Loggers are lighting fires inside the territory of uncontacted Amazon tribes
By Zoë Schlanger & Daniel Wolfe August 30, 2019
Contacted Awá peopleand their uncontacted neighbors, not picturedgrapple with illegal fires in their territory.
Deep in the eastern Amazon rainforest, loggers armed with guns are lighting fires inside the territory of an uncontacted tribe with roughly 100 members left.
This has happened during every dry season in recent years, fragmenting the tribes reserved land piece by piece, according to Survival International, an organization dedicated to protecting forest people. Loggers enter the Awás territory and light fires to burn the underbrush, so they can more easily access and fell the large, old-growth hardwood trees.
Awá territory seen from Sentinel-2 in Aug. 16. Fires were reported within the territory on Aug. 27
Quartz | qz.com
Data: NASA VIIRS/FIRMS, World Database on Protected Areas
Across the Amazon, fires set mostly by cattle ranchers, miners, and loggers are burning swaths of rainforest where indigenous people live. The Amazon is home to some 306,000 indigenous people, who have legal rights to 422 reserves, or nearly a quarter of the land area of the Amazon basin. In many cases, tribes already struggle to defend their land from invasion by illegal loggers and miners. But in light of the current Brazilian governments open disdain for the reserve system, indigenous people are even more vulnerable.
Perhaps most vulnerable are the estimated 100 uncontacted groups living in the Brazilian Amazon, of which the Awá are one.
The news that the loggers have arrived this year was relayed on Wednesday (Aug. 28) to Survival International by way of members of the nearby Guajajara tribe, which has formed firefighting patrols to keep watch for the illegal loggers who threaten the Awás remaining scraps of intact rainforest.
More:
https://qz.com/1698802/uncontacted-awa-tribe-threatened-by-amazon-fires-set-by-loggers/?fbclid=IwAR0W0dWYzQ2x7fQwm0-v_AeEwnE7zChLokN2qwM1TnII6QGsJ1xPozgiaMs
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Karadeniz
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