Green Options

Brazil’s government has announced plans to increase their soldiers in the Amazon Rainforest from 17,000 to 30,000 over the next 9 years, as well as build new forts and improve others. Why have they chosen to invest $488.6 million in this plan?

Occasionally, I come across a rare gem of a children’s book that warms my heart.  It’s not a book that attempts to “dumb down”, simplify, or infuse awkward silliness into an important issue facing the world today, such as global warming.  It’s not a book just for children.

It’s Tribal Alphabet, a multicultural children’s book presenting the ABCs of indigenous people.

Tribal Alphabet is beautifully illustrated and informative.  From Australian Aborigine to Zulu (and all the letters in between), children and parents learn about each tribe following the alphabetic progession.

Nn is for Nukak

Along the Amazon Basin, the Nukak migrate

A tribe never contacted ’til 1988.

The Nukak hunt monkeys, frogs, and peccaries too,

They fish for piranha in the rivers blue.

But now outsiders have sent in expeditions

And some Nukak suffer from disease and malnutrition.

Coca farmers and armies occupied their land

So the Nukak marched out, bow and arrown in hand.

Peruvian and Brazilian authorities are trading accusations that uncontrolled logging on the Peruvian side of the Amazon Forest is uprooting isolated Indian tribesmen forcing them to flee across the border into Brazil in search of untampered land and food.

Indigenous rights groups and Indian tribes researchers in Brazil now believe the uprooting may be a recipe for renewed inter-tribal conflicts over the resource that may suck governments of both nations into a row over the other’s responsibility in the affair, Reuters reports.

Just like in Peter Matthiessen’s classic book At Play in the Fields of the Lord, the gut reaction of several tribal members living in a remote area of the Amazon Rainforest was to shoot arrows at what was most likely the first plane they had ever seen passing by. You can see this yourself in one of the amazing photographs taken recently by the Brazilian government’s office of Indian Affairs.