Life in Amazonia and What We Must Do to Protect It
Paul Sneed 교수(서울대학교 서어서문학과)
I will not run away nor abandon the fight of these farmers that are unprotected in the middle of the forest. They have a sacred right to a better life in a land where they can live and produce with dignity and without devastation.
—Sister Dorothy Stang[1]
Hope lies in the new generations and their new standards of responsibility—in their recognition of traditional peoples and the relevance of biodiversity and environmental services, in their decisions of consumption.
—João Meirelles Filho[2]
“Go ahead and jump in!” the crewmembers yelled to me as our boat curved through the clear, yet slightly coffee-colored Amazonian river waters all around us. We were in the Caxiuanã National Forest in Brazil’s northern state of Pará, far, far away from the nearest city or town. “Don’t be afraid! We haven’t seen a black caiman around these parts in years!” Their joking did little to put me at ease as thoughts of these cousins of crocodiles and alligators—capable of growing up to four or five meters long—flashed through my mind. Here in these remote backwaters of this narrow tributary would be a particularly awful place to get bit by the largest member of the alligator family, I thought nervously.
As I stared at the waters below, visions of caiman in my worried mind were joined by those of other possible predators, like piranhas and anacondas. Maybe I shouldn’t do this, I thought. But the towering emerald trees lining the riverbanks were beckoning me to dive in. The sky above was bright blue in the clean air. It was a welcome change from the bouts of woefully heavy fine dust and other atmospheric contaminants of my regular life back in Korea, where I worked as a U.S. scholar teaching Brazilian literary and cultural studies at Seoul National University. As my boatmates continued cheering me on, I tightly closed my eyes and got ready to leap.
It was January of 2017, two years before Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, came into office.[3] In August 2019, eight months after his inauguration, a massive outbreak of forest fires throughout Brazilian Amazonia would draw the world’s attention and elicit widespread criticism of the leader (Sandy 2019 and Korea Times 2019). Traditional peoples of the region along with local and international activists and many religious leaders and politicians denounced his anti-environmental stance and his pushes for pro-business deregulation. Many feared Bolsonaro was prioritizing the short-term interests of mining, logging, cattle ranching and other forms of agribusiness in Amazonia over the long-term benefits of local peoples and the environment (Doyle 2019). Bolsonaro’s claims that indigenous reservations and protections for the lands of other traditional peoples were obstacles to development, critics claimed, were echoes of the age-old colonialist rationale that had led to the destruction of Amazonia throughout the centuries (Brum 2019). Complicating matters more still, Bolsonaro had a history of making statements exonerating invaders of protected peoples’ lands and other environmental transgressors.[4]
For decades before Bolsonaro was ever sworn in, disputes over cattle ranching, mining and illegal logging had long made Amazonia one of the most dangerous places in the world for environmental activists, traditional leaders and everyday people (Hecht 2019). With his shortsighted policies, however, many feared the “Bolsonaro Effect” would only serve to stoke the climate of violence in a region already rife with murderous land disputes and agrarian conflicts (Mendes 2019). Indeed, roughly one month ago at the time of the writing of this essay, 26-year-old Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a member of Guardioes da Floresta, or “Guardians of the Forest,” formed to protect native lands, was ambushed and shot to death on the Araribóia reservation in the state of Maranhão (Camargo and Valente 2019). A video filmed only months before Paulo died shows him recounting the story of the death of, Afonso, one of his companions, murdered by a gunman hired by illegal loggers. In that video, Paulo added that a gunman had sworn to kill him for his work defending the forest reservation. The would-be killer, he said, was confident the Brazilian law would grant him impunity (Mendes 2019).[5]
Back in early 2017, when I went to the Caxiuanã National Forest, I was spending winter break from Seoul National as a visiting researcher at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (MPEG), a federal graduate education and research institute that serves as the natural history museum of the Amazon. My ethnomusicological research project was based at MPEG’s division of human sciences at its research campus in the capital, Belém, a city of some two million residents and my wife’s hometown. My project writing about the gangster rap of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro was only peripherally related to Amazonian studies (Sneed 2019 and Kang 2019). One day, however, a Korean graduate student in archaeology from my home university, unexpectedly, mentioned to me that perhaps I could tag along with him to the Ferreira Penna Ecological Station, located over 300 kilometers away, roughly 25 hours upstream by boat. It just so happened a vessel was heading out that evening with some of the museum’s field crews in botany, zoology, meteorology and archaeology. Perhaps there was still time to get me on board somehow, he suggested. I was ecstatic. Caxiuanã was not only the largest Brazilian national forest in Amazonia, but it was also located in a remarkably intact area of the woods in an area of terra firme, or “solid land.” What better place to go in search of the heart of Amazonia?
In a flash, my friends and colleagues at MPEG jumped into action to put me on the only boat heading out that month, my only chance before returning to Korea. With the help of my mother-in-law and other family members in Belém, I hastily packed a knapsack for the trip. She had just washed my big red cotton hammock, which she rolled up for me and placed in a large canvas sack along with two strands of rope to tie it up and various snacks for the voyage. Only hours later, I was with the crews on a three-story passenger boat heading upstream to Caxiuanã. I put my hammock to good use. It took us all night to get to the small town of Breves, inaccessible by road. There we changed to MPEG’s more modest-sized, private boat and continued on the entire next day, finally arriving at the research station on the second night.
Though I’d been going to and from the Amazon Basin since 1990, having lived and worked in the region for considerable periods, I’d never been that deep into the forest. I’d been upriver as far as Manaus and crossed by land all the way north through Venezuela. I’d spent time in the wetlands of Marajó Island, the Amazon Delta and many woodlands around Tracuateua, a hamlet near the coastal town of Bragança. I’d been to the islands visible across the Guajará Bay from Belém and had regularly hiked with my son through the State Park of Utinga, where Belém’s water supply lies in two black lakes. I’d also spent time in the vast rainforests in Central America and the Atlantic Forest of southeastern Brazil in the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. But Caxiuanã had even more biodiversity and was even farther from any major towns or sources of electrical power than any of these (by day, the station ran on generators, also having Wi-Fi, though it remained dark at night). As I disembarked onto the dock of the station, there in the drizzling rain, I rubbed my sleepy eyes. A pleasantly musty smell filled my nose, a mixture of rain-drenched earth, leafy green vegetation and forest decay. At last, Caxiuanã!
In the days following our arrival, each team gave me chances to help as they hunted for poison dart frogs, collected automated motion sensor cameras with digital photos of species movements and dug ditches in patches of Amazonian dark earth. One day, the meteorologists in the group took me up the rickety metal frame of their 40-meter weather tower. I’ll never forget the view, even as the three-legged platform swayed to and from up on high, making me swallow hard and sweat profusely. The tower’s fourth leg had been damaged months earlier by a falling tree. A quarter or so of the steel cords meant to hold it up had snapped as well. When I somehow managed to climb the narrow stairs to the top, the rain clouds temporarily broke (January falls in the rainy season in Amazonia, so clear skies are somewhat the exception). The sun-drenched, velvety-green forest canopy stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. Monkeys and parrots hopped through the treetops just below us among tangled vines and bromeliads as countless butterflies floated lazily in and out of the leaves.
Back at the station hours later, when darkness came, the sky was still somehow clear. With so few lights around, there was our Milky Way Galaxy in all its glory stretched out and glistening in the blackness of night. The next morning, I headed out with my graduate student pal from Seoul National. Besides his native Korean, he spoke English fluently and was already learning Portuguese at breakneck speed. There in a nearby forest grove, we excavated a pre-Colombian indigenous site for samples of the famous terra preta, as Amazonian dark earth is called in Portuguese. It’s a densely fertile type of artificial soil created by native peoples through generations of waste management.
Amazonian black earth has gained a tremendous amount of attention in recent years, not only for its fecundity—in contrast to the reputation of soils in tropical rainforests as generally unproductive—but also for the different picture its presence in the region supported. For several thousands of years since the arrival of the first peoples of Amazonia, the area had been anything but a wilderness devoid of people but rather an immense garden carefully cultivated on a massive scale. Different from the image many of us have today, Amazonia in pre-Colombian times supported towns and cities of considerable size. The complexity and large proportions of their communities were reflected in the rich culture of highly symbolic and technically advanced ceramics that flourished across the region along with substantial long-range trade. Indeed, the scale of sustenance throughout the societies of those ancient peoples offers a model for us to follow today. It shows that the presence of human society in Amazonia need not be a harbinger of destruction. Even with 20 some million people living across the region today, mostly in towns and cities, coexistence and sustenance are possible.[6]
Shortly after our first dig, I followed the archaeology student from Seoul National to a second site with a different type of soil he was using as a control. We traded off digging with another archaeologist from Brazil. The tangle of roots in the ground made digging slow and tiring. Taking a breather, he sat in the mouth of a narrow but deep pit we’d slowly managed to dig out and serenely lit up a cigarette. He lit our Brazilian friend up, as well. When a group of monkeys the size of cats appeared in the trees above us, one started throwing pieces of broken branches at us. We looked up just as one of the sticks hit the Korean student on the shoulder, none too lightly. We three humans got a good laugh. The monkey didn’t seem to think it was funny. After hollering and shrieking a few insulting sounding calls, he swung away through the treetops after his kin.
The day before our group headed back to the city, I went out on the boat for an hour-long ride to a village of traditional river people, or ribeirinhos. When many outsiders think of Amazonia, they often think of indigenous peoples. There are many other people living in the region though. Besides folks like most of my Brazilian family living in towns and cities or on large-scale farms, there are thousands of residents of the Afro-Amazonian quilombos. Quilombos are left over from the days of slavery in Brazil, which lasted from the sixteenth century until 1888 and involved more than ten times the number of slaves than slavery in the United States. The quilombos were first settled by runaway slaves—usually located in remote, hard-to-reach areas. Today, the descendants of those escaped slaves, the quilombolas, live a simple, subsistent way of life in the villages of their ancestors. They maintain much of their ancestors’ knowledge and many of their cultural practices.
Another even larger group of traditional peoples of the Amazon Basin are the ribeirinhos. As I had done previously with family members on the Combu and Jaguar islands in the waters around Belém, I went with a team from MPEG to visit several homes of river people as well as a local school and a church. The folks living in the villages and other homes were partners with the research station, working as staff, guides and research collaborators. Despite their limited means, the river people we met during the trip to Caxiuanã were remarkably hospitable and generous. One family shared a delicious dish with us right off the stovetop in their home. The meal consisted of rice, fresh fish and a creamy sauce made from Brazil nuts, known as a superfood in Korea—harvested just meters from their front door.
Another family shared some of the freshest açai berries I’ve ever tasted, another famous superfood and a crop that has helped drive a wave of crucial reforestation across parts of eastern Amazonia.[7] The thick, nectar-like açai was served room temperature with no sugar or additives and eaten with tender chunks of fried fish. Later, while visiting another home, a teenager who had won a prize from MPEG for his sustainable farming ideas showed me around his small farm on the banks of the river. Most of the houses were built on wooden stilts, called palafitas, to let the regularly rising river waters in and out from beneath them without causing damage. The father of one family helped us find the poison dart frogs, catching about 20 by himself, compared to the five or six caught by all four amphibian specialists from the University of São Paulo (USP) put together.
Later in the day at a church in one of the riverside villages, we met with a group of even younger teenagers who were preparing to travel to the Stepping Stones Museum for Children, near New York City, as part of an exciting new cultural exchange program run by MPEG. They were smart kids, and funny, and each had won a competition of science and sustainable agriculture to qualify for the trip. Their biggest fear in traveling to the United States was the cold weather they were likely to encounter, they told me, since they were due to arrive in late fall. Most had never ventured more than 20 or 30 kilometers away, much less traveled to Belém, Bolsonaro’s Brasília or a foreign country. But the American youths from the other side of the exchange, including one overseas Korean, had promised them to help get coats, gloves, scarves and hats. The group from the United States had come a few months before for an annual event at the research station called the Olympics in the Forest. It was a massive youth camp by volunteers from MPEG and Portel and Melgaço, the two nearest towns, in which hundreds of local teens engaged in friendly games and competitions in forest science.
As we headed back to base after a long day, the muggy humidity and sweat all over my body were making the cool river beneath the boat more and more appealing. From the top deck of our little two-story, wooden motorized boat, it was less than a three-meter drop to the surface of the water. I began wondering if it might somehow be okay to dive in before we reached our destination. One researcher I’d become friends with during the trip, a young man from Colombia, was wondering the same thing. He was one of a group of graduate students from the University of São Paulo researching poison dart frogs. When we asked the crew members, they enthusiastically complied. “Tranqüilo!” they said. “No problem!”
The boat’s captain slowed the motors about 50 meters out from the dock of the research station. Looking down at the water then, it suddenly seemed farther than it had moments earlier when we’d first asked permission to dive in. Hesitantly, my pal and I pulled off our shirts. We took off our boots and the thick, black leather snake-guards we wore from our boots to our knees, as well, in preparation to take the plunge. I’d seen him fearlessly searching for frogs through the thickets and swamps of the forest without ever batting an eye at the possibility of running into venomous snakes, caimans or jaguars known to live there. Only a couple hours earlier, I’d also seen him pick up an enormous tarantula with his bare hand. If he was diving in, too, I figured, it couldn’t be that dangerous. Could it? Except he changed his mind at the last minute. When I found my way to the surface to catch my breath, I was by myself in the chilly waters of the river. The seven or eight people on the brightly painted wooden boat were cheering me on to swim to shore—including my pal. Yikes!
Taking a deep breath, I remembered seeing dozens of the children of the river peoples of Caxiuanã jumping in the river and swimming around near the small wooden docks of the villages we’d visited that week. They’d sure get a kick out of how scared I was, I was sure. Under my breath, I said a little prayer. The coolness of the water coupled with the sense of sudden vulnerability I was feeling left me trembling. Then as I started swimming, an intense feeling of awe overtook me like few I’d ever felt before or since. Suddenly, I was in nature’s blue-green cathedral, sublimely rooted in the here and now but also somehow floating outside of space and time. That sense of connection took away my fear—most of it, anyway. Minutes later, I made it to the dilapidated wooden dock. The crew members, who had scooted passed me on their way back, pulled me safely from the river. There they met me with much laughter and hugs.
As the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon is the quintessence of biodiversity. As such, it provides a tremendous amount of oxygen, though far less than the world’s oceans. It also helps regulate the global climate by jetting floating rivers of cooling moisture into the air, as its millions of plants transpire, leading some people to refer to it as the world’s air conditioner. Its fate is inextricably tied to climate change. Though roughly 60% of Amazonia is in Brazil, the region stretches over eight other countries in South America, including Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru and Suriname. It comprises 25% of the world’s biodiversity, provides oxygen, absorbing 5% of the planet’s carbon dioxide yearly, and acts as a global cooling system through the massive water evaporation taking place there (Rice 2019). Unfortunately, as the fires have heated up in recent months, we may be reaching a tipping point from which it may be impossible to return. Experts say some 17% of Amazonia has been deforested, mostly since the early seventies. If the number reaches 25%, they say, the forest will likely begin drying out at increasing rates likely to permanently break it down.
Currently, there are said to be roughly 12,000 species of trees across the Amazon Basin (Daley 2019). Brazil alone has 8,715, half of which can be found only in that country. Colombia, which is smaller but has considerably more variations in altitude, has 5,776, most of which are in the Colombian Amazon (Kennedy 2019). Compared to the 30,000 plant species of the Amazon Basin (Rice 2019), there are some 13,000 in North America (Conservation Gateway). When it comes to animals, the levels of diversity are equally astounding. There are some 2.5 million species of insects, 2,500 fish, 1,500 birds, 550 reptiles and 500 mammals. During a visit with my then ten-year-old son to the Scientific Collection of MPEG, museum curator and primatologist Jose de Souza e Silva Junio told us that Costa Rica only has four non-human species of primates. In Amazonia, there are over one hundred. To our surprise, he showed us a new species that had been discovered only three weeks earlier. One hundred and counting! Such exponential diversity of primates in Amazonia is particularly vulnerable to deforestation, however, since many species require movement across areas of forest that are being increasingly cut off from one another as the region develops.
Three years after my visit to MPEG’s research station, earlier this month, the New York Times published photos of the Caxiuanã National Forest as part of an aptly titled piece, “The Amazon is Completely Lawless” (Sandy 2019). Among other scenes of desolation, the photos show enormous stacks of massive, freshly cut tree trunks at a legal logging project taking place in the park—a plan set in motion long before Bolsonaro’s inauguration. Seeing the photos along with others of the widespread destruction of the region, left me deeply saddened for the forest and its local peoples and acutely aware that not nearly enough is being done to defend the forests and folks of Amazonia. Bolsonaro, for his part, has taken a nationalistic stance, deflecting criticism from European and world leaders and international activists as attempts to violate Brazilian sovereignty. Early on in the crisis, Bolsonaro claimed the burnings were the result of traditional slash-and-burn agricultural techniques and that, as a cultural manifestation, it could not be stopped or avoided (Le Monde 2019). More recently, however, he went as far as placing the blame on outside non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, even putting forth the ridiculous claim that actor Leonardo DiCaprio was a party to a conspiracy to degrade him (Haidar 2019 and Sandy 2019).
In response to Bolsonaro’s criticism of local people as obstacles to modernization, specifically, Ísis Tatiane has made a compelling defense of her local community’s rights. She is a leader of the Criaú quilombo in the State of Amapá, which borders on Pará, and has suffered from death threats in response to her activities. Answering Bolsonaro’s criticisms, she said:
We only wish to be able to live on our lands, live through subsistence farming, without being killed. We just want to preserve our corner of the world, living on what we bring forth from the soil. It’s easy for them to come and take us away from our lands, but they need to understand that we are responsible for nature. Government officials and scientists cannot tell us how to live.[8]
She made this statement in November 2019 as she attended the Amazonia Is the Center of the World conference in Altamira, Pará. The town is a poster child for the conflicts in the region. It is the site of the controversial hydroelectric Belo Monte Dam, which flooded the lands of natives and other traditional peoples. It has developed at a dizzying rate and served as a central stage for land conflicts and debates about indigenous rights since the 1980s (Brum 2019).
In fall 2017, I collaborated in organizing a series of events in Seoul called the Korea-Amazon Encounter. It was organized with the support of Seoul National University, the Korea Foundation, the Brazilian Embassy in Seoul and a small tri-national NGO called Conviva Brazil, which brought together friends from Brazil, the United States and Korea (www.convivabrazil.org).[9] One of the featured speakers at the series was Master Laíca (Luiz Nunes Santana da Silva), master of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira and community activist in a low-income neighborhood in Belém. He is also the founder of the Zambo Cultural Group (Asssociação Cultural Zambo) and president of the Pará State Capoeira Federation (Federação Paraense de Capoeira). Another keynote participant was João Meirelles Filho (quoted at the top of this essay), the director of Instituto Peabiru, a non-governmental organization protecting the Amazon Forest and its traditional peoples by fostering sustainable economic activity in the region. He is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction dedicated to questions of life in Amazonia.[10] The message of these two very different activists and cultural leaders was that instead of being a symbol of the destruction, social exclusion and violence, Amazonia has tremendous untapped potential to become a symbol of peace, coexistence and sustainability for the world.[11]
As he argues in the quote at the top of this essay, during his visit to Korea, Meirelles Filho repeatedly and emphatically claimed that alternative sustainable economic development is the best way to preserve Amazonia. He is especially encouraged by community farming strategies for products like acai, Brazil nuts and forest bee honey. He argued that Korea and Amazonia are no farther apart than the neighborhood supermarket. It’s the seemingly innocuous decisions of everyday life that add up to make an impact in society and history, he explained. Since the cattle industry in the Amazon is responsible for 80% of the deforestation, our insistence on lifestyles of high beef consumption only fans the flames of those forest fires (Meirelles Filho 2019).
Amazonia is an issue of urgent consequence for Koreans, and not only because Samsung and LG have large factories in the city of Manaus, the geographic center of the region, or because Brazil is such an important market for Korean businesses. As Amazonia goes, so goes the world, one could say. We should continue supporting the best practices of local associations and international organizations working to defend the region by protecting the forests and its population, especially traditional peoples so vital in its defense. We should look at the crisis in Amazonia as a reason to make substantial changes in our attitudes towards sustainability and coexistence. Also, we should give far greater recognition to the cultures of local, traditional peoples and groups that have been excluded from the conventional centers of power.
As I had swum the waters of Caxiuanã that day back in 2017, the feeling that swelled in my chest was something profound and hard to put in words. I’d only felt anything like it before a few times in my life, such as the night I had gazed at the stars from the desert high up in the Andes Mountains in Bolivia or when I watched my wife give birth to our beautiful son. The feeling had also been somehow a bit like those times I’d mysteriously felt God’s loving presence in my faith life to the point of ecstasy. There in that bright river, happily in communion with nature, thoughts of my son had flashed to mind. It had filled me with joy to know that Amazonia, as part of our world, is his heritage, too. Such was so not only because of his mother’s Brazilian nationality, but also because he is a part of life on Earth, as are we all.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the following people and institutions for their help in researching and editing this piece. From the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Professors Maria Cándida Drumond Mendes Barros(Linguistics), Helena P. Lima (Archaeology), Jose de Souza e Silva Junior (Primatology) and Socorro de Andrade Silva (Educational Coordinator for Ferreira Penna Scientific Station). I also thank Professor Matthias Fripp (Electrical Engineering, University of Hawaii-Manoa), Professor David Larom (Environmental Studies, San Diego State University) and Pastor Matt Sanders (Waialae Baptist Church). For the photographs, I thank the Instituto Peabiru, Associacão Cultural Zambo Capoeira and Triston Smith (University of Virginia, class of 2019). I am grateful to the Coordination of Human Sciences of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, in Brazil, the Faculty of Humanities and the Department of Hispanic Language and Literature of my home university, Seoul National University, and to the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for institutional support during the research and writing of this article.
References
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Rice, Doyle. “What Would the Earth Be Like without the Amazon Rainforest?” 2019. USA Today, August 28, 2019. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/28/amazon-rain-forest-what-would-earth-like-without-it/2130430001/.
Sandy, Matt. “‘The Amazon Is Completely Lawless’: The Rainforest After Bolsonaro’s First Year. Deforestation in the world’s largest rainforest, an important buffer against climate change, has soared under President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil,” 2019. New York Times, December 5, 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html.
Simões, Mariana. “Brazil’s Bolsonaro on the Environment, in His Own Words. With criticism mounting on the policies of Brazil’s president, he has promised to combat fires raging in the Amazon. But he has long supported scaling back protections for the rainforest,” 2019, New York Times. August 28, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/world/americas/bolsonaro-brazil-environment.html.
Sneed, Paul. 2019. Machine Gun Voices: Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk. Seoul:
Seoul National University Press.
_____. “Why Brazil Elected an Ultra-Right Presidential Candidate,” 2018. Hankyoreh Newspaper (한겨레) Editorial Page, South Korea, December 24, 2018 (Korean title “[왜냐면] 브라질 극구 대통령 취임에 부쳐”). http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion/because/875651.html.
[1] Portuguese: “Não vou fugir nem abandonar a luta desses agricultores que estão desprotegidos no meio da floresta. Eles têm o sagrado direito a uma vida melhor numa terra onde possam viver e produzir com dignidade, sem devastar” (Memorial da Democracia). All translations are my own. Sister Dorothy Stang was a US-born nun who naturalized as a Brazilian citizen in the course of her decades’ long struggle to defend the Amazon Forest and its traditional peoples. In 2005, cattle ranchers near Anapu, in the Northern Brazilian State of Pará, paid two shooters to assassinate her, at age 73. Her story is told in the documentary They Killed Sister Dorothy (Junge 2009).
[2] Portuguese: “As esperanças estariam nas novas gerações e seus novos padrões de responsabilidade – no reconhecimento de populações tradicionais, na relevância da biodiversidade e serviços ambientais, nas decisões de consumo” (Meirelles Filho 2019).
[3] For a discussion of President Bolsonaro’s extremist political leanings before taking office, see my Op-Ed in the Hankyoreh newspaper from just after his election (Sneed 2018).
[4] In August 2019, amid the forest fires crisis, President Bolsonaro stated that those responsible for environmental crimes would be given zero tolerance. Still, throughout his career, on the campaign trail and even after taking office, he had made a mockery of environmental protection. He also led a systematic assault on Brazil’s system of native reservations accompanied by an astounding display of ignorant and racist affirmations too numerous to list here. For a comprehensive list of his quotes to that effect, see Mariana Simões’ report in the New York Times (Simões 2019).
[5] Mendes does not blame Bolsonaro alone for the long-standing crisis of violence against activists in Amazonia but instead argues that his views and policies are worsening the situation. In 2018, for instance, there were 135 murders of indigenous peoples. While she gives no figures for killings in 2019, she states that while 76 invasions of indigenous lands occurred in 2018, 153 have already occurred in 2019, as of November. In a talk examining the effects of policy on environmental protection, UCLA’s international historian Susanna Hecht compares the ecological crisis of Bolsonaro’s fledgling term with the more effective strategies from before. Even those, she claims, had already been mainly deemed insufficient by leaders and activists working in the region (Hecht 2019).
[6] By comparison, Amazonia is roughly fifty-five times the national territory of South Korea (or 5,499,974 square kilometers versus 99,675 square kilometers).
[7] Brazilian TV personality of Korean television Carlos Gorito traveled to Amazonia in search of real Amazonian superfoods like acai and Brazil nuts in recent EBS documentary about everyday life in Amazonia (EBS Documentary 2018a and 2018b).
[8] Portuguese: “Só queremos poder viver nos nossos territórios, viver da agricultura de subsistência, sem que nos matem. Só queremos preservar nosso canto e viver do que tiramos da terra. É muito fácil eles chegarem lá e quererem tirar a gente do nosso território, mas eles têm que entender que a gente tem toda uma responsabilidade com a natureza e não serão as autoridades ou os cientistas que vão nos dizer como viver” (Oliveira 2019).
[9] I am a co-founder of the NGO and its current director.
[10] Afterwards, a short story from his award-winning collection Poraquê, or “Electric Eel,” was translated to Korean and published as 전기 뱀장어 (Meirelles Filho 2018).
[11] The unique perspectives of Amazonian culture are often more apparent in films and fiction than newspaper stories or scholarly work on the flora, fauna and societies of the region. Some points of reference readers may refer to in this sense are the documentary film Marajó das Letras (Martins 2017) about the traditional boat painters of Marajó Island,and Amazon Groove (Murtinho 2018) about the music of Pará. See also the provocative Colombian feature film El Abrazo de la Serpiente (Guerra 2015), a tale of decolonization, and the neorealist Amazonian novels of Milton Hatoum, considered one of Brazil’s greatest living authors. See especially Dois Irmãos (2000), Cinzas do Norte (2005) and Órfãos do Eldorado (2008).