So long!

As I've come to the end of my time with this blog, I thought I'd just recap a few key issues I've highlighted throughout my time writing it.

The major theme that has surrounded this blog is uncertainty. Every post, whether it was relating to climate change, loss of land or major pressing issues such as the Belo Monte Dam, an uncertain feature seemed to lay ahead of the indigenous tribes.

From all my reading I have learnt about their rich cultures and hope that one day we can find an answer to allow both these cultures to survive, but also continue with sustainable development of the area. Looking to the past of the Amazon Rainforest is also a necessary step to understanding what potentially lays in store for the area in regards to climate change - an issue I feel has not been deeply enough explored.

So thanks for reading, I really feel as though I have gained a great deal of knowledge and sympathy for the area. I'll leave you with a video from Amazon Watch, an organisation I've mentioned many times, detailing their activities to inspire you in case you ever feel the urge to get involved.

Adapting to change

One thing that has become abundantly clear from my previous posts is that change can’t be avoided in the Amazon. It looks as though the dreaded climate change will change the indigenous tribe’s spiritual homes, but more pressingly they will have to co-exist more and more with the outside world.

Before their lands were disturbed, the vast majority of Amazonian tribes pursued a ‘mixed subsistence economy with gardening complemented by gathering and hunting and/or fishing’ – (Sponsel, 1986) and exhibited relatively good nutrition and health, with Bergman (1980) going as far to call their diet ‘affluent’ due to the detailed knowledge of the ecosystem the tribes possess, allowing them to extract more from a land with a relatively low abundance of accessible food. This comment really struck me, as I have done so much research around this topic and I am so used to hearing such sad stories that this seems like an alien concept to me.

Sponsel’s article is detailed in their nutritional methods, and I urge you to read it in order to gain a better understanding of how the tribes live their lives, but also to comprehend the changes that they have already and will continue to face. One thing that stood out to me with the “Western World’s” impact on their lives, with nutrition and health seen to be declining with increasing acculturation. Whether this is down to space for agriculture, pollution of water sources (leading to declining fish populations) or new diseases, the impact of expansion into South America has had a catastrophic effect on its indigenous people.

Change is not new in the Amazon, and we can look to the past once again to see this. The indigenous Amazonians are understood to be living in the ‘inferior’ forest after competition pushed them out of the surrounding flood plains, yet they survived and even flourished. Yet as Sponsel argues, this change was unparalleled with the speed and magnitude of the change associated with Western culture.

After mulling this over I can’t help but come to the conclusion that the changes will still march forward, and that unless we can leave areas of the Amazon truly undisturbed then these people will have to adapt. They will adapt, and survive. Yet it is the culture that dies and although their ancestry will be one of indigenous people, they will be a completely different concept to those that have come before.

Just another quick thing before I sign off for tonight. A recent blog entry of Joanna Bold seemed oddly familiar to me. Take a look as the parallels of a society collapsing under the pressures of climate change and human impacts, albeit in a vastly different setting.

Bergman, R. W. (1980). Amazon economics: the simplicity of Shipibo indian wealth. University Microfilms.

Sponsel, L. E. (1986). Amazon ecology and adaptation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 67-97.

Lessons from the past

As we are nearing the end of my blogging time, I thought it was best to look towards the future to try and understand how the Amazon rainforest and its people will change and adapt in the coming years.

The best way to understand the future is to look to the past, and that is why a paper by Botta el al. (2002) interested me. It highlights the need to fully understand past climate and carbon fluxes in order to gauge what can potentially happen in the future. Botta and her team examine past climate records of the Amazon basin and in doing so discovered previously unseen modes of climatic variability, and long term carbon cycles seen in process based ecosystems models as a result of this.

These kinds of investigations are key to truly comprehending climate and carbon cycles on not only a regional, but a global level, and as such Botta et al.  urge fellow scholars to mirror their studies. Further studies are needed to understand the full mechanics of carbon models and identify sources and sinks to determine the true fate of anthropogenic carbon.

Focussing on the Amazon Rainforest, Botta et al.  demonstrate that even without taking into account anthropogenic carbon and land use changes the Amazon has experienced changes in its net carbon functionality, and since the 1930s alone has switched between being a net carbon sink and source, which can be seen in the figure below.

Demonstration of carbon fluxes as seen by Botta et al,.

What struck me about this article was the uncertainty it threw up in previous papers I had blogged about. For example the Malhi et al. article (which you can read my thought about here) even discussed their crude data, yet I didn’t comprehend how much variability an area could have in such a small space on time.

Another interesting, but very different type of historical analysis of the Amazon was conducted by Carnaval et al, (2008). By using models, Carnaval et al, were able to see the spatial range of forest under climatic scenarios of the present day, 6000 years ago and 21,000 years ago. In doing so, areas of stable forest were able to be delineated, giving me a small glimmer of hope for the future of the Amazon’s biodiversity and the people who survive on its land. Better than me explaining this to you, however, I urge you to give ita read.

So there we go, just a couple of different historical analyses to show you how much more work is needed to fully understand this awesome place. Yet with so many other of my blog posts, the word that springs to mind time and time again is ‘uncertainty’. 

Botta, A., N.Ramankutty, and J. A. Foley (2002) Long-term variations of climate and carbon fluxes over the Amazon basin Geophysical Research Letters 29,9

Carnaval, A. C., & Moritz, C. (2008). Historical climate modelling predicts patterns of current biodiversity in the Brazilian Atlantic forest. Journal of Biogeography, 35(7), 1187-1201.

Malhi, Y., J. T. Roberts, R. A. Betts, T. J. Killeen, W. Li and C. A. Nobr (2008) Climate Change, Deforestation, and the Fate   of the Amazon.  Science. 319 pp. 169-172