To geoengineer or not to geoengineer, that is the question.
We could argue for stratospheric aerosols in the Arctic to save the
livelihoods of indigenous people who rely on seal hunting. (Or we
could get sued for neglect!) And we could develop marine cloud
brightening techniques for protecting the Amazon and its peoples.
Or we could not geoengineer... and risk future oblivion for them and
ourselves.
Now is the time for decision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/science/earth/25tribe.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up
Published: July 24, 2009
XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil
— As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the
ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside
chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to
eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies.
For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of
the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.
But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend,
global climate change
are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks
in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other
small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or
capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.
“Us
old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re
always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in
front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent
evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress,
which is basically nothing.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the
Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all
night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they
safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Responsible
for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said
his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.
“I’m
stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has
become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an
interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road,
but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of
animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global
temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming
decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction
for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions,
their arts, their languages.
“In some places, people will have
to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior
adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of
Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and
marginal will assimilate and disappear.”
To make do without
fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy
flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many
around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants.
Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the
chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”
Living
deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted,
“We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to
supplement what is missing.”
Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior
shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate
change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954,
killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.
Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest
residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote
Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now
flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land
is threatened by rising seas.
Many indigenous people depend
intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate
variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that
kills animals.
But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and
inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements
like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed
away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region,
because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the
seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if
not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.
Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations,
demanding compensation and help with adapting.
“As they
see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being
threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton,
who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the
University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not
just about polar bears and wildlife.”
At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations
created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory
help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was
expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none
so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich
countries could make financial commitments,” he said.
Throughout
history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures
threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to
move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is
now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and
once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools
and even declaring statehood.
The Kamayurá live in the middle
of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the
Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.
About 5,000
square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent
years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less
foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending
unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and
hotter.
That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated
Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating
whenever they are hungry.
Fish stocks began to dwindle in the
1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is
considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed
in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less
rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely
low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.
Last year, for
the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not
covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s
method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up,
luring the animals.
The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too.
For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain
star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated
because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and
wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight
seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an
ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.
It
has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year,
families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September,
October and November because there was not enough moisture in the
ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also
failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered
away,” she said.
A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu
said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had
become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed.
The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts
has also become difficult to find.
But perhaps the Kamayurá’s
greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to
ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather.
In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands
of acres were destroyed.
“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung
our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape.
We suffered along with the animals.”
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