At the present time, I am trying to re-focus the NATIVE-L list onto the
sorts of issues that led me to create it and the other NativeNet mailing
lists back in the fall of 1989 and to make more effective use of the Web
facilities provided by Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (Cloquet,
Minnesota) and by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society via
equipment they partially sponsor installed at the University of Texas
Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. As I have mentioned periodically
on NATIVE-L and talk about at some length in essays available via the
NativeNet home page (http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/natnet/), my hope in creating
and maintaining NativeNet was and remains to provide a mechanism for demon-
strating the importance of understanding the relationship between threats
to aboriginal peoples in all parts of the world and threats to the natural
ecosystems upon which we all depend, and which, I feel, have an inherent
value (which must become the real reason we work to protect them) apart
from the ways in which we utilize and depend upon the natural world.
I want to do what is possible to enable the NativeNet mailing lists and
Web facilities to become an effective tool for exchanging information and
ideas that can be utilized in practical ways - both to understand and to
work for change in the attitudes, policies, and practices which have led
to the kinds of destructive exploitation of nature that Randy Hayes talks
about in the article below. I hope to be able to give subscribers to the
NATIVE-L list (which is automatically echoed to the Usenet "alt.native"
and "soc.culture.native" newsgroups, as well as to electronic conferences
on the bulletin-board systems operated by the Association for Progressive
Communications (APC) around the world) periodic updates on my progress in
the effort to re-focus the mailing list and to make better use of the Web
site. I also want to work with subscribers / readers to find ways to let
us work with one another more effectively to do what we can in a number of
areas to enable people in society at large to better understand and better
appreciate the contribution of indigenous peoples to the human community
as well as the important linkages between the lives and cultures of Native
peoples and solutions to problems which we all face and whose ravages are
making life increasingly difficult on this planet - and not only for the
human species.
I hope that in the not-too-distant future we can begin a dialogue with
one another (by means of a separate channel that I plan to establish)
to discover ways that we can together learn and grow and use whatever
understanding we achieve collectively and/or we already possess to work
toward solutions of the sorts of problems talked about by Randy Hayes.
I would be interested to receive any comments readers might like to send
my way regarding any of what I have written about here. Please send them
to the address "gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us" --Gary Trujillo ]
Randy Hayes, Executive Director, Rainforest Action Network
World Rainforest Week Editorial, October 1996
Last Stand for the Amazon
I'm flying across the country, back to San Francisco, after attending a
meeting in New York with colleagues working on globalization issues. Out
of the window of the airplane I see an endless grid of straight roads and
vast regions of perfect rectangular fields etched onto the land below me
like some mathematician's nightmare. This land once was covered with a
beautiful green forest canopy, stretching unvexed from the eastern
seaboard to the Mississippi River, nearly half way across the continent.
Soon I will be flying over a region that was once a sea of tall grass, a
unique North American ecosystem that is now, like the bison who roamed its
rich expanses, all but extinct. Later, as my airplane begins its descent,
crossing the backbone of the world, as the Blackfoot Indians called the
Rocky Mountains, I will look down and see the ghost of our great western
forests.
The sizable chunk of North America that comprises the United States was
once an untamed, beautiful land; but in the name of progress we humans
have desecrated the landscape beyond recognition. The woods have been
chopped down; the land is overpopulated, overtaxed, poisoned, and dying.
The tree museums we call National Parks are nice, but they are industrial
tourism developments that can never replace true wilderness. The tragic
reality is that we have only 5 per cent of our original forests left in
the United States. Its an unspeakable horror: our ancient forests, like
those of Europe and China, are gone.
The ancient Amazon rainforest, however, remains mostly intact, no doubt
because of its remoteness and sheer size. But with modern technology,
fueled by North America's disgraceful demand for resources that out-strips
the capacity of our shrinking natural world, the current threats to the
Amazon could bring devastation on a scale unparalleled in human history.
This is the last stand for the Amazon.
Some powerful people in Brazil clearly want to do the right thing. In late
July, the National Congress passed a two-year moratorium on granting new
mahogany logging concessions, and early reports indicate that most of the
claims against Indian land rights filed by commercial interests under the
so called Genocide Decree are being rejected.
But transnational corporations, primarily from North America, Europe, Japan
and South East Asia, are seducing the Amazon countries with the promise of
fast money, and once these countries are hooked, their economies become
dependent on quick fix solutions. That's why Guyana is considering
selling millions of acres of ancient rainforest to Canadian and Malaysian
logging companies, trading its traditional way of life for one-time
profit. Thats why Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia are turning over control
of their rainforests to American and European oil companies. That's why
Brazil, whose borders inscribe the largest sections of the Amazon
rainforest, is undertaking huge road and canal projects, opening up the
heart of the Amazon to logging and mining, and in one step could erase all
the good that visionary local activists and some government people have
been trying to do there.
That's why I was in New York: I was working on ideas to replace this
idiotic notion of progress before it destroys us all. As I look down
from the airplane on the ruined lands of the United States, I can see
clearly that this notion of progress comes from ecological ignorance.
Ecology is not about saving a tree here and a river there; rather, it is
about the complex system that governs how things work together. We can't
let the Amazon rainforest get cut down and escape the consequences - the
system that governs the earth is delicate and cannot hold. Similarly, we
activists cannot expect our isolated victories to save the planet. We
must find out the connections between the Earth's ecosystems, and we must
work for a new system of social relations that will let us live and work
with nature.
I believe that Nature herself will show us how. The science of
conservation biology can direct us in the protection and restoration of
natural forest systems. These natural systems will also give us an
economic model to transform the current system of commerce into one that
sustains the natural order of things, and is fair to all humans, including
the world's traditional peoples.
Meanwhile, if we are going to learn from Nature, Nature must survive. We
must do all we can to protect the worlds natural forest systems, the
greatest of which is the Amazon rainforest. World Rainforest Week 1996
focuses on the commercial mega-projects poised to consume the Amazon, and
destroy the lives of the people who live there. The time to act is
now, and, as Thomas Jefferson stated so eloquently in the Declaration of
Independence, we need no other imperative than the laws of nature and of
nature's God.