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Letter from Ecuador – where defending nature and community is a crime Updated for 2026

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I have been an activist in Intag’s anti-mining struggle for two long decades. But it is impossible to understand my activism, without knowing where I live and what is at risk.

Knowing that I’ve lived in Ecuador’s Intag region since 1978 and that my home is surrounded by primary and secondary cloud forests of incredible biodiversity, clean rivers, waterfalls and stunningly beautiful vistas, will help.

Intag is also populated with some of the nicest people I have come across, all living in small, tight-knit agricultural communities. Until the mining companies came looking for copper, the area was peaceful with very low crime rates.

It is in this setting that I’ve raised my children, learned how to farm sustainably, and deepened my love for nature. In other words, this is a place I love and care for deeply.

This is the reason why I, and others like me, have fought so hard and for so many years to oppose the open-pit copper mine threatening us.

The recurring nightmare

It is December 13, 2013, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, lashes out against me in a nationally televised address in which he falsely accuses me of destabilizing his government.

He makes accusations related to a manual I co-authored to help communities understand what they face when large-scale mining companies come knocking at their door. The manual includes steps communities can take to minimize or avoid the impacts of mining.

 At the end of his speech, Correa asks his countrymen to “react” to this threat. Feeling threatened, I went into hiding for a few weeks.

90 days earlier, Correa gave a televised speech in which he named and broadcast photographs of me and several other activists who oppose the proposed open-pit copper mine that Intag has been fighting for the last two decades. He implied that a few foreigners (I am Cuban by birth and a US citizen) were impeding Ecuador’s development.

The December threats against me by Mr Correa attracted the attention of Amnesty International, prompting them to issue an International Action Alert to safeguard me.

But this was not the first time I had to go into hiding for my activism.

Flash​back to 2006

Now it is dawn, October 17 2006, and 19 heavily armed police are breaking into my home. A minute before, I received a warning phone call from a neighbour and was able to melt into the nearby forest and avoid arrest. Had it not been for the phone call, I would not be alive today to write this*1.

After intimidating my teenage son and a neighbour, the police ransacked my room looking for evidence meant to land me in jail. The police found nothing, though they did steal cash and a few valuables. Ironically, it’s been the only time I’ve been robbed in almost four decades of living in Intag.

Before the police left, a lone officer entered my home and ‘found’ a gun and a packet with something that looked like drugs. The planted evidence gave rise to another arrest warrant for illegal possession of a firearm: a serious crime carrying a minimum eight year jail term. Now I had two arrest warrants, and in order to avoid arrest, I went into hiding over a month.

Seven months after the raid I received an email from an insider at the mining company who told me that the ultimate goal of the police raid was to jail me and then have someone kill me there.

Two years later, the courts ruled that the lawsuit that kick-started the incident was malicious; filed by an American woman paid by the mining company. The alleged crime had been to steal her camera and money and instruct people to beat her up.

This incident was purported to have taken place in a public anti-mining demonstration in Ecuador’s capital amidst hundreds of protesters from Intag, with a squad of police looking on. Neither the District Attorney nor the judge involved in the case asked for a police report before ordering the arrest and search warrants.

A coordinated plan to neutralize opposition to mining

The raid, it turned out, was part of a plan to neutralize opposition to a copper mining concession in Intag. The plan was drawn up by Honor and Laurel, an international security firm. Two weeks after raiding my home, they sent in 50 paramilitaries with attack dogs, machetes and tear gas to try to access the mining concession.

The communities turned them back then, as they did again on December 2006 when even more paramilitaries came to the Junín community, this time armed with pepper spray, shotguns and .38 caliber guns. The confrontation was filmed and forms part of documentaries: ‘Under Rich Earth’, When Clouds Clear’ and ‘In the Open Sky – Rights Undermined‘.

Though I am one of those most targeted by the mining companies, I am not alone. Another case is that of Javier Ramírez, a campesino anti-mining leader from the Junín community who was recently released from jail after serving ten months for a crime he did not commit. Almost a year later, his brother Victor Hugo is still in hiding accused of the same crime.

Since 2012 Ecuador’s state-owned mining company, Enami, along with Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, have been trying hard to continue where Bishimetals and the Canadian company Copper Mesa failed.

 For three years the companies have pretty much been following the script used by most mining and petroleum multinationals for steamrolling opposition. Offer everything to everyone: high paying jobs to key people; offer to improve basic infrastructure (like roads), and so forth. When that fails, the tactics get nastier.

Thus, just as the Canadians sent in their armed security firm in 2006, the Ecuadorian government sent in a 300-strong elite police force to intimidate the hell out of the communities.

Similarly to the timing of the raid on my home and the sending of the security to the communities, the police assault took place a few weeks after the arrest Javier Ramírez, who was president of the Junín community at the time.

Why do I oppose the mining?

To understand the struggle you need to know what is at stake. The cloud forests of Intag are adjacent to one of the world’s most biologically important protected area, the Cotacachi Cayapas Ecological Reserve, coming ahead of the Yasuní National Park in terms of irreplaceability.

Cloud forests make up less than 2.5% of the world’s tropical forest. Nonetheless these fragile ecosystems are centres of endemism and biodiversity and play an important role in conserving watersheds and maintaining the natural flow of rivers.

Based on a preliminary study undertaken for a small open-pit copper mine, the proposed mine threatens the whole Intag region with profound environmental and social upheaval.

The study for the small mine predicted, in their own words: “massive deforestation” which would lead to a process of “desertification”, contamination of rivers and streams with lead, arsenic and other heavy metals.

Subsequent impacts to primary forests would further endanger species already facing extinction; including jaguars, spectacled bears and brown-faced spider monkeys.

The study went onto say that the mine would impact the Cotacachi-Cayapas Ecological Reserve, the only protected area of any significant size in Western Ecuador, and one of the planet’s most biologically important.

It also predicted some grim social impacts, including increased crime and the relocation of four communities. Junín, Javier Ramírez’s community, would be the first one to be wiped off the map. The year after these impacts were published, many times more copper was found in the region.

If the copper mining is allowed to go ahead, given the exceptional steep terrain of the mining site, the composition of the mining deposit, combined with the area’s high rainfall, the presence dozens of pristine rivers and streams as well as abundant underground aquifers and primary forests sheltering endangered mammals and other species, and the seismic risks, this would be one of the world’s most environmentally devastating mining projects. The threat could not be clearer nor grimmer.

Why bother?

I am often asked how I can keep opposing copper mining after so many years and so much harassment. The thought of Intag’s beauty, biological and cultural diversity vanishing, to be replaced by yet another open-pit mine haemorrhaging heavy metals is what sustains me.

In spite of the death threats, the incessant stress, the economic hardships, the witnessing of so much injustice and apathy, the short-sightedness of politicians, and being vilified by the highest elected official of a nation, I think it’s worth it.

I find the question of how I can keep opposing the mine baffling. I find it baffling because it is impossible for me to grasp that anyone who feels part of, and loves his community, and values the incredible cloud forests of Intag, would do anything else but defend it against such a clear and imminent threat.

The alternative is to pack up and leave. And I’m not about to do that.

 

 

Event: Carlos Zorrilla will be giving a talk about his work on 15th April for the Anglo Ecuadorian Society at the Institute of Latin American Studies, London. To book a place, please contact mpatlea@gmail.com.

Carlos Zorrilla is co-founder and Executive Director of DECOIN (Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag).

Translated by Sarah Fraser (Rainforest Concern).

DECOIN’s work takes place within the cloud forests of northwest Ecuador, which form part of the most biodiverse of the world’s 36 Biological Hotspots. He is the author of several papers on development, large-scale mining and its impacts on communities and the environment and was principal author of the guide ‘Protecting your Communities Against Large Scale Mining and Other Extractive Industries’. DECOIN works in partnership with Rainforest Concern on cloud forest conservation projects in Ecuador.

Rainforest Concern is a UK Registered Charity, established to protect threatened natural forest habitats and the biodiversity they contain, together with the indigenous people who depend on them for survival. In its 21 year the charity has legally protected over 1.4 million hectares of threatened forest habitats, always engaging the local communities to protect their interests, and working closely with local conservation NGOs. Rainforest Concern has worked with 21 partner organisations in 12 countries: Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Romania, Costa Rica, Panama, India, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Suriname.

 

 




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To forestall a mass extinction, fight forest fragmention Updated for 2026

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Much of the Earth was once cloaked in vast forests, from the subarctic snowforests to the Amazon and Congo basins.

As humankind colonised the far corners of our planet, we cleared large areas to harvest wood, make way for farmland, and build towns and cities.

The loss of forest has wrought dramatic consequences for biodiversity and is the primary driver of the global extinction crisis. I work in Borneo where huge expanses of tropical forest are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations.

The biological cost is the replacement of some 150 forest bird species with a few tens of farmland species. But forest is also frequently retained inside or at the edges of oil palm plantations, and this is a pattern that is replicated globally.

The problem, according to new research published in Science Advances, is that the vast majority of remaining forests are fragmented.

In other words, remaining forests are increasingly isolated from other forests by a sea of transformed lands, and they are found in ever-smaller sized patches. The shockwaves of loss thus extend far beyond the footprint of deforestation.

Accessible forests

The team, led by Nick Haddad from North Carolina State University, used the world’s first high-resolution satellite map of tree cover to measure how isolated remaining forests are from a non-forest edge. Edges are created by a plethora of deforesting activities, from roads to cattle pastures and oil wells, as well as by rivers.

They found that more than 70% of remaining forest is within just 1km (about 0.6 miles) of an edge, while a 100 metre stroll from an edge would enable you to reach 20% of global forests.

Comparing across regions, the patterns they find are even starker. In Europe and the US, the vast majority of forest is within 1km of an edge – some of the most ‘remote’ areas in these regions are a stones throw from human activity. ‘Getting away from it all’ has never been more challenging.

If you want remote forests on a large scale you’ll have to head to the Amazon, the Congo, or to a lesser degree, central and far eastern Russia, central Borneo and Papua New Guinea.

Biodiversity reduced

These findings wouldn’t be cause for alarm if wildlife, forests, and the services that they provide humankind such as carbon storage and water, were unaffected by fragmentation.

However, by drawing together scientific evidence from seven long-term fragmentation experiments, Haddad and colleagues show that fragmentation reduces biodiversity by up to 75%. This exacerbates the extinction risk of millions of forest species, many of which we still don’t know much about.

Forest species struggle to survive at edges because these places are brighter, windier, and hotter than forest interiors. Edges become choked by rampant vines and invaded by disturbance-tolerant, parasitic or invasive species that outcompete the denizens of dark forest interiors.

In Borneo, for example, small forest patches house bird communities that are far more similar to those found in the surrounding oil palm than to those of larger forest tracts.

The survival of large, carbon-rich trees – the building blocks of any intact forest ecosystem – is reduced in smaller and more isolated forest fragments. These patches thus fail to maintain viable populations, which over time are doomed – an ‘extinction debt’ yet to be paid.

With so much global forest in close proximity to humans, larger forest animals such as chimpanzees, gorillas, tapirs or curassow birds are being hunted to extinction in individual areas. This shifts animal communities within the forest fragments to one dominated by small-bodied species.

Further, hunters are willing to penetrate forests for several kilometres from edges in search of game, effectively making the truly wild global forest estate yet smaller.

Difficult management decisions

The insidious effects of fragmentation mean that the top conservation priority must be preventing further incursions into dwindling wildernesses. By preventing the first cut we can help to prevent global fragmentation and the further loss of biodiversity.

Of course, we should not ignore fragmented regions. Some of these, including the Brazilian Atlantic forest, Tropical Andes and Himalayas, share a toxic mix of hyperdiversity, endemic species with tiny ranges, and severe fragmentation.

The critically-endangered Munchique wood-wren, for instance, exists only in a handful of peaks in the Colombian Andes, but these are now isolated from each other by cattle pastures and roads. Here we must seek to restore forest cover and improve connectivity between larger fragments if we are to prevent extinctions.

However, the rapid expansion of human populations, greed, and meat consumption mean that more forest is likely to be lost, even if farm yield and efficiency can be improved to help bridge gaps between current and future demand.

The difficult question is where should this expansion happen? Given the severe degradation of small and isolated fragments, perhaps conversion could target some of these patches, coupled with wilderness protection and expansion.

Next time I visit my local National Park – the highly fragmented Peak District – I will spare a thought for the species that are being harmed by their habitats being broken up into ever smaller chunks.

There are no easy answers to the problems of fragmentation, but our forests urgently need a global management plan.

 

 

The paper: ‘Habitat fragmentation and its lasting impact on Earth’s ecosystems‘ by Nick M. Haddad et al is published in Science Advances (full paper / open access).

David Edwards is Lecturer of Conservation Science at the University of Sheffield.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




391551

Occupy Amazonia? Indigenous activists are taking direct action – and it’s working Updated for 2026

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The native peoples of Loreto, in Peru’s Amazon basin, have just ended a month long occupation of 14 oil wells belonging to the Argentine company Pluspetrol.

Negotiations are still underway between the oil company and various other communities, represented by the indigenous association Feconaco.

This is not the first time Feconaco has occupied Pluspetrol’s operations. Such actions on the part of indigenous groups are relatively common.

Amazonian people don’t appear to have learned direct action from the Occupy Movement or from Euro-American protest traditions, despite the similar tactics. In the absence of functioning state protection, native people have always had to stand up for themselves.

Last September, for instance, Ka’apor people of northeastern Maranhão in Brazil published photographs of illegal loggers whom they had captured and tied up. They had taken matters into their own hands because the state was not protecting their territory.

The pioneers of indigenous direct action were the Kayapó of southern Pará in Brazil, who began monitoring goldmining and later logging in their territory, which senior leaders tolerated and indeed profited from.

In the early 1990s, environmental destruction and mercury poisoning led many Kayapó people to support a younger generation of leaders who expelled the miners and loggers from their territory. Images of the Kayapó have since become synonymous with indigenous environmentalism.

A history of exploitation

The relative success of direct action in recent decades contrasts with the often bloody encounters that went before, from which poorly-armed Indians invariably emerged badly.

Indigenous people in the Amazon have been the victims of the mining and energy industries for hundreds of years. The earliest colonists were motivated by greed for gold, and successive waves of exploitation have followed. The violent and coercive labour relations of the rubber boom (which ended a century ago) continue to affect how local people view trade and outsiders.

Fur hunters would shoot native people on sight throughout much of the 20th century. A good friend of mine, one of my principal informants in the field, fled Brazil as a child after his family were killed by fur hunters, and came to live with another tribe in the border area between French Guiana and Suriname.

Here, and across the Guiana region (the vast area of northeastern Amazonia bordered by the rivers Negro, Orinoco and the lower Amazon), mining for gold, diamonds and other minerals has led to significant social conflicts.

The region’s small communities are held together by personal ties of kinship and are highly dependent upon local ecosystems for their livelihoods. This makes them particularly vulnerable to the side-effects of extractive industries such as environmental destruction and pollution of rivers and lakes. But there are also social and medical effects: prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction and the introduction of new diseases such as HIV.

Mining and oil companies generally earn a bad reputation for their Amazon activities, but projects devised in the name of ‘sustainability’ can have a negative impact too. Think in particular of the programme of hydroelectric dams being rolled out across Brazil.

Belo Monte, the world’s fourth largest hydroelectric dam, is being built across a southern tributary of the Amazon, for instance. It has already caused the influx of tens of thousands of workers, with severe strain on local social relations. Its impact on a vast ecosystem – a major hydrological basin – will be monumental.

Protests against the Belo Monte dam have failed, as a Brazilian government focused on development ploughed on with its project which is, after all, consistent with the political rhetoric of the ‘green economy’. Indigenous people are a small section of the electorate, and their voice cuts little sway in the national political scene.

Companies in the crosshairs

Protests against international private companies can arguably be more effective, in so far as the directors of these companies consider a poor public image to significantly affect their profits.

A legal battle raging for nearly two decades between indigenous peoples in Ecuador and the energy giant Chevron, contributed to the corporation earning the title of a Lifetime Award for Shameful Corporate Behaviour by grassroots satirists in Davos earlier this year. Yet the corporate social responsibility activities which result from such pressures all too often seem to be largely cosmetic.

Where direct action has succeeded it is largely thanks to the construction of new kinds of alliances between indigenous leaders, progressive and socially oriented NGOs, and independent activists, including some academics.

Indigenous people in the Amazon basin have gradually, over the centuries, become more adept at getting organised and speaking the language of power. They’re now a key part of a global indigenous peoples’ movement which can call on an increasing number of activists with training in international law, documentary film making, or indeed anthropology, to assist campaigning efforts.

On a smaller scale, communities regularly engage with different projects brought by outsiders, including the ‘partnerships’ proposed by extractive industries. However, they just as often come to regret their entrance into the relationship.

Indigenous people come to realise that their understandings of fair exchanges are not the same, and sometimes not even compatible with those of their interlocutors, whether they be loggers, miners, or people looking for more intangible wealth such as traditional designs, music or ecological knowledge.

These experiences show that the conflicts that sometimes arise between native people and outsiders seeking to extract natural resources are not merely conflicts of material interests, and are not structured merely by an imbalance of power. They are on a more fundamental level conflicts of worldviews, of cosmovisiones, as Afro-Colombians sometimes call them.

Indigenous people have made vast efforts to speak across the gap between themselves and others who live and move in the capitalist world. The onus is now on outsiders, including postcolonial states and transnational organisations, to make a corresponding effort.

 

 

Marc Brightman is Lecturer in Social and Environmental Sustainability in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Together with Jerome Lewis, he is co-founder and co-director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




391337

Occupy Amazonia? Indigenous activists are taking direct action – and it’s working Updated for 2026

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The native peoples of Loreto, in Peru’s Amazon basin, have just ended a month long occupation of 14 oil wells belonging to the Argentine company Pluspetrol.

Negotiations are still underway between the oil company and various other communities, represented by the indigenous association Feconaco.

This is not the first time Feconaco has occupied Pluspetrol’s operations. Such actions on the part of indigenous groups are relatively common.

Amazonian people don’t appear to have learned direct action from the Occupy Movement or from Euro-American protest traditions, despite the similar tactics. In the absence of functioning state protection, native people have always had to stand up for themselves.

Last September, for instance, Ka’apor people of northeastern Maranhão in Brazil published photographs of illegal loggers whom they had captured and tied up. They had taken matters into their own hands because the state was not protecting their territory.

The pioneers of indigenous direct action were the Kayapó of southern Pará in Brazil, who began monitoring goldmining and later logging in their territory, which senior leaders tolerated and indeed profited from.

In the early 1990s, environmental destruction and mercury poisoning led many Kayapó people to support a younger generation of leaders who expelled the miners and loggers from their territory. Images of the Kayapó have since become synonymous with indigenous environmentalism.

A history of exploitation

The relative success of direct action in recent decades contrasts with the often bloody encounters that went before, from which poorly-armed Indians invariably emerged badly.

Indigenous people in the Amazon have been the victims of the mining and energy industries for hundreds of years. The earliest colonists were motivated by greed for gold, and successive waves of exploitation have followed. The violent and coercive labour relations of the rubber boom (which ended a century ago) continue to affect how local people view trade and outsiders.

Fur hunters would shoot native people on sight throughout much of the 20th century. A good friend of mine, one of my principal informants in the field, fled Brazil as a child after his family were killed by fur hunters, and came to live with another tribe in the border area between French Guiana and Suriname.

Here, and across the Guiana region (the vast area of northeastern Amazonia bordered by the rivers Negro, Orinoco and the lower Amazon), mining for gold, diamonds and other minerals has led to significant social conflicts.

The region’s small communities are held together by personal ties of kinship and are highly dependent upon local ecosystems for their livelihoods. This makes them particularly vulnerable to the side-effects of extractive industries such as environmental destruction and pollution of rivers and lakes. But there are also social and medical effects: prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction and the introduction of new diseases such as HIV.

Mining and oil companies generally earn a bad reputation for their Amazon activities, but projects devised in the name of ‘sustainability’ can have a negative impact too. Think in particular of the programme of hydroelectric dams being rolled out across Brazil.

Belo Monte, the world’s fourth largest hydroelectric dam, is being built across a southern tributary of the Amazon, for instance. It has already caused the influx of tens of thousands of workers, with severe strain on local social relations. Its impact on a vast ecosystem – a major hydrological basin – will be monumental.

Protests against the Belo Monte dam have failed, as a Brazilian government focused on development ploughed on with its project which is, after all, consistent with the political rhetoric of the ‘green economy’. Indigenous people are a small section of the electorate, and their voice cuts little sway in the national political scene.

Companies in the crosshairs

Protests against international private companies can arguably be more effective, in so far as the directors of these companies consider a poor public image to significantly affect their profits.

A legal battle raging for nearly two decades between indigenous peoples in Ecuador and the energy giant Chevron, contributed to the corporation earning the title of a Lifetime Award for Shameful Corporate Behaviour by grassroots satirists in Davos earlier this year. Yet the corporate social responsibility activities which result from such pressures all too often seem to be largely cosmetic.

Where direct action has succeeded it is largely thanks to the construction of new kinds of alliances between indigenous leaders, progressive and socially oriented NGOs, and independent activists, including some academics.

Indigenous people in the Amazon basin have gradually, over the centuries, become more adept at getting organised and speaking the language of power. They’re now a key part of a global indigenous peoples’ movement which can call on an increasing number of activists with training in international law, documentary film making, or indeed anthropology, to assist campaigning efforts.

On a smaller scale, communities regularly engage with different projects brought by outsiders, including the ‘partnerships’ proposed by extractive industries. However, they just as often come to regret their entrance into the relationship.

Indigenous people come to realise that their understandings of fair exchanges are not the same, and sometimes not even compatible with those of their interlocutors, whether they be loggers, miners, or people looking for more intangible wealth such as traditional designs, music or ecological knowledge.

These experiences show that the conflicts that sometimes arise between native people and outsiders seeking to extract natural resources are not merely conflicts of material interests, and are not structured merely by an imbalance of power. They are on a more fundamental level conflicts of worldviews, of cosmovisiones, as Afro-Colombians sometimes call them.

Indigenous people have made vast efforts to speak across the gap between themselves and others who live and move in the capitalist world. The onus is now on outsiders, including postcolonial states and transnational organisations, to make a corresponding effort.

 

 

Marc Brightman is Lecturer in Social and Environmental Sustainability in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Together with Jerome Lewis, he is co-founder and co-director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




391337

Occupy Amazonia? Indigenous activists are taking direct action – and it’s working Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




The native peoples of Loreto, in Peru’s Amazon basin, have just ended a month long occupation of 14 oil wells belonging to the Argentine company Pluspetrol.

Negotiations are still underway between the oil company and various other communities, represented by the indigenous association Feconaco.

This is not the first time Feconaco has occupied Pluspetrol’s operations. Such actions on the part of indigenous groups are relatively common.

Amazonian people don’t appear to have learned direct action from the Occupy Movement or from Euro-American protest traditions, despite the similar tactics. In the absence of functioning state protection, native people have always had to stand up for themselves.

Last September, for instance, Ka’apor people of northeastern Maranhão in Brazil published photographs of illegal loggers whom they had captured and tied up. They had taken matters into their own hands because the state was not protecting their territory.

The pioneers of indigenous direct action were the Kayapó of southern Pará in Brazil, who began monitoring goldmining and later logging in their territory, which senior leaders tolerated and indeed profited from.

In the early 1990s, environmental destruction and mercury poisoning led many Kayapó people to support a younger generation of leaders who expelled the miners and loggers from their territory. Images of the Kayapó have since become synonymous with indigenous environmentalism.

A history of exploitation

The relative success of direct action in recent decades contrasts with the often bloody encounters that went before, from which poorly-armed Indians invariably emerged badly.

Indigenous people in the Amazon have been the victims of the mining and energy industries for hundreds of years. The earliest colonists were motivated by greed for gold, and successive waves of exploitation have followed. The violent and coercive labour relations of the rubber boom (which ended a century ago) continue to affect how local people view trade and outsiders.

Fur hunters would shoot native people on sight throughout much of the 20th century. A good friend of mine, one of my principal informants in the field, fled Brazil as a child after his family were killed by fur hunters, and came to live with another tribe in the border area between French Guiana and Suriname.

Here, and across the Guiana region (the vast area of northeastern Amazonia bordered by the rivers Negro, Orinoco and the lower Amazon), mining for gold, diamonds and other minerals has led to significant social conflicts.

The region’s small communities are held together by personal ties of kinship and are highly dependent upon local ecosystems for their livelihoods. This makes them particularly vulnerable to the side-effects of extractive industries such as environmental destruction and pollution of rivers and lakes. But there are also social and medical effects: prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction and the introduction of new diseases such as HIV.

Mining and oil companies generally earn a bad reputation for their Amazon activities, but projects devised in the name of ‘sustainability’ can have a negative impact too. Think in particular of the programme of hydroelectric dams being rolled out across Brazil.

Belo Monte, the world’s fourth largest hydroelectric dam, is being built across a southern tributary of the Amazon, for instance. It has already caused the influx of tens of thousands of workers, with severe strain on local social relations. Its impact on a vast ecosystem – a major hydrological basin – will be monumental.

Protests against the Belo Monte dam have failed, as a Brazilian government focused on development ploughed on with its project which is, after all, consistent with the political rhetoric of the ‘green economy’. Indigenous people are a small section of the electorate, and their voice cuts little sway in the national political scene.

Companies in the crosshairs

Protests against international private companies can arguably be more effective, in so far as the directors of these companies consider a poor public image to significantly affect their profits.

A legal battle raging for nearly two decades between indigenous peoples in Ecuador and the energy giant Chevron, contributed to the corporation earning the title of a Lifetime Award for Shameful Corporate Behaviour by grassroots satirists in Davos earlier this year. Yet the corporate social responsibility activities which result from such pressures all too often seem to be largely cosmetic.

Where direct action has succeeded it is largely thanks to the construction of new kinds of alliances between indigenous leaders, progressive and socially oriented NGOs, and independent activists, including some academics.

Indigenous people in the Amazon basin have gradually, over the centuries, become more adept at getting organised and speaking the language of power. They’re now a key part of a global indigenous peoples’ movement which can call on an increasing number of activists with training in international law, documentary film making, or indeed anthropology, to assist campaigning efforts.

On a smaller scale, communities regularly engage with different projects brought by outsiders, including the ‘partnerships’ proposed by extractive industries. However, they just as often come to regret their entrance into the relationship.

Indigenous people come to realise that their understandings of fair exchanges are not the same, and sometimes not even compatible with those of their interlocutors, whether they be loggers, miners, or people looking for more intangible wealth such as traditional designs, music or ecological knowledge.

These experiences show that the conflicts that sometimes arise between native people and outsiders seeking to extract natural resources are not merely conflicts of material interests, and are not structured merely by an imbalance of power. They are on a more fundamental level conflicts of worldviews, of cosmovisiones, as Afro-Colombians sometimes call them.

Indigenous people have made vast efforts to speak across the gap between themselves and others who live and move in the capitalist world. The onus is now on outsiders, including postcolonial states and transnational organisations, to make a corresponding effort.

 

 

Marc Brightman is Lecturer in Social and Environmental Sustainability in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Together with Jerome Lewis, he is co-founder and co-director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




391337

Climate change sparked Syria’s ruinous war Updated for 2026

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In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




391003

Climate change sparked Syria’s ruinous war Updated for 2026

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In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




391003

Climate change sparked Syria’s ruinous war Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




391003

Climate change sparked Syria’s ruinous war Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




391003

Climate change sparked Syria’s ruinous war Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.

And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011. The ensuing civil war has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.

The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago.

The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors are clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability – but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.

“We’re not saying the drought caused the war”, says Richard Seager, one of the co-authors. “We’re saying that, added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Climate link to violence

Their study, although it contains new material, is not the first to suggest a possible link between extreme weather and the likelihood of violence.

Some researchers have investigated whether there may be a link between El Niño and La Niña – the periodic Pacific weather disruptions – and outbreaks of unrest. Suggestions of a global connection between climate change and political instability is being taken seriously by two influential groups – insurers and military planners.

Syria was not the only country affected by the drought. It struck the Fertile Crescent, linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where agriculture and animal herding are believed to have started around 12,000 years ago.

The Levant has always seen natural weather swings. Other research has suggested that the Akkadian empire, spanning much of the Fertile Crescent about 4,000 years ago, probably collapsed during a long drought.

But the authors of the Lamont-Doherty study, using existing studies and their own research, showed that the area has warmed by between 1°C and 1.2°C since 1900, and has undergone a 10% reduction in wet season precipitation. They say this trend is a neat match for models of human-influenced global warming, and so cannot be attributed to natural variability.

Global warming has had two effects, they say. First, it appears to have indirectly weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. And higher temperatures have increased the evaporation of moisture from soils during the hot summers.

Other researchers have observed the long-term drying trend across the Mediterranean region, and have attributed at least part of it to anthropogenic warming.

Government stuck with water-intensive cash crops

The government has also encouraged water-intensive export crops such as cotton, while illegal drilling of irrigation wells depleted groundwater, says co-author Shahrzad Mohtadi, an international affairs consultant at the US Department of State.

The drought’s effects were immediate and overwhelming. Agricultural production – typically, a quarter of Syria’s gross domestic product – fell by a third. In the northeast, livestock was practically wiped out, cereal prices doubled, and nutrition-related diseases among children increased steeply.

And Syria was especially vulnerable because of other factors – including a huge increase in population from four million in the 1950s to 22 million in recent years. As many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to cities already strained by waves of refugees from the war in neighbouring Iraq.

“Rapid demographic change encourages instability”, the authors say. “Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.”

Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says the study is “the first scientific paper to make the case that human-caused climate change is already altering the risk of large-scale social unrest and violence.”

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




391003