Brazil’s election could determine the fate of the Amazon rainforest

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Kerry Bowman is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and its School of the Environment.

Sunday’s election in Brazil marks a pivotal moment for the Amazon rainforest. If President Jair Bolsonaro remains in power, the rampant razing of these lands will continue, which could push the world’s biggest rainforest past an irreversible tipping point of destruction. If his rival “Lula” – former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – returns to power, that could lead to a sharp decline in deforestation, something we saw in his previous time in office.

I have been studying environmental realities in the far western Amazon for several years, primarily observing how protected Indigenous land can help preserve Earth’s climate and biodiversity. It has been a magnificent experience. The Amazon rainforest is the most concentrated expression of life on Earth. Nourished by an equatorial cycle of constant warmth, humidity and rainfall, the region has been the genesis of some of the most complex and spectacular ecosystems on our planet. It also holds some of the most isolated human cultures in the world.

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I just returned from a recent expedition in the western Amazon. Waking early one morning and looking out from my tent, I saw beauty. There was a soft, swirling mist rising from the river and forest, tinged orange in the near-dawn light. I just had to take a walk. At the “low water” time of year we were in, there are many open sandy beaches leading up to a wall of emerald forest.

Up ahead, through the mist, I saw the barely clothed figure of a man. At first I thought it might be one of our team, but it was not; this man had longer hair and held either a club or a blowpipe (a weapon used for hunting). Just as the weight of what I was seeing struck me, he vanished into the forest wall.

We were not in a protected Indigenous territory and had gone to great lengths to avoid any possible encounter with uncontacted peoples. The encounter was ethereal and deeply moving, yet not an illusion – his footprints in the sand were clear as day. Sightings of the uncontacted are extremely rare, and this event deepened my resolve to draw attention to the need to protect this spectacular region.

This man represents one of the most voiceless and vulnerable groups on Earth. The uncontacted are increasingly and more accurately called “the isolated.” Their very presence is of profound benefit to all of us. The Amazon rainforest plays a massive role in absorbing carbon and moderating climate. It is home to about a third of our planet’s terrestrial life forms, and providing formal protection to Indigenous communities is proving to be one of the most effective ways of preserving it. Areas declared Indigenous protected territory by Amazon countries – Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, which is actually a territory of France – have consistently demonstrated drops in forest decline.

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Only an extremely small minority of Indigenous people in the Amazon are uncontacted. Furthermore, Indigenous ways of life are not monolithic, and there is significant interaction with broader cultures. Yet many Indigenous people would say there are often shared beliefs rooted in a profound respect for the environment and non-human life and an intrinsic spiritual and cultural connection to the natural world, something often greatly lacking in the foundations of Western cultures.

Although some differences in measurement exist, almost one-half of the remaining intact forests in the Amazon basin are in Indigenous territories and regions. Deforestation is even lower in Indigenous territories than it is in environmentally protected lands.

The Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the world are one of our best hopes to protect our forests, secure biodiversity and slow the environmental calamity we are facing. With Western cultures’ long and tragic history with Indigenous contact, it is staggering to see that we still allow and tacitly support the subjugation and destruction of Indigenous cultures.

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Yet protecting the environment and Indigenous rights is becoming a dangerous game, particularly in Brazil, where journalists, Indigenous people and environmentalists have been killed trying to communicate the threat to Indigenous societies and what they are protecting – and why this matters to all of us. I have now known three people who died trying to tell this story and effect change.

Increasingly, the front lines of the toughest environmental protection battles are this planet’s most biodiverse regions. Such regions are under attack from organized crime – including cartels and deeply entrenched government corruption – which wants to exploit timber, land, water, minerals, fish and animals for quick profit. In many regions, the only thing standing in their way is the demarcation of protected Indigenous territories. Many of us, even far away, are complicit, as Western consumption is clearly linked to the destruction of tropical forests.

Furthermore, fires in the Amazon region are now unprecedented in terms of destruction and scale. Unlike the case in many other forests of the world, Amazon fires are not naturally occurring. They are often set on Indigenous lands as a way of moving people out of an area so the territory can be claimed by others. Yet we now hear less about them because other world events have overshadowed coverage of this calamity.

The biggest threat for Indigenous territories, greatly exploited by the current Brazilian government, is weak law enforcement, which allows loggers, miners, cartels and hunters to enter Indigenous regions almost at will.

Some say these environmental and human-rights issues are solely the purview of the governments of Amazon countries, such as Brazil, yet on both fronts there is a much larger context to consider. The international environmental calamity is deepening and, as culturally difficult as they are, human-rights issues must always be considered globally. In the case of isolated people, this raises a hard question: What are our responsibilities under national and international law to people who have no contact or limited contact with the outside world – who have no idea they are Brazilian or what Brazil is?

This question emerges as many Western countries are re-examining just how brutal and destructive dominant cultures have been to Indigenous peoples and how, if even possible, this can be redressed. The Indigenous peoples of the Amazon are protecting some of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and, in turn, creating an important counterpoint to climate change. They must be protected. Hopefully the results of the election this weekend will move us forward on this path.

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