Brazil: Loggers Invade Uncontacted Kawahiva Tribe’s Rainforest

Brazil: Loggers Invade Uncontacted Kawahiva Tribe’s Rainforest

     by Survival International

Waves of loggers are invading the territory of one of the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. The Indians, known as the Last of the Kawahiva, are the survivors of a larger tribe who have been killed or died of disease.

One group of loggers was recently caught by agents from FUNAI, Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs department. However, as the loggers have local political support, and FUNAI agents do not have the power to arrest suspects, the men were released. Further waves of loggers have since entered the territory.

The crisis has raised concerns among campaigners that the tribe and their rainforest home could be destroyed entirely.

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FUNAI agents work in many parts of Brazil to protect indigenous territories from loggers and other threats. © Mário Vilela/FUNAI

In April 2016, the Brazilian Minister of Justice signed a decree to create a protected indigenous territory on the tribe’s land to keep loggers and other intruders out. This was a big step forward for the Kawahiva’s lands and lives, and followed pressure from Survival’s supporters around the world. However, the decree has yet to be properly enacted and now the small team who are working to protect the land are facing severe budget cuts.

Jair Candor, an experienced FUNAI agent, said: ”The Kawahiva are trapped. If any contact happens, it will be devastating for them. The only way to ensure their survival is to map out the land and put in place a permanent land protection team. Otherwise, they will be relegated to the history books, just like so many other tribal peoples of this region.”

Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance has narrated a film to highlight the tribe’s plight.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “Brazil committed to protecting the Kawahiva’s land in April, but with the government dragging its heels an urgent and horrific humanitarian crisis is unfolding. The Kawahiva’s land is still being invaded and their forest is still being destroyed. It’s time for Brazil to take action as it promised, before the genocide of an entire people is complete.”

Should This Cruelty Be Normal?

Society must choose whether women count as human

Lierre Keith / Deep Green Resistance

Feminism has always been a contested area of politics. Fierce arguments centre on what it is, and why we need it. The best definition I know is from Andrea Dworkin: “Feminism is the political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class.” In one elegant sentence, she names both the problem ― male supremacy ― and the solution ― political action.

Implicit in those 16 words are also the two requirements of the human heart: love and hope. It is an act of love to notice women. Women are on display everywhere of course ― naked, for sale, the coin of the realm in a pornographic culture ― but being an object is the opposite of being human. Noticing the harm that is being done ― insisting that it is harm ― starts from love.

Such noticing tends to have an inverse relationship to hope. When harms against a people are both vicious and everyday, hope becomes a combat discipline. But, whether grim or glad, hope is possible only because change is possible. This is the promise of feminism: as endless as the horrors seem, they could end. We, as a society, could end them.

Armed with love and hope, I travelled to London recently for a conference on male violence and how we might end it. I left the US still braced against the details that had come out of Ohio: three women, one six-year-old girl, a basement strung with chains ten years long.

I arrived in London to news of Mark Bridger’s trial: his catalogue of images of murdered girls, his library of sadistic child-porn, the stalking that escalated from online to real life. This meant real death to a perfect promise of a girl named after spring. Her parents are now condemned to a deep winter of grief; how they will survive is anyone’s guess.

Then there was the long fall of Chevonea Kendall-Bryan, the 13-year-old who fell to her death from the window of her home, having suffered sexual bullying. Longer still was the fall from human to object, through rape, and more rape, landing finally on the unyielding surface of complete public violation. Does it matter whether she jumped or fell? Her life was shattered either way.

This is where we stand or fall as a society. We will have to choose. Right now, our society is choosing to make cruelty normal. We are choosing saturation in sadism. The choice turns on whether women count as human.

A few brute facts will answer. Globally, one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. Half of all sexual assaults are committed on girls under 16: might as well start the lesson early. In the UK, a woman is raped every nine minutes. There are plenty more numbers, and inside each and every one are the broken shards where body and soul, self and world, once met.

The numbers should speak for themselves, but numbers don’t actually speak, of course. They need human voices to carry them. The result of subordination, though, is always silence. Silence is what happens when people are turned into objects. Violence will do that. Sexual violence especially will do that. Sexual violence against children is a shroud of silence that can take a lifetime to unwind.

Amnesty International reports that rape is the most traumatic form of torture. In fact, women who have survived prostitution have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers who have survived combat, which is to say that the war men are waging against women is in many ways worse than the wars they inflict on each other.

If you need convincing, type the word “rape” into Google images. Or, if you have the stomach and the spiritual stamina, try “torture porn”. What you will see is not entertainment, or sex, or freedom. What you will see is hell. What you will also see is that men by the million have been there before you.

We need feminism because, without it, the realities of women’s lives are unspeakable ― each woman cut adrift in a hostile, chaotic sea. Apply feminism, and that chaos snaps into a sharp pattern of subordination ― from the small, daily insults to body and soul, to the shattering traumas of incest and rape.

The crimes that men commit against women are not done to women as random individuals: they are done because women belong to a subordinate class, and they are done to keep women a subordinate class.

None of this will change unless we face the truth. I wrote above that every nine minutes a woman is raped. That is hard enough, but it is not the truth. This is: every nine minutes a man rapes a woman. And I am left with a human howl of “Why?” After 30 years spent fighting male violence and pornography, I still have no answer.

I am a feminist because I think women count as human. But feminism also insists on the humanity of men: we think that men can do better. The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday studied 95 societies, and found that almost half were rape-free. It is not random. It is actually rather straightforward. Rape-free cultures value co-operation whereas rape-prone cultures reward competition. In the former, political and economic power are shared by the sexes; in the latter, women are dispossessed.

Whereas in the one, the sacred has both female and male aspects, in the other, God is only ever male. And now we come to it: in rape-free cultures, anyone can assume positions of ceremonial importance. In rape-prone cultures, men exclude women from roles of spiritual intercession.

Social subordination is like a set of concentric circles. The innermost is where the worst occurs: the cattle cars, the severed limbs, the missing girls found as bone fragments and blood stains. But every circle in the set helps to constrain the people trapped inside. The outer rings shore up the inner horrors, making them both normal and invisible.

How can such things happen, we ask in anguish? They can happen because each successive circle ― each institution and social practice ― creates the bull’s eye where Chevonea landed and April will never be found.

We have a choice, as individual men and women, and as a society. We can keep other humans barricaded inside such atrocities, or we can bring those barricades down. Either women will finally count as human, or the rancid pleasures of sadism will continue to rot our society and our souis. Choose now, before another girl falls, and another goes missing.

Originally published in the June 28, 2013 issue of Church Times

Lawsuit Filed to Protect Endangered Ocelots in Arizona, Texas From Government Killing

Lawsuit Filed to Protect Endangered Ocelots in Arizona, Texas From Government Killing

Featured image: Ocelot photo by Tom Smylie, USFWS. Fewer than 100 of these rare wildcats likely remain in the United States. 

     by Center for Biological Diversity

TUCSON, AZ The Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Welfare Institute today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure that endangered ocelots aren’t inadvertently killed as part of the Department’s long-running program to kill coyotes, bears, bobcats and other wildlife in Arizona and Texas. The Department’s Wildlife Services program kills tens of thousands of animals in the two states every year using traps, snares and poisons.

“All the latest science shows Wildlife Services’ predator-control program is expensive, ineffective and inhumane,” said Collette Adkins, a Center attorney and biologist. “With fewer than 100 ocelots remaining in the United States, we’re trying to ensure that none will suffer and die in traps set for bobcats, coyotes and other predators targeted by Wildlife Services.”

Wildlife Services is required by the Endangered Species Act to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on its activities that may affect endangered species, including its predator-control activities. Because Wildlife Services kills wildlife within the range of the endangered ocelot, and given the similarity in size between ocelots and many of the targeted predators, the Fish and Wildlife Service warned Wildlife Services in a 2010 “biological opinion” document that ocelots could be harmed by its use of traps, snares and poisons (including baited M-44 devices that propel lethal doses of sodium cyanide into animals’ mouths).

Since that 2010 opinion, ocelots have been spotted in several additional locations in Arizona, including the Huachuca and Santa Rita mountains. New evidence also indicates that Wildlife Services has failed to comply with the document’s mandatory terms and conditions, intended to minimize risk to ocelots. This new information requires the program to reinitiate consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service to examine risks to ocelots and develop risk-mitigation measures. The complaint also alleges that Wildlife Services must use recent science to supplement its outdated environmental analyses of its wildlife-killing program in Arizona, which were prepared in the 1990s under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“The ocelot population is crumbling at the feet of Wildlife Services’ indiscriminate and haphazard wildlife-killing activities,” said Tara Zuardo, a wildlife attorney with Animal Welfare Institute. “With this lawsuit, we are sending a message to Wildlife Services that its tactics should not come at the expense of the future of this critically endangered species.”

To protect ocelots while the Fish and Wildlife Service completes the required analysis, the groups are seeking a halt to Wildlife Services’ animal-killing activities throughout the ocelot’s range in southern Arizona and Texas.

Background
The ocelot has a tawny coat marked by elongated brown spots with black borders. It can weigh as much as 35 pounds and stretch to 4 feet in length (including the tail). Ocelots seem to prefer dense cover but use a variety of habitats. Hunting mostly at night, they target rabbits, birds, fish, rodents, snakes, lizards and other small- to medium-sized prey.

The ocelot’s range includes Texas, Arizona, Mexico and Central and South America. Monitoring of collared individuals has shown that ocelots travel as far as 10 miles outside their home ranges. Since 2009 ocelots have been detected at least five times in Arizona, including a road-killed ocelot near Globe in 2010, a treed ocelot in the Huachuca Mountains in 2011, and a male ocelot photographed in the Santa Rita Mountains in 2014.

Since 1982 the species has been designated as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. Although never abundant, ocelots were historically killed incidentally during the hunting, trapping and poisoning of coyotes, bobcats and other predators. Habitat loss also contributed to the animal’s decline; only a fraction of the less than 5 percent of original native vegetation remaining in the lower Rio Grande Valley is optimal habitat for the cats. Now continuing habitat loss, collisions with vehicles and inbreeding resulting from small and isolated groups are keeping the wildcat’s population numbers low.

See more about USDA Wildlife Services at this award-winning film:

Peru: National park plan to open up uncontacted tribe’s land to Big Oil

Peru: National park plan to open up uncontacted tribe’s land to Big Oil

Featured image: Many contacted Matsés have expressed opposition to any efforts to contact their uncontacted neighbors, or to explore for oil in their territory. © Survival International

     by Survival International

Survival International has learned that the Peruvian government is developing a “Master Plan” for a new national park that could pave the way for large-scale oil exploration. This will threaten the lives and lands of several uncontacted tribes.

The area, known in Spanish as the Sierra del Divisor [“Watershed Mountains”], is part of the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier, the region straddling the Peru-Brazil border that is home to the largest concentration of uncontacted tribal peoples on the planet.

A new plan for the area currently being drafted by Peru’s national parks agency SERNANP could enable oil companies to enter the park. It has further been reported that the new government wants to change the law to make it even easier to open up national parks to oil and gas operations.

The Sierra del Divisor National Park was created in 2015 to protect the region. The new plan could wipe out the uncontacted Indians, not all of whom have been recognized by the authorities.

A contacted Matsés woman said: “Oil will destroy the place where our rivers are born. What will happen to the fish? What will the animals drink?”

In 2016, Canadian oil company Pacific E&P cancelled a contract to explore for oil on nearby contacted Matsés territory, in the face of stiff opposition from the tribe.

The Watershed Mountains are a unique and highly diverse environment, home to many uncontacted tribal peoples. © Diego Perez

The Watershed Mountains are a unique and highly diverse environment, home to many uncontacted tribal peoples.
© Diego Perez

However, it still has a contract to explore in the Watershed Mountains.

In 2012, it conducted the first phase of exploration, which Survival International and contacted Matsés campaigned against.

The more vulnerable uncontacted members of the tribe are still at risk, and not in a position to consent or object to the project. The environment that they have depended on and managed for millennia could be destroyed.

The oil exploration process uses thousands of underground explosions along hundreds of tracks cut into the forest to determine the location of oil deposits.

Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. All uncontacted tribal peoples face catastrophe unless their land is protected.

With a new Peruvian government in place, Survival and the indigenous organizations AIDESEP, ORPIO and ORAU are urging the government to think again.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “It’s in all our interests to fight for the land rights of uncontacted tribes, because evidence proves that tribal territories are the best barrier to deforestation. Survival is doing everything we can to secure their land for them.”

Groups Sue Government Agencies for Yellowstone Bison ESA Protections

Groups Sue Government Agencies for Yellowstone Bison ESA Protections

     by Buffalo Field Campaign

Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC), Friends of Animals (FoA) and the Western Watersheds Project have filed a lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior and U.S. Fish & Wildlife (USFWS) for failing to provide Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for the distinct population (comprised of at least two herds) segment of bison in Yellowstone National Park in response to two citizen petitions.

“What an insult to the American public that the wild bison, who was named our first national mammal in May, continues to be slaughtered because of pressure from the meat industry and ranchers grazing their doomed cattle and sheep,” said Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals. “These herds are obviously in a place where they should already be protected.”

The 4,500 bison in Yellowstone National Park are the only genetically pure bison herds of that size in America. But hundreds are slaughtered every year when snow and ice cover the bison’s food and hunger pushes them to lower elevations across the park boundary in Montana. When they cross this arbitrary line, the buffalo enter a zone of violent conflict with cattle and sheep ranchers.

“Protection under the Endangered Species Act is needed to counter these management inadequacies and to get state and federal agencies to address the threats these bison face,” added Michael Connor, California director of Western Watersheds Project and author of the listing petition. “Instead of allowing these bison to behave like bison and move with the seasons, government agencies are practicing indiscriminate killing that is reducing their genetic diversity.”

The lawsuit states that in issuing a negative 90-day determination on the petitions to list the bison as threatened or endangered, USFWS failed to rely upon the best available science, applied an incorrect legal standard to the petition and ignored the plain language of the ESA, which requires that any species threatened by one or more of five factors shall be designated as endangered or threatened.

Michael Harris, director of Friends of Animals’ Wildlife Law Program, points out that USFWS failed to consider that the curtailment of habitat has already resulted in placing the Yellowstone bison at risk of extinction. USFWS deems the population status to be stable, however under the ESA, the agency is required to not only look at the current numbers of bison, but how much of the bisons range has already been destroyed. Bison historically occupied approximately 20,000 square kilometres and presently only 3,175 square kiometres within the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park serve as principal bison habitat.

“There were millions and millions of acres that were available to the bison that are no longer available to them because of cattle and sheep ranching. Their range has been curtailed by 90 percent, and that alone should be enough to warrant a listing,” Harris said.

“America’s national mammal, the wild bison, is threatened with extinction because of the actions of the agencies entrusted with protecting them,” added Dan Brister, executive director of Buffalo Field Campaign. “The Department of Interior should base its decisions on the best available science, not political pressure from the livestock industry.”

The groups’ petition to list Yellowstone bison is available online at:
Buffalo Field Campaign ESA Petition (PDF)