Who Could Survive A Scorching Sun?

Background

In the early 1900s, rubber was king. The insatiable demand for rubber tyres to service the growing global market, from automobiles and aeroplanes, not to mention the onset of WWI, meant that, for those who could harvest the wild rubber, money was literally growing on trees. As rubber plantations had not yet been established, the only available source of this white-sap gold was from native trees scattered throughout the vast rain forests of the Amazon and sub-Saharan Africa. The ravenous and brutal thirst for quick fortune had a tragic by-product: the widespread displacement, maiming, and killing of tens of thousands of indigenous peoples for whom these forests were home.

In 1910, the Irish humanitarian Roger Casement travelled deep into the heart of the Amazon to investigate the rubber operations of the British Registered Peruvian Amazon Company. What he found he described as “extermination not trade.”

PRESENT DAY

A century on, another Irishman, lawyer and activist, Brendan Tobin, found the same indigenous peoples once more under threat. Surrounded by extractive industries, an advancing agro-industrial frontier and drug mafias, the peoples of the Predio Putumayo –the largest Indigenous reserve in Colombia– face new existential challenges. Climate change and the invitation to participate in Carbon markets. At play here is the survival of the Amazon, its peoples and the global climate.

The history of the peoples of the Predio Putumayo, their struggle for survival and their quest for self-determination provide a stark reflection of the challenges we all face from the destruction of our environment, climate change and the lack of effective enforcement measures for breach of human rights and genocide. As well as the increasing challenges to have our voices heard and to be able to influence state behaviour. The increasingly fragile state of the earth’s ecosystem and climate demonstrates the urgent need to find a new way of relating to our environment. A way that indigenous peoples have not yet lost but are being invited to abandon.