The Amazon’s Neighbourhood Watch
In 2016, twelve people from the Indigenous Borarí and Arapiun communities set out with GPS-cameras to document illegal deforestation of the Amazon happening across the Maró region: a 420 square meter area in the Brazilian state Pará and their homeland. They would locate logging activities, take photographs with their GPS-cameras, send the GPS-referenced images to the Brazilian Environmental Inspection Agency (IBAMA), which in turn would send out helicopters to put a halt to the deforestation. By 2017, these efforts stopped all illegal deforestation in the Maró region and since then no new deforestation activities have gotten a foothold in the area.
The group is led by Odair ‘Dadá’ Borarí, the Chief-General of the Maró region who has been working to prevent deforestation for decades. When Tim Boekhout van Solinge, a Dutch criminologist, was looking for people to experiment with the use of GPS-cameras in forest protection he and Chief Dadá found each other. Under the banner of Treesistance, they have been trying to spread their methods to different communities facing similar struggles and gain support for their fight to preserve the Amazon. Treesistance aims to revolutionize forest crime prevention and biodiversity protection. Their strategy centers around bridging scientific and Indigenous knowledge in order to create new highly effective means of resistance. To do so, Treesistance for instance spreads their knowledge through stories about Curupira, who the Borarí and Arapiun communities believe to be the invisible entity that guards and embodies the forest.
Since 2017, Treesistance has reached out to neighboring Indigenous communities, so that together they now protect 1500 square meters of rainforest. They aim to branch out to protect not only the Amazon but also other forests under threat.
The Amazon is in dire need of such protection. It is the largest rainforest in the world, more than 16 times the size of all of the Netherlands. The 400 billion trees currently store 76 billion tons of carbon, which is more than a quarter of all the carbon stored in trees worldwide. Nevertheless, to make room for grazing livestock and soy plantations that produce animal feed, the Amazon is quickly being deforested. We are heading towards a tipping point where the forest will no longer be able to cool itself, entering into a vicious cycle of heating and forest fires, until there is no forest left.
Deforestation of the Amazon and the Dutch agricultural business are strongly linked to each other. We are the biggest importer of soy for animal feed in Europe: one of the main reasons deforestation happens in the first place. Tim Boekhout van Solinge says he once asked a federal officer about what Dutch people ought to know about the relation between the Amazon and the Netherlands. The officer replied: “That the soy has an aftertaste, an aftertaste of blood because of the violence against Indigenous people.”
Protecting the Amazon comes at a steep price. Here in the Netherlands, we are aware of the challenges environmental activism increasingly faces, through criminalizing peaceful protests by governments all over the world. However, we are not as aware of the violence experienced by people on the frontlines of the environmental movement. Chief Dadá says farmers and loggers set his house on fire, killed his dogs, sabotaged his car and routinely threaten him. In 2006 armed men forced Chief Dadá into a car. After blindfolding and undressing him, they drove Dadá to a forest close to Santarém where they bound him to two trees and proceeded to beat him with their weapons, insisting he stop his activism. After they left, it took ten hours before Dadá was found. Chief Dadá’s case is not an exception. The NGO Global Witness claims that since 2012, 1910 people have been murdered because of their environmental activism. In 2022, at least 177 environmental activists were murdered, out of which 34 in Brazil.
At the end of the documentary Curupira Chief Dadá says: “We don’t want to lose this. We want our environment to thrive, for its biodiversity not to die out, but to continue growing. This is the major role of the Arapiun and Borarí people: to protect its biodiversity with Curupira.” An effort of great importance, and in need of support.
More about Treesistance
www.treesistance.com