The Fight to Secure Rights for Rainforests

The Sarayaku people of Ecuador seek legal protection for Amazonian plants and animals. Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s work on “thinking forests” might help.

By Emily Laber-Warren

The Sarayaku territory in Ecuador is a 500-square-mile roadless jungle reachable only by helicopter, small aircraft, or a full day’s canoe trip on the Bobonaza River. For outsiders, opportunities to connect with this community of about 1,200 people are rare.

It was October 2015, just weeks before the big United Nations climate change meeting that would ultimately yield the Paris Agreement. After decades of bravely staving off oil company incursions on their land and spearheading an Indigenous resistance movement in Ecuador, the people of Sarayaku wanted to make their predicament more widely known. Sitting behind a desk in his office at the Sarayaku’s Puyo headquarters, Santi, a serious, self-possessed man in his mid-30s, shared with Kohn an ambitious plan.

A 30-foot canoe carved from a cedar tree was already en route to France, and a delegation of Sarayaku leaders would follow. When heads of state from nearly every nation convened in December, the Sarayaku leaders would launch their canoe into a Parisian canal, bringing their struggle for the Amazon to the world stage.

Related posts:

Machine Learning works with data and processes it to discover patterns that can be later used to analyze new data. ML usually relies on specific representation of data, a set of “features” that are…

Are you out of ideas? If you’re having some hard time coming up with a topic which you’d like to write about, this one’s for you. You see, this was one of the reasons I procrastinated from writing…

Whenever we travel by plane, every pre-flight safety check tells us exactly the same thing: “In the event of an emergency, please make sure that you…” In these times of change, we will become most…