Displaced Family - VII

During our week of activities with Beija-Flor na Comunidade (Hummingbird in the Community), we came into much closer contact with the population that makes up our community. Brazil is so wealthy in cultural and ethnological heritage so it was no surprise for us meeting children of Indian heritage from displaced families, who’s grandparents had once left their tropical paradise only to end up in the slums of the big cities.

Environmentalist, Jose A. Lutzenberger, who died on May 14, 2002 at the age of 75, was founder of Brazil's first modern environmental organisations, AGAPAN, and later on of the country’s leading environmental movement, Fundação GAIA. He once proclaimed;

"We must learn to look at Nature, at Creation, as something sacred of which we humans are only a part - or we will have no future. We need a new, actually very old, holistic ethics, an ethics of reverence for life in all its forms and manifestations."

In 1988, he was chosen to receive the Right Livelihood Award, known as the Alternative Nobel, one of the 85 awards he won for his work in defence of the environment, dedicating his efforts to fighting not just one threat to the ecology, but four: pesticides, overpopulation, energy waste, and nuclear power.

Dr. Lutzenberger mentioned the displacement of Indians in an interview 25 years ago (has anything really changed since then?!), where he explained the following:
“Regarding the wholesale destruction of Nature in Brazil, there has never in the history of Life been a biological holocaust such as the one being conducted here. Thousands of species disappear every year without anybody's noticing.

Every time a unique ecosystem is wiped out (and we've had thousands ruined in Brazil's Amazon basin) uncounted endemic species go with it. And as you know, the Universe is poorer for every species that goes. Each lifeline in the Symphony of Evolution is a unique, irreversible historical process that can be cut off but can never be resumed thereafter.

Whether increasing ecological consciousness will, in time, provoke a reversal of this country's practices remains to be seen. I can only hope so for our children's sake, for Life's sake!”

As the Amazon Caboclo [the product of the racial and cultural mixing of European (Portuguese), African, and native Brazilian populations.] says; "Where cattle move in, hunger comes along and we move out."

Yet the meat production on our "modern" ranches is ridiculously low . . . around 30 pounds per acre per year. Compare that to what's being done in northern Europe, where — despite a much more difficult climate — yields of 600 pounds of meat and 800 gallons of milk per acre per year are achieved.

But the owners, who are mostly powerful Brazilian politicians or the executives of multinational corporations, don't care. Their profit derives from the incredible size of the operations, from government subsidies, and from corruption.

The Caboclos are — most of the time — simply displaced by immense agribusiness schemes that totally extinguish their paradise . . . send them to the slums in big cities far away.. . or employ them as inexpensive help under labor camp conditions. In not-so-rare cases, the big guy actually uses machine guns on "squatters" or "ferocious" Indians!

For 20 or 30 thousand years, Brazil's Indians lived in relative harmony with Nature, and even though the forest must have seemed unlimited to them, they were very conscious of the demographic problem and applied deliberate controlsincluding infanticide — when a tribe became too large. Today, though, the villages of the "civilized" Indians display tremendous population growth and horrible devastation of the environment.

Yet we have sufficient land in Brazil to allow us to easily postpone "developing" the Amazon until we know enough about the marvelous patterns of life there to do so intelligently and sustainably. Our government must find ways to restrain both its own greed and that of foreign companies. We have much to learn from the remaining Indian tribes.”
(Clipped from MotherEarthNews.com)

NB! - Indian Tribes of Brazil
Before the arrival of Europeans in 1500, Brazil was home to an estimated population of anything between 5 and 13 million people in at least 1,000 tribes. Five hundred years of exposure to disease, violence and dispossession wiped out the vast majority of this indigenous population. Today, there are around 350,000 Indians in Brazil in over 200 tribes, who live scattered all across the country. Between them they speak a huge number of languages, from a variety of language families; 110 of the tribal languages of Brazil have less than 400 speakers. Brazil's tribes range in size from the Guarani and Yanomami, who number tens of thousands, to tribes such as the Akuntsu and Kanoê, who number only a few dozen... continued here::::