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.