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The\u00a0Amazon\u00a0Has\u00a0Seen Our\u00a0Future<\/em>, The New York Times, Oct. 2, 2020<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Our original intention for the last post on October 2 had been to focus on another issue. But when the leader of the most powerful nation on earth contracted the disease that has been ravaging the planet and remains an out of control pandemic starting its next phase as science predicted if not properly controlled by necessary and consistent policies, then all bets were off.<\/p>\n For now on the above subject, we’ll just note that more than ever, reality imitates science-fiction, and science-fiction imitates reality, in an exponential cycle that requires new descriptors which we will not pursue at this time.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, as all things are connected, all the pandemices of every kind on earth continue to spiral out of control.<\/p>\n So here’s the issue we had planned to post October 2.<\/p>\n On that day, The New York Times posted another of its finest extensive reports (which with certainly was lost in the maelstrom of the unforseen news that day referenced above) in a three part series of connected opinion pieces, Th<\/em>e\u00a0Amazon\u00a0Has\u00a0Seen Our\u00a0Future<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Intellectually, emotionally and visually, it’s a mesmerizing and bracing series. An update on the state of the planet.<\/p>\n We’ve written often of the Amazon and all the related issues–which means all the issues that will determine the “whether or not” of life on earth. Enviroment, human rights, hunger, disease, economic opportunity, war, population and the personal growth to see the connections and take action.<\/p>\n “Today the people of the\u00a0Amazon Are Living through\u00a0the most extreme\u00a0versions of our planet’s most\u00a0urgent problems”, the subtext of the introduction to the series observes. “We asked a dozen experts on\u00a0and from the region to tell us what\u2019s going on, and to imagine a better future.”<\/p>\n Today is Columbus Day\/Indigenous Peoples\u2019 Day in the US.<\/p>\n Two years ago on the same day, we posted\u00a0The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Ten<\/em>,<\/a> which focused on the Amazon and the same inter-related issues The Times series does now two years later.<\/p>\n Here’s an excerpt from the opening:<\/p>\n \u201cNative Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world\u2019s largest garden.\u201d \u2013\u00a0Charles C. Mann, 1491, The Atlantic Magazine, March 2002<\/em><\/p>\n As we have noted throughout our reflections, sometimes we have to look back in order to look forward, much less to see clearly where we are.<\/em><\/p>\n Today is Columbus Day in the US, a federal holiday set on the second Monday of October, and a national holiday in many countries of the Americas and elsewhere which officially celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus\u2019s arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492.<\/em><\/p>\n It is a controversial holiday, for good reason. Many states and cities observe it as a \u201cDay of Observance\u201d or \u201cRecognition\u201d and a number of states and cities observe it as \u201cIndigenous Peoples\u2019 Day.\u201d …<\/em><\/p>\n This week, we go back to the creation moment when a connected world was born, and all that has flowed from it. When Western civilization was influenced at least as much by the indigenous civilizations it encountered and colonized as the other way around.<\/em><\/p>\n Terrible and amazing things have happened ever since 1492. Everything changed then. Most people don\u2019t truly understand this. Or the context of indigenous civilizations going back thousands of years. Or the relationship since to virtually every aspect of Western civilization.<\/em><\/p>\n Most importantly, 1492 was the year that we became one world.<\/em><\/p>\n There are countless reasons to wish it had never happened. Conversely, it was always inevitably going to, one way or another, and in the evolution of our species, aspects of it were going to be awful, one way or another. No excuses, but terrible reality, until we are citizens of the planet as one species, with basic needs, rights, rules and responsibilities for all with global governance.<\/em><\/p>\n It is quite possible that the population of indigenous peoples who created advanced civilizations disconnected from the rest of the world was larger than the population of Europe in 1492. Their relationship to the environment was complex and as with all people in response to their basic needs. As it was, they may well have, through their ingenuity, created the Amazon in no small part, the linchpin on the planet to a significant extent upon which every breath we take depends.<\/em><\/p>\n The food crops that Europeans and much of the world came to depend on were developed by indigenous peoples.<\/em><\/p>\n The fate of indigenous peoples in the Americas was sealed the moment Columbus landed. The huge majority were not killed by European weapons but by disease, pandemics perhaps historically unequaled. The Europeans apparently had little to no idea what was happening in the main at first\u2013one person or animal could start the process that destroyed populations over time after the initial European incursion moved on (the paths of disease, years between Eurpoean incursions and places they occured helped engender the myth of wilderness)\u2013and had every reason to want large populations of indigenous peoples to survive to be used as labor (although had the huge majority survived, it is quite possible that even with their weaponry, Europeans would have been overwhelmed and their weapons technology adopted\u2013in which case history may have taken a very different course.) Because of the decimation of indigenous populations, Europeans looked to Africa for slave labor in the Americas.<\/em><\/p>\n Make no mistake about it, Europeans were more than willing to consciously commit genocide and did, along with every imaginable crime against humanity. Their interest was their own security, wealth and power (although to remind of the connectedness of all things, some were themselves virtual serfs or were fleeing tyranny, persecution and deprivation). In the US as throughout the Americas, the original sin was not slavery (although that was the abominable crime that tore the US apart from the start for many reasons). The first sin, the first great crime, was committed against indigenous peoples.<\/em><\/p>\n But the situation was far more complex as it unfolded over half a millennium than was, or still is, understood by many. The degree of the tragedy is minimized by not acknowledging the size of the populations and civilizations destroyed. And the lack of understanding as to the contributions made by indigenous peoples that in many ways were more advanced than Europeans, and that ended up benefiting Europeans and the whole world, adds to the degradation and racism endured by indigenous peoples. The cruelest irony and greatest tribute may be that humanity and all life on earth may owe our future survival in significant measure to them.<\/em><\/p>\n We covered at length the history, past and present, associated with the Amazon and all the issues related to it. We warned at length about what it appeared was about to happen, specifically in Brazil.<\/p>\n The worst predictions, by us and by others, related to the worst of what has been happening globally, have tragically been realized. The Times series reads like a follow-up and even more extensive deep dive into the issues we covered then. And it touches on other issues we have covered before and since.<\/p>\n Including, on top of it all, the pandemic.<\/p>\n Again and again, reality tries to force our eyes open, and will, until they do, individually and collectively, or until they all close in species ending events.<\/p>\n Homero Aridjis is a Mexican poet, novelist and environmental activist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Here is his poem, Discreation<\/em>, in\u00a0Three Poets on the Amazon<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0part of The Times series:<\/p>\n Anger is a brief madness, Horace<\/em><\/p>\n Amazonia turned into the biggest bonfire in the world.<\/em><\/p>\n The Alps and the Andes were converted into chasms.<\/em><\/p>\n The seas and the eyes that looked upon them evaporated.<\/em><\/p>\n On the tree of life, the bird that sang the four hundred<\/em><\/p>\n voices of blue faded into the flames.<\/em><\/p>\n Of all creatures, human eyes had the deepest pits.<\/em><\/p>\n Suddenly, it was night on earth.<\/em><\/p>\n A searing silence came over all.<\/em><\/p>\n The most orphaned of beings was the son of man.<\/em><\/p>\n Old as the moon was the baby\u2019s face.<\/em><\/p>\n Eons dissolved into instants.<\/em><\/p>\n Somewhere, at some moment<\/em><\/p>\n a deranged Godzilla and a maddened Batman<\/em><\/p>\n pitched nuclear strikes at one another.<\/em><\/p>\n All of it was brief.<\/em><\/p>\n The Apocalypse shall be the work of man, not of God.<\/em><\/p>\n And here is an excerpt from the first piece in the series,\u00a0Captain Chain Saw\u2019s Delusion<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0by Chris Feliciano Arnold,\u00a0author of \u201cThe Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First-Century Amazon”:<\/span><\/p>\n Amid political strife and smoke visible from space, the future of the Amazon has rarely been so hazy. Environmentalists see a vanishing rainforest of global consequence. Indigenous leaders see an ancestral home still being exploited by settlers after 500 years of genocidal violence. Brazil\u2019s president, Jair Bolsonaro, sees valuable acreage wasted by \u201ccave men<\/a>\u201d and Marxists.<\/em><\/p>\n Sixty percent of the world\u2019s largest tropical forest lies within Brazil\u2019s borders, and since 2006 I\u2019ve traveled thousands of miles in the Amazon, witnessing how the river and its people have experienced a century\u2019s worth of ecological and cultural change in a generation. For a few weeks last year, record-setting fires in the region focused the world\u2019s attention with an intensity reminiscent of the Save the Rainforest campaigns of the 1980s, but this year, the land is burning during a pandemic that has interrupted travel, stymied environmental protection efforts, and emboldened miners, loggers and ranchers to encroach on Indigenous land with impunity.<\/em><\/p>\n This spring, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles was caught on video<\/a> urging Mr. Bolsonaro to use the distraction of the coronavirus as cover to loosen environmental regulations. \u201cWe need to make an effort here during this period of calm in terms of press coverage because people are only talking about Covid,\u201d he said, as mass graves<\/a> were being dug for coronavirus victims in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas State.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Bolsonaro, who just last month blamed the wildfires on \u201cpeasants and Indians,\u201d embodies the brutal history of the Amazon. \u201cCaptain Chain Saw,\u201d as he has smugly nicknamed himself<\/a>, spent his formative years as an Army paratrooper, idolizing the generals and autocrats of the United States-supported dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.<\/em><\/p>\n During Brazil\u2019s \u201cEconomic Miracle\u201d of the 1970s, the military president Em\u00edlio M\u00e9dici proclaimed the Amazon \u201ca land without men for men without land,\u201d suggesting that its undeveloped wilderness and unsettled tribes were at once the cause of \u2014 and the solution to \u2014 Brazil\u2019s woes. \u201cWe must start up the Amazon clock,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in 1971, urging Brazil to make up for lost time by carving the 3,400-mile Transamaz\u00f4nica highway through the heart of the forest. Brazilians from the drought-stricken northeast could start new lives along the highway, solving \u201cthe Indian problem\u201d along the way.<\/em><\/p>\n For migrants who heeded Mr. M\u00e9dici\u2019s call, the road to salvation ended in starvation. The rich topsoil of their freshly cleared plots washed away in torrential rains. Most were forced to abandon their dreams, but not before countless tribes were massacred, ravaged by disease, or forcibly relocated, sometimes minutes before bulldozers arrived.<\/em><\/p>\n Decades later, thousands of roads, rumbling with logging trucks and cattle trailers, fishbone into the rainforest off the spine of the Transamaz\u00f4nica and highways like it. Along the delicate Amazon watershed \u2014 responsible for more than 15 percent of the planet\u2019s river discharge into oceans<\/a> \u2014 gas pipelines and hydroelectric dams pump energy for cities around Brazil. Industrial farms ship billions of dollars of beef and soy to a hungry world. Manaus hosts multinational manufacturers like Harley Davidson and Samsung alongside biotech laboratories and universities that are beacons of rainforest research.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Thirty million people<\/a> live within the Amazon basin \u2014 more than the populations of the five Nordic countries combined. They include Indigenous peoples, migrants from throughout Brazil, and immigrants from around the world. Yet Mr. Bolsonaro would have you believe that the Amazon is an untamed jungle. His calls for new roads, dams, mines and ranches paint a false choice \u2014 save Brazilians, or save the rainforest \u2014 that ignores the fact that Brazil has been aggressively developing the Amazon since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.<\/em><\/p>\n As the planet warms over the next decades, the Amazon will become a cradle of human discovery or an ecological crime scene. The question for the 21st century is not how to extract more raw materials from the forest, but how to empower its people to live sustainably in the forest, the way Indigenous Brazilians did before Europeans committed genocide on the continent. …<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Capitalists and environmentalists alike might want to resist it, but the future has already come to the Brazilian rainforest \u2014 and it looks much like the past: chaotic, unjust and unsustainable.<\/em><\/p>\n In cities like Manaus, elites bask in sunset river views from high-rise condominiums and eat sushi in air-conditioned shopping malls. A rising middle class of mostly non-Indigenous Brazilians enjoy food truck festivals, Texas Hold \u2018Em tournaments and craft breweries. During the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, I watched throngs of international soccer fans<\/a> flood Ubers and Airbnbs.<\/em><\/p>\n But while luxuries have boomed, essential services like public transportation, safety and health care are shoddy to nonexistent. Overcrowded prisons routinely spasm with horrific riots while government officials negotiate with crime bosses for votes from their neighborhoods. Residents lack water, sanitation and electricity. Urban neighborhoods are dominated by drug traffickers and rogue police officers, while tribes in the interior are menaced by wildcat miners, drillers and loggers. They leave in their wake mercury, spilled oil, tree stumps, survivors of violence and sexual assault, and pathogens like influenza that are every bit as novel there as the coronavirus.\u00a0…<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The myth of the untouched rainforest has endured because it is easy for consumers to imagine. It\u2019s easier to raise funds against bulldozers toppling old-growth forests than it is to support itinerant farmers who burn pastures to graze their bony cattle. It\u2019s easier to order forest code-certified furniture on Amazon than it is to question how Amazon rainforest hardwood ended up on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway. It\u2019s easier to condemn industrial meatpackers than it is to understand how China\u2019s rising middle class \u2014 and the U.S. trade war \u2014 feed demand for Amazon beef and soy.<\/a> It\u2019s easier to root for a chief with a headdress and a bow than it is to rally around Indigenous leaders with dirt bikes, cellphones and shotguns.<\/em><\/p>\n Development blunders \u2014 from colonial model towns to the rubber boom to the Transamaz\u00f4nica to the Belo Monte \u2014 show how, despite the challenges of living in the rainforest, or perhaps even because of them, this breathtaking place inspires big dreams. And big dreams are exactly what the Amazon needs.<\/em><\/p>\n One lesson from 2020 is that, in moments of crisis, politically impossible ideas can become possible overnight. Covid-19 spurred telemedicine, distance learning and universal basic income from the fringes to the mainstream. Global support for the Black Lives Matter movement awakened millions of people to see history \u2014 and the future \u2014 in a new light. Apocalyptic wildfires on America\u2019s West Coast are burning in tandem with agricultural fires in the Amazon, showing how our climate future is intertwined across hemispheres.<\/em><\/p>\n . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It is a moniker of how all-encompassing and anchored in basic values this series on the Amazon is that in another piece in part one, the issue of child sexual abuse is covered. The Times has covered this worst of global pandemics in scope and horror in historic Sunday cover stories last September, November and December that we have reported on at length, here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n On March 5<\/a> this year, our commentary began with an update on the exploding Covid-19 pandemic, and then focussed on the covergence with the ongoing child abuse pandemic, specifically sexual abuse, as The Times had just further reported on in two-parts on their Daily podcast. Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2020\/09\/18\/opinion\/00arnold2b\/merlin_165846672_e153f05e-4dc3-4099-bfab-eaf699cd1ac9-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=600\")
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