From the deep rivers

STEFANO VARESE

 

 

ÔYou hear so much life, so much silent wisdom when you listen to the jungle.Õ

  – Cesar Calvo

Three Halves of Ino Moxo:

  Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon

 

ONE need not be a specialist in biophysical science to understand the sombre reality of global warming and frightening predictions about the extinction of life in the next few decades. If we continue with current levels of atmospheric contamination of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, caused by excess, non-regulated industrial production, the burning of fossil fuels, abuse of petro-chemicals in agriculture, and uncontrolled forest and marine extractivism, the alarming scientific diagnosis is that, by the year 2100, the temperature of the globe will have reached 7.4 degrees Celsius and that the oceans, from their current 16.4¡C, may be at 30¡C, almost the temperature of the human body.

Tragedies such as the 30,000 deaths in Europe in the summer of 2003 due to global warming will seem increasingly normal events as of 2030 and 2040, and the capacity of the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans to absorb and recycle carbon dioxide produced by humanity will have reached its maximum limit, carrying all living beings of our planet rapidly towards a final abyss, with no possibility of return. As Albert Bates declares, Ôplanet Earth will turn into VenusÕ.

What can we oppose and propose in response to these apocalyptic visions of
our immediate future? What alternatives exist that we can apply to ourselves as human beings with our emotional intelligence still intact, in a different social, cultural, political, and ethical dynamic which seeks life in place of total suicide - subsistence worthy of Ôgood livingÕ rather than mortal opulence, materialistic overflow, and grotesque individual accumulation at the expense of the totality of existence?

The vocation and geo-biospheric destiny of millions of years of world existence have been radically altered in a little over 200 years of industrial economy and its auto-destructive voracity. DoesnÕt the metabolism of the earth and universe include not only those ÔlivingÕ beings that are born, reproduce, and die, but also those millions of seemingly inert beings whose life and death – imperceptible to superficial human observation – can be measured in millions of years? The lack of moderation in industrial liberalism and extractivism have altered these metabolisms in a way that forces us to think pessimistically about the lethal essence of any biophysical, anthropogenic manifestation; that is, about any biophysical alteration produced, intentionally or not, by humanity.

Anthropologist Elisabeth Povinelli has denominated these colonial anthropogenic incursions into planetary geology as the new ÔgeontologyÕ, now imposed on all indigenous communities of the planet as the only alternative to their own cosmological conceptions and practices. This geontology of late liberalism is the result  of neo-imperial and neo-colonial policies, hyperactive and neurotic in their uncontrolled vora-city for all resources in existence.  Local native populations have to adopt neoliberal geontology and once again reconfigure the world as an inexhaustible warehouse of goods available to use and abuse by those who have money.

And the Amazon, in this foolish hallucination of capitalist voracity, is
rapidly becoming the last frontier of invasion, conquest, and destruction. The forest is freely felled, its biodiversity mutilated or completely destroyed. The industrial monoculture of biofuels – whether those of the sacred corn of the Indians, soya, sugarcane, or African palm oil – has become the despot of agriculture in the tropical belt of the Americas – a land of ecolsystems which imperial and colonial incompetence left unharmed, not out of intelligent generosity, but rather out of technical idiocy.

 

 

As I write these lines in the Peruvian Amazon of San Martin, to cite just one case, thousands of hectares of tropical rain forest, lungs of the world and a sanctuary of animal and plant biodiversity, are being flattened along with temples erected and cared for during millennia by the Kichwa-Lamista and Shawi indigenous groups of Guaran’ lineage, by bulldozers and tractors sent in by the Peruvian capitalist Romero and his gunmen, setting up plantations of African palm oils that will produce
sweat, tears, wages of hunger, and motor fuel oil to poison the world for an elite of car owners, a minority of privileged urbanites infected by the lies of modernity.

This monoculture of palm oils, replacing the jungle, is not Ôforest coverÕ, as the evangelists of big capital declare, but rather an industrialized desert, a cemetery of micro-organisms, animals, birds, and botanical diversity. Of the ten thousand flowers and birds of these jungles, nothing is left but their tenacious memory, which lives on in the languages and songs of the indigenous people.

Where is hope to be found? In what intelligences, sensibilities, memories of such people can humanity find a way of life whose essence is good living – Sumaq Kawsay, or Sumaq Quama–a? The ancient formula of the Andean Aymara people is that Ôthe future is found in the pastÕ because the cyclic time of the cosmos finds its beginning in the end and its end in the beginning. So powerful is this conception of time and existence that the verb has no future tense. The wisdom of Indian civilization – and their future – lies in their memory, in their past, in their long and deep history.

Since the 1990s, the indigenous memory of the Amazon started to re-flower in the lives of the indigenous
people, thanks also to those dedicated archeologists, an example of North American expertise at its best, who returned to the Caverna de Piedra Pintada, close to the Tapajos river, in the Brazilian city of Santarem, and concluded that Marajo island, in the low rainforest jungle, developed and flourished for over a thousand years, as a complex society of possibly 100,000 people over thousands of square kilometres, with public works, intensive agriculture and all signs of a great complex society.

Studies on Piedra Pintada by Anna Roosevelt, published at the beginning of the Õ90s, opened the doors to a radical review of the long history of the Amazonian indigenous people. More than 10,000 years of human presence in the Amazonian tropical rainforest, including its historical demography, had to be revised from headto toe in light of this agro-archeao-ecological, archeao-botanical, pre-European agro-forestry engineering.

 

 

Francisco de Orellana and Fray Gaspar de Carvajal were right after all when they claimed, at the beginning of the 16th century, that along the Amazon river, houses and villages were so close to each other over a stretch of 300 kilometres that it seemed as if one were sailing for leagues and leagues along a single large and long city. Where did that civilization get so much food for such a population? What do all the hundreds of embankments, canals and overpasses connecting small islands covered with vegetation tell us about the lowlands of the Bolivian Beni, the Llanos de Moxos, and the Brazilian Acre that today look like uninhabited deserts?

Since the 1990s, studies on the Amazon produced by North American, Latin American and European researchers dealt a mortal blow to the hypotheses advanced in the 1950s by Betty Meggers, on the Ôbiocultural infeasibilityÕ of the Amazon, Ôthe false paradiseÕ of apparent abundance and dangerous fragility. What recent studies began to reveal is a new history of the domestication of tropical plants: nearly
200 plant species, of which half are cultivated fruit trees and bushes, that were used to increase and reproduce the original forest with trees of harvestable products and productivity for
years.  Bio-archaeology and ecological anthropology have revolutionized outdated notions that the Amazon ecosystems could not support high civilizations and demographic density –
a sustainable complex society.

The discovery of extensive areas of Terra Preta do Indio – a rich black soil made from biochar, a special charcoal, organic matter and fragmented ceramic shards – brought into focus an Amazonian landscape of great time and depth linked to the deliberate creation by indigenous societies of long-lasting soils with high productivity, able to retain carbon dioxide generated by the Ôslash-and-burnÕ system of burning open fields for short duration crops.

 

 

At the same time, the rewriting of the Amazonian peoplesÕ ecological history reinforced the catastrophic role played by classical colonialism and contemporary neocolonialism in the destruction of these ancient Amazonian communities; and their demographic collapse due to the biological and economic invasions by the colonizers, which forced surviving people to return to an agroforestry based exclusively on slash-and-burn agriculture and short cultivation cycles practiced on poor soils of the interfluvial areas, cornered by colonizing invasion. Both Donald Lathrap and William Denevan have argued for years that the diffusion of the slash-and-burn system is a relatively recent, post-Columbian adoption by indigenous – and later mestizo – populations of the Amazon – a forced return to a productive technology that had been overtaken and marginalized for at least a thousand years.

Archaeo-agricultural studies indicate that perhaps for millennia, indigenous agricultural practices of the Amazon consisted of alternating slash-and-burn with production of carbon (the biochar indicated by A. Bates) obtained by burning stubble without oxygen. This technological invention must have been diffused from the lower Amazon to the rest of the basin, including Beni and Llanos de Moxos, resulting in increased productivity, permanent woodland gardens, demographic growth and socio-political complexity. For centuries before the EuroAmerican invasion, the application of these technologies enriched the Amazonian soil, creating a ÔBlack Indian EarthÕ of great fertility, auto-reproduction and high productivity.

 

 

The memory of this Amazonian history is memory of an advanced, long-lasting civilization, similar to the hidden history in other tropical rainforests such as that of the Maya of the Guatemalan Peten
and the Yucatan Peninsula. These pre-Columbian indigenous peoples formed themselves into complex and sophisticated societies of philosophers and astronomers, builders of temples and public buildings, artists, artisans and farmers in such an abundance that the whole community could afford to keep an entire class of citizens dedicated to spirituality, and to philosophical and cosmic speculation. The Maya people achieved a powerful civilization in a tropical rainforest similar to the Amazon, establishing a similar relationship of coexistence and mutual benefit with the environment. They also established embankment crops, hydraulic controls, and soil improvement. Above all, they understood the principles of biodiversity, complementarity and reciprocity as regulators of an existential balance.

 

 

The Mayans too were slaughtered, decimated and enslaved by European invaders and their domestic descendants. Like the Amazonian peoples, they had to take shelter, isolate themselves and resist, sometimes with weapons, in so-called Ôsafe havensÕ. Capitalist, colonial and neocolonial processes forced all these indigenous peoples to regroup as horticulturalists, subsistence farmers or suburban and rural proletarians, in a rapid process of forced adaption and involution that obliterated the technological achievements of their ancestors over millennia, reducing them to practicing an impoverished parody of their own civilization.

The hope is for ÔThe return of the godsÕ – the Andean Inkari, the Meso-american Kong Hoy of the proto-Mayan Mixe people, or the Pachakamaite of the Ashaninka from the Peruvian Amazon. This symbolizes for todayÕs indigenous peoples a remembrance and unearthing, the revival and restoration of their ancestorsÕ civilizations, achievements and ideals, claiming their own history for the present and future, through re-encounter with their own past civilization. This seems the fundamental challenge that Amazonian and other Indigenous Peoples are facing now, throughout the continent of America and beyond: how to survive the onslaught of predatory capitalism armed with their own social and cultural technologies through recovering the long memory of their own civilizations?

 

* This article is a translated and edited version of part of the Introduction to Selva Vida: De la destrucci—n de la amazon’a al paradigma de la regeneraci—n, in Spanish, entitled ÔIntroduction to the three voicesÕ. Stefano Varese, FrŽdŽrique Apffel-Marglin and R—ger Rumrrill, IWGIA-UNAM-Casa de las AmŽricas, Copenhagen, Lima, MŽxico, Havana, 2013, are the editors of this book.

**Stefano Varese is author of La sal de los cerros (1968), Forest Indians in the Present Political Situation of Peru (1972), Witness to Sovereignty: Essays on the Indian Movement in Latin America (2007), and others.