It’s Getting Hot In Here

While many adults in the US are still in a state of denial over global warming, young schoolchildren in villages deep in the Peruvian Amazon are learning about the effects climate destabilization is likely to have on their way of life.

That’s just one thing I learned during a recent three-week trip to the Loreto region (northeast corner) of Peru, with a Peace and Conflict Studies class from Pacific University in Oregon. We spent much of our time in Peru staying in small villages, where we learned about the culture and way of life of the people there – as well as the threats they are likely to face in coming years. Based on my, admittedly very brief, exposure to life in Peru’s Amazon, it seems climate destabilization is not a “debated” issue there; people in the rainforest make their livelihoods mostly through small-scale farming, fishing, and hunting—and living so close to the land, they know their ability to make a living will be affected by changes in climate. Already, during our stay, it turned out that water levels in the river are lower than normal for the time of year.

Talking to one of the Loreto region’s chief conservationists – Gilberto Guerra Reátegui, founder of the “Isla de los Monos” conservation project – we learned how higher global temperatures are causing glaciers in the Andes Mountains to melt, contributing to lower water levels in the country’s rivers. This is bad news for wildlife, but also for the dozens of villages that look to the rivers as everything from a source of food (fish) to their main means of transportation, by boat. Further, changing weather patterns in the area will affect the forest in ways that are difficult to predict—but in the likely scenario that the local climate becomes dryer, entire rainforest ecosystems that depend on frequent rains will be put at risk. And if the forests and the myriad plants and animal species in it begin to die, so too will the thriving cultures that dot the Amazon and other rivers.

Luckily, there is good news, too. It was encouraging to see that local people were so aware of—and concerned about—the problem. One farmer we talked to and worked with mentioned the connection between deforestation and global warming; by now many of us, I think, know the statistic that about 25% of worldwide greenhouse emissions come from destroying the planet’s forest-cover. He expressed concern that his own occupation sometimes required cutting down stands of trees for farming. However, it’s not really the practices of small villages like the ones we visited that are destroying the rainforest; the farmer we talked to was going to use the same plot of land indefinitely, planting it in different crops on different years to keep the soil healthy and do away with the need to clear more forest. Further, the village “plantations” we saw were about as different as you can imagine from the huge banana or palm oil monocrops planted by Big Agribusiness in South American countries. I wrote in my journal during the trip:

“Though much different from the primary forest, the crop fields are high in natural biodiversity, and blend with the natural forest. There are many patches of undisturbed trees and bushes mixed in with the crop plants, and these provide habitat for birds, reptiles, and insects. The mentality that every square inch not devoted to the chosen food plant is a piece of ground wasted, does not seem to exist here – perhaps because the amount of land small farmers without industrial methods can cultivate is limited, anyway.”

The small farmers are not the source of massive deforestation but rather—along with the native rainforest ecosystems, plants, and animals—its victims. During my time in Peru, I saw traces of the real problem in the piles of Red Mahogany logs being shipped upriver—for processing in the jungle city of Iquitos. The timber giants may employ local people, but their activities are carried out in response to demand by US consumers. The same holds true for the petroleum companies devastating the rainforest—over 50% of Peru’s remaining forestland is under concession to oil and gas companies (think LNG, Northwesterners)—and for the Agribusiness giants as well. So far as I’m concerned, Big Timber, Big Oil, and Big Agribusiness make up the Terrible Trio of rainforest destruction in South America.

So what’s to be done? To save the rainforests—and as a step toward rescuing the climate for all of us—we have to get Corporate America out of Peru and other forested countries. This means fighting the corporate giants on their home turf—individuals boycotting their products is a start (I have boycotted bananas in the US for years), but in the end we’ll need so much more than that. We need to get entire universities, entire store chains, to stop selling products from the rainforests. Even now, I have plans for a campaign this fall that would eliminate palm oil—a food ingredient produced by leveling forests around the world—from the Pacific University cafeteria. And at the national level, we need to strengthen laws that would prevent importation of illegally harvested wood. A massive push to save the rainforests should be as important to the climate movement as the effort to freeze construction of news coal plants, or to make our cars more fuel efficient. A hopeful development, to my mind, is the Rainforest Action Network’s use of some of the same techniques used by the highly successful anti-coal movement to begin pushing Agribusiness to get out of the rainforests.  A year from now, could the rainforest movement be where the anti-coal movement is today? It’s possible.

In the end, if my amazing experiences in Peru showed me anything, it was that saving the rainforests is not just about wildlife, or even the climate. It is about people, too—people in villages along the Amazon and other rivers, who live close to the land while managing to have a far smaller ecological footprint than us Americans. A schoolchild in the Peruvian Amazon, learning about the way his or her future will be affected by the actions of far-off governments, is the real face of climate action at the frontlines. And that, to me, is part of why saving the rainforests is so important.