Indigenous Brazilians And Environmental Protection - Analysis

[Judi Lynn]

Indigenous people in Brazil

1 Analysis Environment

February 9, 2019 YaleGlobal Online 0 Comments
By YaleGlobal Online

Researchers document sustainable land-management practices of Brazil’s indigenous people that attract international support.

By Suzanne Oakdale*

Anthropological and archeological research in Brazil points to ways that indigenous Amazonians are integral to the protection of biomes – or domains of nature with characteristic flora, fauna, soil and more. Such research can call into question the boundaries between the categories of “nature” and “humanity.”

Forest management is an ancient practice, and archeology has been key for showing the entanglement of the natural and human worlds. Rather than being categorized as either “wild” or “wrecked,” biomes are coming to be seen as “rooted in and contingent on human actions and social configurations of the past,” as described in The Social Lives of Forests, by Susanna Hecht, Kathleen Morrison and Christine Padoch. The composition of soils, rivers, flora and fauna reveal the complex relationship between humans and nature over time. Amazonians started to manage forests about 4,000 years ago, Charles Clement and other researchers wrote in 2015. Long-term occupation formed fertile Amazonian dark earth from acidic soils, explained Eduardo G. Neves and James Petersen. In some locales such as the Upper Xingu during the first half of the first millennium AD, high population sites were built and connected by roads forming lattice-like structures, the land in between managed with weirs, ponds, causeways, fields for thatch and fruit trees, according the Michael Heckenberger and others.

Many contemporary indigenous peoples in Brazil – in all255 different groups comprising less than 1 percent of the Brazilian population, according to the 2010 census – continue forest management with sustainable practices that attract international attention and support. The Kayapo practice of continual low-level burning favors inaja and tucumá palms and is linked to the formation of dark earth. The Ka’apor encourage old-growth forest that enhances species diversity, and this practice initiated a project funded by the World Wildlife Foundation and Rio’s Museu do Índio in 2009 to support distribution of their forest knowledge and help fight logging. Upper Xinguans, who manage their landscape with fire and have monitored rainfall for more than 1,000 years, have a wealth of generational knowledge about current rainfall changes and conditions leading to uncontrollable fire. The Associação Rede de Sementes do Xingu with the help of the Instituto Socioambiental has enlisted Xinguans since 2007 to gather native seeds to sell for replanting of deforested areas. With indigenous lands comprising approximately one fifth of the Brazilian Amazon, these kinds of practices contribute to environmental management, explained David Nepstad in 2005.

Another body of work questioning the boundaries between nature and culture is that of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his students, called perspectivism. Based on his fieldwork with the Araweté and mastery of lowland ethnographies, Viveiros de Castro has put forth an influential general characterization of Amazonian thought and explains that “Amerindian thought” is guided by “multinaturalism” – a mode that considers humans and animals as united by their common humanity yet with each holding different perspectives. In contrast, “naturalism” characterizes Western thought, a mode founded on a shared biological nature among all living things, but a division between nature and culture, with culture being the force that separates humans from animals. Western thought regards agency and creativity as belonging to humans in contrast to the more passive nature. With the aim of “decolonizing thought,” multinaturalism and naturalism are not simply different cultural perspectives on a shared world, but rather entirely different realities or ontologies.

More:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/09022019-indigenous-brazilians-and-environmental-protection-analysis/