Paul Paz y Miño from Amazon Watch speaks on biodiversity of Western Amazon Rainforest and protecting it from mining and drilling interests
Tag: Amazon
Amazon Defenders Part Three: Fires, Corruption, and Resistance in Brazil
EcoJustice Radio celebrates the land and water protectors of the Amazon Rainforest in a Four-Part series called Amazon Defenders. In Part Three we discuss the Indigenous rights movement for community and ecosystem health in Brazil and the six US-based financial institutions complicit in deforestation, fires, and rainforest destruction.
Ecuadorian Amazon Under Oil Assault to Service Chinese Debt
Ecuadorian state capitalism has sacrificed significant tracts of one of the planet’s most important biosphere reserves, Yasuni National Park in the Amazonian region, to a massive new oil drilling project. It threatens multiple indigenous territories and the area’s biodiversity and ecosystem integrity.
“Embrace of the Serpent” Film: Journey of Healing and Ethnobotany
Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, one of the most important plant explorers of the 20th century, served as a key inspiration in a recent film called “Embrace of the Serpent.” In December 1941, Schultes entered the Amazon to study how indigenous peoples used plants for medicinal, ritual, and practical purposes. After nearly a decade of fieldwork, he made significant discoveries about the sacred hallucinogen ayahuasca. In total, Schultes would collect more than 24,000 species of plants including some 300 species new to Western science.
Colombia: Stunning Indigenous Rock Art from Amazonia
Prehistoric paintings on vertical rock faces in an Amazonian wilderness in Colombia were recently photographed and filmed for western eyes. The pretense of this British filmmaker as the “discoverer” of the paintings is of course ludicrous. The once populous Karijona Tribe most likely painted these masterpieces, and continue to live uncontacted in the vast rainforest, and anthropologists and explorers have studied the region for hundreds of years.
China’s Latest Earth Assault: Trans-Amazonian Railway
Environmentalists push back against more Chinese-financed plans to construct 5,300km (3,300-mile) route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to cut transport costs
Thirty-Four Colombian Tribes Face Extinction
The Nukak People of Colombia have been forced from their homes by illegal armed groups, in the latest attack against the country’s most recently-contacted tribe. Mining, palm oil, cattle ranching and coca threaten the majority of the country’s 102 indigenous communities.