Deforestation and loss of biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest has created many issues for indigenous tribes. Read here about the problems they face as well as barriers to solving them.
Edited by Tyler Vu
Across the world, the encroachment of industrialization on previously untouched lands has decimated terrain, biodiversity, and most importantly infringed upon the lands of indigenous people who had inhabited the areas beforehand. The Amazon rainforest is one of the many areas home to over 100 uncontacted species and around 300 indigenous tribes. Deforestation and human activity has led to loss of both culture and life among indigenous people of the Amazon.
Ever since the arrival of colonists to the Americas, indigenous people living in this area have struggled with their rights of ownership to their own land, which had been theirs for thousands of years. Even five centuries after Europeans first entered the area, studies show that many indigenous Brazilians are still dying due to outsiders, and entire tribes face extinction in an ever-changing world that seems to disvalue their existence. In 2019, for example, around 10 indigenous leaders were killed in one year, seven of which were tribal leaders. Most of this activity was centered around a region of Brazil in which native people opposed the development and logging going on on their land. Some have even called this an “institutionalized genocide”, carried out to avoid oppositions to development and therefore economic gain. Deforestation, as well as injustice, poses a large issue to native communities. In an interview, a leader of the Xakriaba people, Celia Xakriaba, spoke out against the loss of biodiversity she and her tribe witness daily in the Amazon, saying “every minute one tree is cut. And whenever a tree is cut, a part of us also dies… people just see Earth as a thing. They can design big cities, but they can’t see this connection to Earth” (Xakiraba). The connection to the earth that Xakriaba speaks of is an age-old spiritual one, reflected through their mythology, oral history and religions. Without a connection to the land, it is easy for loggers and ranchers to chop down trees without regard for the significance behind their actions, but to the native people of the area each acre of land removed is precious, and one that they will never regain.
Deforestation in the Amazon comes directly from one source, human activity. Both through direct action or changes in climate that have negatively impacted the environment. The Brazilian cattle ranching industry, for example, supplied over 1.82 million tons of beef to the world in just the year 2019 alone. Cattle ranching is an industry that calls for a large amount of land, therefore requiring vast amounts of trees to be cut down in order to clear land for ranching, taking even more land from the indigenous tribes of the area. In addition to cattle ranching, logging and various scales of agriculture have caused further deforestation by direct human forces, and fires have destroyed vast areas of land as an environmental consequence.
To make matters worse for the Amazon’s indigenous communities, Brazil’s current president, President Jair Bolsonaro, is pushing to develop more of the rainforest and get around certain environmental protections preventing further work in the area. Once he was elected, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research recorded a double-digit increase in deforestation in the Amazon in just the last few months of 2018. He and his cabinet have opposed and ignored requests made by the indigenous communities in his area regarding agriculture and the environment, and Bolsonaro has openly opposed indigenous occupation of land in the Amazon region. Without a change in leadership, it will be impossible for native tribes in the area to gain a voice regarding the destruction of their own land.
Because of both human and environmental stressors chipping away at the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest, indigenous communities living in the area are suffering from loss of land and culture, as well as injustice from their government. It is imperative to save the Amazon from further environmental destruction and loss of biodiversity, and equally crucial to uplift these voices in hopes the world will recognize the urgency of their pleas.
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