "It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.

Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.

In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India -- and a full-court press from Intel Corp.'s more power-hungry Classmate.

But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with "mesh" technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.

Mass production began last month and Negroponte, brother of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by next November. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.

Peru made the single biggest order to date -- more than 272,000 machines -- in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.

Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through "Give One, Get One," a U.S.-based promotion ending December 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.

The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop's transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds' poorest kids.

"Some tell me that they don't want to be like their parents, working in the fields," first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates -- animals without backbones.
Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.

Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.

Kevin, 9, wants to play trumpet.

Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town's recent Fiesta de la Virgen.

"What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record," says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.

Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this population-800 hamlet arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins. Arahuay's lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.

Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the work week in fields many hours' walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.
When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.

Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima's shantytowns four hours away.

It's the best answer yet to "a global crisis of education" in which curricula have no relevance, he said. "If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes."

Indeed, Arahuay's elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school's director. The XOs that Peru is buying will be distributed to pupils in 9,000 elementary schools from the Pacific to the Amazon basin where a single teacher serves all grades, Becerra said. Although Peru boasts thousands of rural satellite downlinks that provide Internet access, only about 4,000 of the schools getting XOs will be connected, said Becerra.

Negroponte says One Laptop is committed to helping Peru overcome that hurdle. Without Internet access, he believes, the program is incomplete. Teachers will get 2½ days of training on the laptops, Becerra said. Each machine will initially be loaded with about 100 copyright-free books. Where applicable, texts in native languages will be included, he added. The machines will also have a chat function that will let kids make faraway friends over the Internet.
Critics of the rollout have two key concerns.

The first is the ability of teachers -- poorly trained and equipped to begin with -- to cope with profoundly disruptive technology. Eduardo Villanueva, a communications professor at Lima's Catholic University, fears "a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers."

To counter that fear, Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops, for which it is also arranging low-interest loans.
The second big concern is maintenance.

For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it. "What you want is for the kids to do the repairs," said Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson. "I think the kids can repair 95 percent of the laptops."

Tech support is nevertheless a serious issue in many countries, Negroponte acknowledged in a phone interview. One Laptop is currently bidding on a contract with Brazil's government that Negroponte says demanded unrealistically onerous support requirements.

The XO machines are water resistant, rugged and designed to last five years. They have no fan so they won't suck up dust, are built to withstand drops from a meter and a half and can absorb power spikes typical of places with irregular electricity. Mendoza, the psychologist, is overjoyed that the program stipulates that kids get ownership of the laptops. Take Kevin, the aspiring trumpet player.

Sitting in his dirt-floor kitchen as his mother cooks lunch, he draws a soccer field on his XO, then erases it. Kevin plays a song by "Caliente," his favorite combo, that he recorded off Arahuay's single TV channel. He shows a reporter photos he took of him with his 3-year-old brother.
A bare light bulb hangs by a wire from the ceiling. A hen bobs around the floor. There are no books in this two-room house. Kevin's parents didn't get past the sixth grade.
Indeed, the laptop project also has adults in its sights.

Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them. Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska -- the youngest of her six children -- has meant to her. Miluska's father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.

"We never imagined having a computer," said Arrendondo, a cook. Is she afraid to use the laptop, as is typical of many Arahuay parents, about half of whom are illiterate? "No, I like it. Sometimes when I'm alone and the kids are not around I turn it on and poke around." Arrendondo likes to play checkers on the laptop. "It's also got chess, which I sort of know," she said, pausing briefly. "I'm going to learn."

Amazon Could Lose More Than Half Its Forest

2007-12-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

Amazon Could Lose More Than Half Its Forest, Group Says

Michael Casey in Bali, Indonesia

Associated Press
December 7, 2007

The impact of climate change and deforestation could wipe out or severely damage more than half of the Amazon forest by 2030—making it impossible to keep global temperatures from reaching catastrophic levels, an environmental group said this week.

Several recent studies have suggested similar findings, but other scientists say the size and complexity of the Amazon leaves many questions about the rain forest's future open to debate. Brazil's Environment Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

"The importance of the Amazon forest for the globe's climate cannot be underplayed," said Daniel Nepstad, author of a new report by the World Wide Fund (WWF) For Nature released at the United Nations' climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia.

"It's not only essential for cooling the world's temperature, but also such a large source of fresh water that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents, and on top of that, it's a massive store of carbon."

Sprawling over 1.6 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), the Amazon covers nearly 60 percent of Brazil.

Largely unexplored, it contains one-fifth of the world's fresh water and about 30 percent of the world's plant and animal species—many still undiscovered.

Large swaths of forest like the Amazon are also valuable "carbon sinks," or absorbers of carbon dioxide. Deforestation pours carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and at the same time kills off carbon-absorbing vegetation.

Tipping Point

The WWF said logging, livestock expansion, and worsening drought are projected to rise in the coming years and could result in the clearing of 55 percent of the rain forest. If rainfall declines by ten percent in the Amazon, as predicted, an additional four percent could be wiped out.

Scientists say if global temperatures rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, the risks to the environment and to people will be enormous. It is essentially the "tipping point" for catastrophic floods and droughts, rising sea levels, and heat wave deaths and diseases.

"It will be very difficult to keep the temperatures at 3.6 degrees (Fahrenheit) if we don't conserve the Amazon," said Nepstad, who is also a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.

According to the WWF, deforestation in the Amazon could result in 55.5 billion to 96.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide being released into the environment by 2030, an amount roughly equivalent to two years of global carbon emissions, by some estimations.

Earl Saxon, a climate change expert with the World Conservation Union, said the report was consistent with "all the best science" on the issue and recognizes there are "opportunities the delegation in Bali can take to protect the Amazon basin."

However, Milton Nogueira, a Brazilian government consultant on climate change who is also part of his country's Bali delegation, said such predictions on the Amazon's future should be taken lightly given its "size and complexity."

"It is such a big, complex system that no one can predict what will happen," he said. "It is like you are looking at a blond and blue-eyed boy and saying he will be an Olympic champion."

In its report the WWF said saving the Amazon requires a shift to sustainable logging practices, implementation of land-use polices that are already on the books in the country, and the provision of money to developing countries including Brazil to reduce deforestation.

"We can still stop the destruction of the Amazon, but we need the support of the rich countries," said Karen Suassuna, a climate change analyst with WWF-Brazil. "Our success in protecting the Amazon depends on how fast rich countries reduce their climate-damaging emissions to slow down global warming."

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

No Protection for Unusual Tribe

2007-06-05T09:38:00.001-07:00

ASUNCION, Paraguay (Reuters) -- Paraguay's Congress rejected on Thursday a proposal to protect an Indian tribe that has avoided contact with outsiders.

Indian rights organizations warned that the nomadic Ayoreos are doomed to die or be run off their land by ranchers, unless their territory is turned into a reserve.

The group lives deep in the untouched forest of the northwest, known as the Chaco, growing subsistence crops and hunting wild pigs and anteaters with spears.

But the land they roam is owned by businessmen who have been encroaching steadily to raise cattle or log its valuable hardwood forests.

After a year of debate, lawmakers rejected a bill that sought to expropriate 114,000 hectares (281,700 acres) of the privately-owned land and turn it into a reserve for the Ayoreo.
"It's very bad news for the the Ayoreo and for Paraguay. Their survival is now seriously at risk," said Jonathan Mazower, research coordinator at the London-based group Survival International, which campaigns to protect tribal peoples.

Mazower called the bill the "first serious attempt" to protect the tribe, which has an estimated 5,000 members.

Since the 1960s, some of the Ayoreos have been either coaxed out of their seclusion by Mennonite missionaries who settled the area -- or forced by bulldozers to flee their small gardens.

Many died in violent clashes with settlers or from disease. But an unknown number has resisted all contact with the outside world and their existence was confirmed last year when 17 of them appeared at the edge of the scrub in search of water. They told outsiders that their relatives in the forest did not want to come out but needed help to resist encroachers.

"A very rapid and violent cultural change will be forced on these people," said Jose Zanardini, an Italian anthropologist who has worked with the Ayoreo for several years. Nobody knows exactly how many Ayoreos there are, but Zanardini estimates six or seven extended families with no history of outside contact remain.

"They will be forced to undo thousand of years of history in one or two years and go from being hunters and gatherers to working as day laborers," he said. The Ayoreo is the last tribe of its kind in South America outside the Amazon basin, where there are some 50 Indian groups that have avoided outside contact.

Paraguay's constitution recognizes the right of its estimated 90,000 Indians, or 2 percent of the population, to preserve their land, but in practice little is done. Activists say the center-right government has always sided with the powerful landowners who bought the land at bargain prices.

Deputy Francisco Rivas, who voted against the bill, said the landowners could commit to protecting the Ayoreo lifestyle, but critics were skeptical. "They feel they've lost the war against the white man," Zandarini said.

News - Brazil Busts Illegal Logging Ring in Amazon Reserve

2007-05-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Source - Planet Ark/Reuters

CUIABA, Brazil - Brazilian police on Wednesday broke up a suspected illegal logging ring involving Indians, environmental officials, ranchers and businessmen believed to have felled and sold around 2,000 truckloads of logs from an Indian reserve in the Amazon.

A police statement said 17 people had been arrested and dozens more suspects were being hunted in four states.

Those detained included three leaders of the Trumai Indian tribe who lived in the Xingu National Park and four officials of the environmental protection agency IBAMA who had issued permits authorizing logging in prohibited areas of the reserve.

About 1.4 million cubic feet (40,000 cubic metres) of wood, equivalent to 2,000 truckloads, were extracted from Xingu over an unspecified period of time and transported and sold to lumber businesses, the police said.

The Xingu National Park covers 11,000 square miles (28,000 sq km) in Mato Grosso state in the southern Amazon basin and is home to about 4,000 Indians from 14 tribes.

Officials tracking the destruction of the world's largest rain forest estimated that about 6,500 square miles (16,700 sq km) of forest -- an area about the size of Hawaii -- could have been lost legally or illegally in the year to July 2006.

Corruption inside IBAMA, which was reorganized last month, has been part of the problem. Dozens of IBAMA officials have been arrested in recent years for similar schemes.

Story Date: 18/5/2007

News - Brazilian Rancher Guilty in American Nun's Murder

2007-05-28T19:30:00.001-07:00

POSTED: 3:20 p.m. EDT, May 16, 2007

Story Highlights

• Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura guilty in murder of American nun Dorothy Stang
• Moura, a Brazilian rancher, sentenced to 30 years as mastermind behind shooting
• Stang had attempted to halt rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers
• Trial a key measure of making masterminds of land-related killings accountable

BELEM, Brazil (AP) -- A Brazilian rancher was convicted Tuesday of ordering the killing of an American nun and rain forest defender in a case seen as an important test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. A judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

A jury voted 5-2 to convict Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura of masterminding the shooting of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang on February 12, 2005, deep in the rain forest that she had been working decades to defend.

Judge Raymond Moises Alves Flexa said Moura "showed a violent personality unsuited to living in society," adding that the "killing was carried out in violent and cowardly manner." The sentence is the maximum in Brazil, which does not have the death penalty.

Stang's brother David, who flew to Brazil for the two-day trial, trembled and wept after the verdict. "Justice was done," he said. He expressed hope that another rancher accused of ordering his sister's killing, Regivaldo Galvao, might soon be tried. Galvao is free on bail while his lawyers file motions to avoid prosecution.

Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, helped build schools and was among the activists who worked to defend the rights of impoverished farmers in the Amazon region. She also attempted to halt the rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers that has destroyed some 20 percent of the forest cover.

Tuesday's verdict came even though three other men convicted in connection with the killing -- a gunman, his accomplice and a go-between -- recanted earlier testimony that Moura had offered them $25,000 to kill Stang in a conflict over land he wanted to log and develop.

Human rights defenders said the trial was a key measure of whether the powerful masterminds behind land-related killings can be held accountable in the Amazon state of Para. Of nearly 800 such killings during the past 30 years, only four masterminds have been convicted and none are behind bars.

Shortly after Stang's killing, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ordered the army into the region, suspended logging permits and ordered large swathes of rain forest off-limits to development.

"The sisters are thrilled because it means it's possible to find justice and we want to make it possible for the many more people who were killed to find justice," said Betsy Flynn, a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the same order as Stang.

About 200 settlers from the jungle town of Anapu, in the region where Stang worked, celebrated the verdict at their makeshift encampment across from the court.

"I'm happy because she was a great woman and didn't deserve to be killed," said Eliete Prado, an elderly woman who made an 18-hour bus trip over dirt roads from Anapu to attend the trial.

Moura denied ordering the killing during the trial, and his lawyer mounted a lengthy anti-American tirade in his closing arguments, calling Stang "the fruit of a poisoned tree."

Accusing the United States of crimes ranging from atom bombs dropped on Japan during World War II to the treatment of prisoners at its Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, defense attorney Americo Leal said Stang "shares this DNA of violence, the DNA to kill."

David Stang expressed dismay.

"The trial's about Bida, Dorothy was the victim," Stang said, referring to Moura by his nickname. "So this fantasy world the defense lawyers are trying to create only maintains this cycle of killings."

On Monday, Moura said he did not even know the nun, who had been organizing poor settlers around the jungle town of Anapu for 23 years.

"This thing about money isn't true. This thing about me and Bida talking isn't true," Clodoaldo Carlos Batista said Monday, in recanting his earlier testimony implicating Moura.

Batista, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison as an accomplice to gunman Rayfran Neves Sales, claimed he had been coerced into implicating Moura by two American FBI agents who traveled to Brazil shortly after the murder to monitor the police investigation.

Both Batista and Sales, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison, claimed the agents threatened to send them to the United States, where they could face the death penalty if they did not cooperate. Brazil does not have the death penalty and the most a convict can serve at a single stretch is 30 years.

The judge said Moura must remain imprisoned pending appeal.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

News - "Oil Chief - Do Uncontacted Tribes Really Exist?"

2007-05-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, 24 April 2007, 9:28 am
Press Release: Survival International Peru:

The president of Perupetro, the government body responsible for granting oil exploration licences, has caused outrage after calling into doubt the existence of uncontacted Indian tribes in the Peruvian Amazon.

The comments come after the Peruvian government recently opened up 70% of its rainforest to oil exploration. Some of this territory is inhabited by uncontacted tribes. A vast amount of evidence for their existence has been collected by Survival, local indigenous organisations and other researchers going back decades, ranging from the testimonies of other Indians to sightings, encounters, photographs, and even reports of violent clashes with loggers and oil workers. Yet Perupetro's president, Daniel Saba, said during an interview on Peruvian TV, 'It's absurd to say there are uncontacted peoples when no one has seen them. So, who are these uncontacted tribes people are talking about?'

The uncontacted Indians have no immunity to outsiders' diseases because of their isolation from the rest of society and any form of contact, no matter how brief, can be fatal. Following oil exploration on their land in the 1980s, more than 50% of the Nahua tribe died.

Survival's director, Stephen Corry, said today, 'Doubtless Mr Saba would much rather there were no uncontacted Indians in the areas where he wants to explore for oil. Declaring they don't exist at all, however, is a shameful self-fulfilling prophecy. If Perupetro allows companies to go in, it's likely to destroy the Indians completely and then they really won't exist.'

News - "Drug Wars Threaten to Wipe Out Amazon Nomads"

2007-05-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

Kelly Hearnfor
National Geographic News
April 27, 2007

Civil strife and wars over the plant source of cocaine are pushing one of Colombia's last hunter-gather cultures into ruinous contact with modernity, rights groups say. For millennia the Nukak Maku have lived a nomadic existence in the tropical forests of southern Colombia in a small swath of land below the Guaviare River. Tribe members still hunt game with blowguns, fish with bows and arrows, and gather berries.

But the Amazon lands that sustain the tribe are being overrun by Colombia's drug war. The tribe's troubles have even led one leader to commit suicide. Clashes between coca-plant-growing colonists, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, and Colombian antidrug troops—flush with U.S. military aid—are increasing in the tribe's territory.

The estimated 500 remaining members of the Nukak—who made first contact with modern society only in 1988—are caught in the crossfire. "The guerilla groups think [the Nukak] are collaborators with the government, and the government troops think they are collaborating with the guerillas," said Luis Evelis Andrade of Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC), a Bogotá, Colombia-based indigenous-rights group working with the tribe.

"This has meant murders, threats, kidnappings, and blockades of food and medicine that have nearly destroyed the Nukak."

Protection Sought

Things have gotten so bad that last March some 120 Nukak walked half-naked out of the forest and into the stunned jungle community of San José del Guaviare. A tribal leader named Mao-be was soon asking Colombian officials for protection, pledges to cease armed conflicts in their territories, and money for getting back home. Colombia is widely known for its progressive legal stances on indigenous rights. But ONIC's Andrade said the government told the Nukak that it could not guarantee their security.

On August 11 Colombian officials did relocate the Nukak to a protected area in nearby Puerto Ospina. But David Hill, of the London-based indigenous-culture advocacy group Survival International, said the relocation "backfired" and the Nukak have since moved back to San José del Guaviare.

"Gas on the Fire"

Many critics blame Plan Colombia, the U.S. aid program that funds Colombia's coca-eradication efforts. The program has fallen under intense criticism for its aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, which activists say also kills legal crops and causes health problems for residents of jungle communities.
Echoing human rights and environmental groups, Wade Davis, an explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, says Plan Colombia has been a devastating failure. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

U.S. military subsidies for Colombia's coca wars have been "gas on the fire" of a drawn-out civil war that would have otherwise "petered out due to sheer national exhaustion," Davis said.
The project has failed to diminish coca production but has managed to empower the Colombian military and "rationalize a continuation of the war. … ," he said.

"It has accomplished little except the idiocy of destroying the environment with herbicides."
The U.S. government's Office of National Drug Control Policy maintains that coca acreage under cultivation in Colombia fell between 2001—the year the program started—and 2005.

In addition to drug wars, the Nukak face other threats due to globalization in the region.
In recent years high world commodities prices have sparked an oil and natural gas boom along the eastern slopes of the Andes and the adjacent Amazon lowlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

"Whenever the Nukak have stood up to these multinational corporations, it has meant more threats, expulsions, and disappearances," ONIC's Andrade said. "They don't have vaccines, proper food, or security."

Hill, of Survival International, said that many activists suspect "that the government's apparent inability or unwillingness to help the Nukak relocate to their territory is due to the fact that there are oil reserves."

Deep Isolation

The Nukak follow a relatively rare preference for living a nomadic life deep in the Amazon forests rather than along settled riverside villages. As a result, their distance from contemporary ways is immense. When asked if they were concerned about the future, Mao-be—the only member who learned some Spanish—seemed to have no concept of the word, according to a March report by the New York Times.

Some Nukak asked if planes that flew over the jungle canopy traveled along invisible roads.
But the Nukak still seem keenly attuned to the problems caused by outsiders. "We are few now, hardly any Nukak remain," Survival International quoted one Nukak man as saying. "The outsiders are many, and have big houses. They don't care that the Nukak are being wiped out."
For some Nukak, this attitude has led to irrecoverable despair: In October, Mao-be killed himself by drinking poison.

"From what we can tell, he felt the responsibility to get the Nukak back home," Andrade said. "He felt he had failed."

Welcome to LIP - Librarians for the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples

2007-04-26T04:05:00.000-07:00

LIP will be a forum for librarians and others to exchange ideas, news, and information about the human rights of indigenous peoples. LIP's focus at present is the Amazon rainforest, and the diverse tribes that live within it. A good site to begin to explore and meet these incredibly interesting and culturally-rich people is http://www.amazon-indians.org.

In the past fifteen years, the UN has pushed forward with recognition and rights for indigenous people. The UN launched the first of two decades specifically meant to focus on and honor indigenous peoples called "The Decade of the World's Indigenous People." We are currently in the Second Decade, which will end in 2015.

Perhaps the two most important acts by the UN were the establishment of the Draft of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which you can read here -
http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/E.CN.4.SUB.2.RES.1994.45.En
and the Creation of the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples, which first met in 2002. Their website is - http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/about_us.html

Here are a few facts about indigenous peoples:

There are over 370 million indigenous people in some 70 countries worldwide. (UNPFII).

Indigenous peoples inhabit nearly 20% of the planet, mainly in areas where they have lived for thousands of years. (WWF).

Compared with protected area managers, who control about 6% of the world's land mass, indigenous peoples are the earth's most important stewards. (WWF).

Librarians are in an optimal position in the age of computer technology to assist in the preservation and advancement of human rights for indigenous people. Librarians are well-educated, have a community base, and have access to and knowledge of computer technology. We as librarians need to address this issue and create a discourse regarding our roles as librarians and how we can effect progress.

I will continually post news, information, and ideas on this site. All comments, thoughts, and suggestions are welcome.

News - "Amazon Conservation Team Puts Indians on Google Earth to Save the Amazon"

2007-04-26T03:44:00.000-07:00

By Rhett A. Butler
November 14, 2006
Mongabay.com

http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1114-google_earth-act.html

Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians (Amerindians) are using Google Earth, Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping, and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. Helping them is the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests.

ACT was founded by Mark Plotkin, an accomplished author and renowned ethnobotanist, who has spent much of the past 20 years with some of the most isolated indigenous groups in the world. ACT is active in the Amazon, one of the few places where indigenous populations still live in mostly traditional ways. However, like the Amazon rainforest itself, this is rapidly changing. As forests fall to loggers, miners, and farmers, and the allure of western culture attracts younger generations to cities, extensive knowledge of the forest ecosystem and the secrets of life-saving medicinal plants are forgotten. The combined loss of this knowledge and these forests irreplaceably impoverishes the world of cultural and biological diversity.

Member of the Union of Yagé Healers of the Colombian Amazon (UMIYAC) using GPS to map a section of forest. Photo courtesy of ACT. ACT has pioneered a novel approach to address these problems by enabling Indians to monitor and protect their forest home while passing on their cultural wealth to future generations. ACT is working in partnership with local governments to train Indians in the use of GPS and the Internet to map and catalog their forest home, helping to better manage and protect ancestral rainforests by monitoring deforestation and preventing illegal incursions on their land. At the same time the efforts are strengthening cultural ties between indigenous youths and their parents and grandparents.

Googling for forest conservation

While Indian reservations are nominally protected in parts of Brazil — in fact more than 26 percent of the Brazilian Amazon has been set aside in such reserves — in reality Indian lands in northern South America are suffering from encroachment, especially from illegal miners looking to exploit the region's gold deposits. Since the early 1990s the region that includes parts of French Guiana, Guyana, Venezuela, Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia has witnessed a gold rush that has brought tens of thousands of informal miners across lightly patrolled — and sometimes unpatrolled — borders. These mines have wreaked havoc on the local environment, causing deforestation, mercury pollution, and sedimentation of otherwise pristine rivers. The influx of miners has social consequences as well, ranging from violence between miners and indigenous populations to the introduction and spread of diseases like malaria and AIDS. The situation is so problematic that the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), the world's largest scientific organization devoted to the study and protection of tropical ecosystems, recently passed a resolution calling upon governments to take action to stop this illegal and destructive mining.

GPS data gathering on a mapping expedition in the Amazon. Image courtesy of ACT. Due to the scale of mining operations and the remoteness of the area, illegal mining has been exceedingly difficult to detect. A clandestine airstrip in cleared forest or a series of riverside sluice boxes can be nearly impossible to pinpoint on the ground, given the vastness of the Amazon. But technology is changing the picture. Google Earth and GPS are proving to be key tools in battling deforestation and helping Indians protect their lands.

Indians, who have access to the Internet at the ACT offices in several locations in northern South America, use Google Earth to remotely monitor their lands by checking for signs of miners. “Google Earth is used primarily for vigilance,” Vasco van Roosmalen, ACT’s Brazil program director, said in an interview with mongabay.com. “Indians log on to Google Earth and study images, inch by inch, looking to see where new gold mines are popping up or where invasions are occurring. With the newly updated, high-resolution images of the region, they can see river discoloration which could be the product of sedimentation and pollution from a nearby mine. They are able to use these images to find the smallest gold mine.”

Vasco van Roosmalen, ACT’s Brazil program director, with a Xingu elder in the southern Amazon. Image courtesy of ACT. GPS mapping of Tumucumaque in Brazil. Image courtesy of ACT. Once the Indians pinpoint suspect areas using Google Earth, they note the coordinates, then go on foot patrol to investigate further or mark the spot for future airplane flyovers, where five to six Indians go up with government officials to scout for illegal incursions. Van Roosmalen says that without the aid of satellite imagery, flyovers can be of limited effectiveness due to the extent of the forest. “The high-resolution images make it a lot easier to actually find these areas,” said Van Roosmalen. “When Google Earth updated these images earlier this year with higher resolution versions, we could find nearly all the disturbances in the forest. Our guys have been finding gold mines we didn't know about at all.”

Van Roosmalen said that ACT has spoken with Google Earth about the project. “We made a presentation earlier this year explaining how we use the images,” Van Roosmalen recounted. “We offered the Google Earth team a list of coordinates where it would be helpful to have sharper images. We also discussed the possibility of finding ways to include the Indians’ nonproprietary data, as a layer with Indian names, on Google Earth.”

Beyond the forest-monitoring capabilities, Google Earth and more generally the Internet, is also helping to strengthen bonds between indigenous children, hungry for technology, and their parents, who are interested in protecting their homeland.

“We have three Indians working in Macapá, the state capital,” Van Roosmalen explained. “The kids are spending time on the computer now and learning very quickly. They are helping their parents use Google Earth to find gold mines near the borders of the indigenous reserve. Not only are the kids having fun with it but they are helping preserve the forest.” "This is the perfect combo of western technology and indigenous custom and know-how," said Plotkin, president of ACT. "We've got guys painted red and nothing else, walking through the jungle with GPS units mapping their land. That's the sweet spot, the best of both worlds."

Two headed invisible jaguars here "Westerners maps in three dimensions: longitude, latitude, and altitude," explained Plotkin. "Indians think in six: longitude, latitude, altitude, historical context, sacred sites, and spiritual or mythological sites, where invisible creatures mark watersheds and areas of high biodiversity as off-limits to exploitation."

A model map created by Indians in Brazil. Image courtesy of ACT. Their maps are also meticulously detailed, including virtually everything associated with a place. "Indians mark where they get materials for houses, bamboo, specific vines, places where they find honey and wood for canoes, anything they eat in terms of palm nuts, brazil nuts, Açaí -- rich palm fruit. For example we're working with the Wayana, a warrior tribe. They have marked two specific parts of the forest where they can find wood hard enough for arrow points. They've marked another point on the other side of the reserve where they get hollow wood to craft the arrow shaft," added van Roosmalen.

The Indians also chart the distribution of medicinal plants -- they use hundreds -- but for security reasons, some highly coveted medicinal plants are not published. In the past there have been problems with biopiracy where outsiders trespass on lands to illegally collect these plants for export. The Indians saw nothing in return.

In addition to plants, the Indians mark all the places they see animals, including game animals and mythological animals that have deep spiritual meaning. "On one of the maps the Kamayura had drawn a two-headed animal, so I asked the shaman what it was," recalls Plotkin. "'A two-headed invisible jaguar' he told me. So I asked if he'd ever seen one. 'No they are invisible and dangerous so we don't go there,' he said. Later I learned that the area marked with the invisible jaguar was a strict no-hunting zone, which was preserved to ensure a breeding refuge for forest wildlife. This was his way of saying that it was a protected area where hunting was not allowed."

There are good reasons that Indians say certain sites are sacred. Watersheds, which ensure clean drinking water, are off-limits to disturbance as are areas of high biodiversity and places with sacred plants. Indians don't want these places over-exploited.

Besides indicating the location of resources, villages, and geographical features like rivers and creeks, the mapping process has helped reestablish bonds between generations in a society where culture is at risk of extinction.

"The Tumucumaque map has over 2000 Indian names that never before had been registered," said van Roosmalen. "This is extremely important because behind each name is a story that can serve as a tie to the land."

"For example when we did one of the first mapping projects, Indians went out into villages and forests to get the names of the places. When they returned, they said it was taking longer than expected because the elders spent half an hour telling them the story behind the name, before they revealed the name. Well, some of these guys thought this through and asked us for tape recorders so they could record these stories, transcribe them into their language, and make a book with the stories behind the names on the map. Now, for the first time, they have educational material about their culture."

"Look, you want to map your land so you head into the forest with GPS and mark your waypoints and your routes, but the monkey at the end of the creek isn't going to tell you the name and history of a place. All the technology in the world is not going to explain to you the spiritual significance of a spot. No, it's the old guy sitting at the back of the hut, the one you've ignored since you were a kid. He's the one with the knowledge. All of a sudden these old guys are being appreciated as tremendous sources of knowledge by the younger generation, conservation organizations like ACT, and government agencies. Now they see the value of these elders when before no one cared."

In Brazil, Van Roosmalen says that the maps themselves are helping younger generations better understand the struggles of their parents and grandparents in the 1970s and 1980s to acquire rights to the land.
"The elders are dying. The younger generation hadn't been learning about the stories of their ancestors or their ties to the land. There were no materials for the school. The main reason the elders asked for these maps was the huge responsibility to hold on to their lands. Their forefathers fought so very hard for these territories -- not having ways to learn about this history, the younger generation is not interested in the land."

"Just last month a researcher told me, 'I thought this land has always been ours. I didn't know we fought so hard for it. Now I need to do a better job of managing it and protecting it.'"

The maps change all this -- they make culture relevant to the new generation and present an easy way for the old generation to pass on their knowledge. Most importantly, the decision to make the maps was that of the Indians. Van Roosmalen says that ACT just comes in with the methodology, but doesn't tell the Indians what to map.

"They know they are making these maps for themselves. They decide what goes into these maps," he says. "The maps empower them and make them more self-reliant."

The maps also have important legal implications for Indians. Maps can be used to establish land rights. For example, says van Roosmalen, in Suriname where there are no indigenous land rights, the maps serve as a very basic tool to help them get rights to their land. In Brazil, vast quantities of land are set aside for Indians but don't have title, meaning that if there is a change to the constitution, they could lose their land.

"A common question from politicians and developers is 'Why do so few Indians need so much land?'" said van Roosmalen. "When you can illustrate it with these detailed maps -- showing that they are using it for all their various purposes -- it's a much more powerful argument than just having a blank map with a green rectangles drawn on it."

Eyes and ears for the government

The maps and Indian involvement also pay dividends for the Brazilian government, concerned about illegal activities and border security. Van Roosmalen says the government has taken an active interest in training Indians in GPS so they can monitor forest areas.

"Brazilian security agencies are very interested in information from indigenous park guards. These guys know these areas better than anyone -- they are the eyes and ear on the ground. With GPS and the Internet, Indians now have the means to pass on information in a form that is useful to the government. Before this technology was available, an Indian might come upon a new airstrip or hear a plane overhead, but he would have no way to communicate with officials. He might know the traditional name for that place but there was no map to identify its location. Now he's able to plot the point on the GPS and look it up on Google Earth. Today he can hand in an entire report with all the supporting information. The government has even linked a database updated by indigenous park guards to national security databases."

Indigenous people can save rainforests and biodiversity

The involvement of Indians in monitoring could play a key role in rainforest conservation efforts. Research has found that indigenous reserves have lower deforestation rates than unprotected regions and observations cited by Plotkin, suggests that indigenous reserves may preserve biodiversity and forest cover better than traditional protected areas.
Plotkin points to Tumucumaque indigenous reserve on the Suriname border as an example.

"Tumucumaque indigenous reserve is inhabited by 2000 Indians and has one gold mine," he said. "Tumucumaque national park is about the same size, maybe a little smaller, on the border of French Guiana. It's officially inhabited by no one has between 10 and 25 gold mines, depending on who you believe. The fact is where you have people with poison-tipped arrows it's a lot less attractive a proposition to destroy that territory and the one next door."

Plotkin says that Brazil's extensive indigenous reserves - which cover more than a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon -- have more conservation potential than the country's poorly patrolled national parks which cover less than 7 percent of the territory.

"If we can help Indians look after their lands as well as watch over after neighboring nature preserves, we'll have tremendous conservation leverage," said Plotkin. "It's our strong belief that the people who best know, use, and protect biodiversity are the indigenous people who live in these forests," said Plotkin.

Plotkin adds that conservation initiatives would be better-served by having more integration between indigenous populations and other forest preservation efforts since "you can't have rainforest Indians without the rainforest. The best way to protect ancestral rainforests is to help the Indians hold on to their culture, and the best way to help them hold onto their culture is to help them protect the rainforest. "

News - "Brazil to Offer Free Internet Access to Amazon Tribes"

2007-04-26T03:42:00.000-07:00

"Brazil to offer free Internet access to Amazon tribes"

CNN.COM

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/03/30/amazon.internet.ap/index.html

POSTED: 8:28 a.m. EDT, March 30, 2007

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Brazil's government said it will provide free Internet access to native Indian tribes in the Amazon in an effort to help protect the world's biggest rain forest.
The environment and communications ministers signed an agreement Thursday with the Forest People's Network to provide an Internet signal by satellite to 150 communities, including many reachable only by riverboat, allowing them to report illegal logging and ranching, request help and coordinate efforts to preserve the forest.
The goal is to "encourage those peoples to join the public powers in the environmental management of the country," Francisco Costa of the Environment Ministry said in a statement. "The government intends to strengthen the Forest People's Network, a digital web for monitoring, protection and education."
The ministry said city and state governments must first install telecenters with computers in selected areas, including indigenous lands. The federal government then will provide the satellite connection.
The areas in 13 states, including the Pantanal wetlands and the poor northeast, were chosen by the Environment Ministry, the National Indian Foundation, or Funai, and the government environmental protection agency Ibama, the ministry said.
Francisco Ashaninka, a native Indian from the Ashaninka tribe who works for the western Acre state government, said the arrival of the Internet was a success for the Forest People's Network, created in 2003.
He said there are currently a few telecenters on the outskirts of cities, but that the new ones will be built deep in the forest and will allow Indians easy access to public officials so that they can alert them of illegal miners, loggers and ranchers.
"It will be a real chance for the indigenous communities to acquire, share and provide information to public officials," Ashaninka said. He added the Internet would "strengthen indigenous culture by linking them and providing environmental education."
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