[Scpg] A permaculture lesson

[Cory Brennan]

A good example of needing to design for disaster in permaculture and a worthy reason for us to continue what we are doing, even more so if possible.


http://www.nytimes. com/2009/ 07/25/science/ earth/25tribe. html?_r=1& hp

An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the
Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival,
they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh,
whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they
will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes
and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s
primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore.
Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are
making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in
this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other
small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or
capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer —
they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who
stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a
recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional
dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one
name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams
where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously
teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe
members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of
bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life
has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an
interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the
road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and
grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30
percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if
global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in
coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural
extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their
traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,”
said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the
International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland.
“But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and
disappear.”

To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their
traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There
aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok
said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for
their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill
your stomach.”

Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he
noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and
beans to supplement what is missing.”

Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat
he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that
arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of
the Kamayurá.

Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include
rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food
supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen
rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-
lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.

Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and
have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for
example, or a hurricane that kills animals.

But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in
only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and
Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas
Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea
ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around
are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not
impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations,
demanding compensation and help with adapting.

“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is
being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr.
Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at
the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people,
not just about polar bears and wildlife.”

At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United
Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could
in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the
money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there
have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would
help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.

Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous
cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political
strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land
surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global
population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building
homes and schools and even declaring statehood.

The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast
territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by
farms and ranches.

About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually
in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far
less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle,
lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate
drier and hotter.

That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá
life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever
they are hungry.

Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed”
since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of
fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake.
With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the
region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to
their spawning grounds.

Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the
village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering
useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in
holes that would fill up, luring the animals.

The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá
planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the
horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the
sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,”
Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the
star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous
divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.

It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year,
families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September,
October and November because there was not enough moisture in the
ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn
also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and
withered away,” she said.

A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used
to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to
find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound
together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult
to find.

But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest
fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable
because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for
the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.

“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief
Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the
animals.”