What will become of the Amazon?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Intro (00:04):
Trailblazers in research; innovators in technology;
and those who simply have a good story:
all make up the fabric thatis George Mason University,
where taking on the grand challengesthat face our students, graduates,
and higher education is ourmission and our passion.
Hosted by Mason PresidentGregory Washington:
This is the Access to Excellence podcast.

Gregory Washington (00:26):
The Amazon Basin, which holds the world's biggest river, rainforest, and a
fifth of its fresh water is running dry.
That was the news in theWashington Post recently.
The New York Times went even furtherciting a study that says the Amazon
rainforest could transform intograsslands in the coming decades

(00:50):
because of climate change,deforestation, and severe drought,
such as the one theregion just experienced.
Jeremy Campbell is a culturalanthropologist who studies
land conflicts and environmentalchange in the Brazilian Amazon.
He is also the associate directorfor strategic engagement at

(01:13):
Mason's Institute forSustainable Earth. Since 2020,
Dr. Campbell has served as thepresident of the Society of
Anthropology of Lowland South America.
That's an international scholarlyorganization that advocates on behalf of
peoples and environmentsin Amazonia and beyond.

(01:35):
In this Earth Month,
I am thrilled that Dr. Campbellhas given us an opportunity Gregory Washington:
to engage. Welcome Dr. Campbell.

Jeremy Campbell (01:44):
Thank you so much Dr. Washington. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, it's great to have you. So let's get right to the bad news.

Yeah, let's do it.

According to the Times and the study that was produced by an international team
of scientists and publishedin the journal "Nature",
the collapse of all or partof the Amazon rainforest
would release the equivalent ofseveral years of global emissions,
possibly 20 years worth,into the atmosphere.

(02:14):
Give us a template or an understandingfor how that actually happens.

Sure. It's complex inherently because the Amazon is,
is a very complex region, but tounderstand what's really going on,
you have to really appreciate the sizeand the immensity and the complexity of
the Amazon, which I think for most NorthAmericans, certainly me growing up,
I didn't really have much of anunderstanding other than maybe the, uh,
back of the cereal box image of thecanopy rainforest with monkeys and toucans

(02:43):
and things like this. Butyou know, the Amazon is vast.
It's the size of thelower 48 United States.

Really?

Yeah. The Amazon Basin is that big.

The Amazon basin

Right.

Is the size of essentially the US minus Alaska and Hawaii.

You got it. That's it.

Amazing.

It's amazing. Yeah. Not only that,
there are nine different nation statesthat share a portion of that basin.
Going around from Boliviain the southwest up to Peru,
Ecuador, Colombia,Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname,
French Guiana--which is an overseaspart of the French Republic,
so it's part of Europe, it's partof the EU--and then, of course,

(03:22):
Brazil is the lion's share about70% of the basin. You mentioned,
Dr. Washington, your stats aregood, your research is good,
that the Amazon is the world'sbiggest river by water discharge.

Yes.

But if you look at the top 20 hydrological discharges rivers in the world,
six of them are tributaries of the Amazon.
So you've got seven of thetop 20 rivers in the world.

Whoa.

Right in that region. Okay.
So it is a region that is so immenseand so complex to say nothing of the
diversity of different river types.You have black river systems,
you have clear water systems,you have white water systems.
The subbasins are very complex.
What that all adds up tois with this immense area,
with immense amounts of water,

(04:02):
it is big enough togenerate its own weather.
And so when we talkabout the tipping point,
the looming tipping point that actuallyour departed colleague Tom Lovejoy
coined that phrase back in 2018,
it's the idea that the neotropics,
the subtropical system that is the Amazon,
is in danger of phaseshifting from a robust complex

(04:25):
rainforest to somethinglike a savanna, a grassland,
or even in some cases something morelike the Sahel region of Northern
Africa.

That's near desert.

That's near desert. Exactly. And so how can that happen?

Now, now, now let's, let's put it in perspective.

Right.

You're talking five years, we're talking five decades,
or we're talking 500 years.What are we talking about?

Great question. So back in 2018,
when Dr. Lovejoy and his colleague Dr.Carlos Nobre from the University of Sao
Paulo, published in "Nature" thefirst warning about the tipping point,
they estimated what it would take toget to the tipping point is a gross
deforestation of approximately20 to 25% of the land in the

(05:10):
entire basin. That wasin 2018. At that time,
about 18% of the basin hadbeen deforested flash ahead.
Six years we're at about 20% ofthe basin has been deforested.
So depending on the projections,
and depending on what we might be ableto do to put the brakes on deforestation,
we might be looking at a tipping pointin the next five to 10 years. And again,

(05:31):
to put that in perspective, youhave the wettest place on earth,
some parts of that place becominga savanna, due to deforestation.
But the other crucial part, we canhandle deforestation. It's difficult,
but we can handle it.
The other contributing factor tothe tipping point is climate change.
And that we're locked into in termsof warming that's affecting the

(05:54):
Amazon. The Amazon is warmingfaster than other regions.
It's already warmed 1.3degrees Celsius since 1980.
And it's on an upward trend.
That means that some parts ofthe Amazon are getting wetter,
especially the northernparts of the Amazon.
But other parts of the Amazon within theglobal climate system are getting far,

(06:16):
far drier.
And that's irrespective of seasonalanomalies like an El Nino or a La Nina,
which intensify thingseven further as we know.
So you have deforestation cuttingdown trees that make their own weather
through transpiration and evaporation.The Amazon is big enough to,
through the transpiration process,
there's literally riversflying above your head if--

That much water.

That much water. Exactly.
And those rivers basically follow thetrade winds that come from Senegal,
from Cape Verde in Africa,
and those winds pick up moistureover the South Atlantic.
They pick up all the moisture at the fallsof the Amazon near the city of Belm.
And then all of that goes kind of ina southwesterly direction towards the
Andes. And the Andes is 20,000 feet high.

(07:01):
So what happens whenair hits that barrier...

Turns to ice and snow.

It turns into ice and snow. Some of it turns left,
which is to say south and southeast,
and irrigates South America'sbread basket where most of South
America's wheat in Argentina,
soy in Paraguay and Bolivia andBrazil is grown. And then of course,
cattle and pig operations.
South America's economy over the past20 years has been based on the export of

(07:28):
commodities in the agriculturalsector to East Asia.
You turn off the spigot, which isthe Amazon hydrogeological cycle,
and you're going to see some dryingout of that bread basket as well.
And so the Amazon plays a crucialrole in the global climate system.
Sequestering carbon--we can get into someof the numbers for that if you like--

(07:49):
But it also plays a key role inthe hydrological and geochemical
cycling beyond itsborders in South America,
which then has implications for globaltrade and for wellbeing of people who,
you know, we've got 8billion of us on this planet.

That's exactly right.

Hungry souls, right?

, you got more than 8 billion. So climate change is affecting that way.
I was also reading in the same naturearticle where they were talking about
the drought significantlyreducing the depth--

Mm-Hmm. .

--In a number of the rivers.

Mm-Hmm. .

And also causing tremendous warming of the waters in some
of the lakes. I think they talk about,uh, Lake, I think it's pronounced Tefe.

Tefe. Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. That's in Brazil. Yeah.

Yeah. Where the temperature had reached 40 degrees centigrade.

That's right.

For those of us who are challenged on that system,
it's 104 degrees Fahrenheitand you had a large
pods of dolphins, over 150 of 'them,these freshwater dolphins that perished,
because the water got so warm.
So that meant other waterlife didn't live either.

(08:58):
If you major and if you major living,
eating and living off and usingthe sea life in that water
for commerce--

Mm-Hmm. .

--You probably saw some changes there as well.

Sure. And for subsistence living,
I've done a quite a bit of work over thepast 20 years with indigenous and other
traditional peoples in the Amazon.And you're absolutely right.
The stresses caused by climatechange and by deforestation,
which really do interact with one anotherdynamically to push us ever closer to
that system change,

(09:30):
that phase change from a stable systemwhere water gets recycled to one
where, you know,
when you cut down a tree and around20% of the forest is gone now,
you are drying out that soil,
you are drying out thatpart of that region.
And basically the southern strip of theAmazon has been converted to pasture and
cities in the past 40, 50 years,where there used to be forests,

(09:52):
you're not gonna get any moreof that transpiration cycle.
And so the drying isn't limited to theplaces where deforestation happens.
Where things are dry, things gethotter. Uh, and then when you add,
like we had last year with thehorrible situation in Lago Tefe,
but all throughout the Amazon ofan El Nino induced heat spike and
drought, then you havevillages that rely on fish,

(10:16):
rely on the rivers to get around becausethe rivers are the highways in the
Amazon who are literally stranded withoutthe ability to get to major cities,
the without the ability to get healthcare.
So the drying out of the Amazon isa tremendous biodiversity challenge.
It's also a tremendous economic challengein the ways we just talked about,
but it's also a human tragedy,

(10:37):
and it's taking tremendous costs onthe people of the Amazon as well.

Wow. This is a pretty significant outcome.
I've always wanted to get abetter understanding of the impact
that the Amazon can haveon the planet in terms of
a losing of substantial portion of it.

Mm-Hmm. .

What do you think that will do to the rest of us? So let's say if we lost,
let's make it a big number.

Sure.

50%.

Sure.

What are we talking about relative to what the rest of the globe
will feel?

Well, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, let's take that first,
because the Amazon isestimated--these are our best guesses.

I know. I look, I understand.

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's.

It's, but your guess is a scientific guess.

Well, that's right. That's right.

And that's better than me putting my index finger in the air and saying,
you know, about, okay. So.

Right, right, right. And so, yeah, for the sake of argument,
if we lose half of the rainforest,then I think we're definitely,
even though there was some quibbling whenDr. Lovejoy and Dr. Nobre said tipping
point will be reachedat 25% deforestation.
There was some pushback againstthat. But if we get to 50%,
we're definitely seeing a phase change.We're gonna be seeing savannization,
we're gonna be seeing the loss ofendemic species diversity in the affected

(11:54):
valleys. Again,
the Amazon is the name we give tothe river that goes west to east.
But there are huge river systems thatgo north south and south north that feed
that Amazon.
And each one has its distinctbiodiversity profile and has also
distinct sociocultural properties,
different social groups who speakdifferent languages. And so,

(12:15):
depending on what happens valleyby valley, region by region,
we could be experiencing acatastrophic loss of biodiversity.
What goes along with that, of course,is part of the mystery of life.
Part of what makes us human is thatwe share this planet with other
creatures. And so even before we'reable to describe them scientifically,

(12:36):
you would see thousands,
if not millions of species being pushedto the brink of extinction. Of course,
many minds would go towardsthe opportunity value or the,
or the opportunity lost to developmedicines or to develop new technologies
based upon things that we don't knowthat we don't know in the Amazon,
because it is such a biodiversitylibrary. Library is also a good metaphor.

(13:00):
Uh, and it's actually a metaphor that'sused by my indigenous colleagues when
deforestation or drought spikesand begins to challenge and
affect indigenous lands.
My indigenous colleagues describe thatas the libraries of their people burning.
Because the trees and theanimals and the plant life are

(13:20):
part of the traditional knowledge system.
Part of how you make your way in theuniverse, know your place in the universe,
find medicine, find food,
find stories to pass downto the next generation.
And so deforestation plays asociocultural role in terms of
challenging culture's abilityto reproduce itself. Right?
And for people to continue to hold ontotheir languages and their traditional

(13:44):
knowledges and medicines.Also, it's worth saying,
because we're talkingabout climate change.

Mm-Hmm. .

That the system, the broader Amazonian system,
sequesters roughly 200 billiontons of carbon dioxide,
200 billion tons. If we losthalf of that, let's just go...

Just cut it in half.

Really gross numbers here. Exactly.
A hundred billion tons goes into theatmosphere. Poof, Just like that.
We, as the United States of America,the world's second largest emitter,
emitted 4 billion tonsof carbon last year.
So that's 25 years worth of our emissions.

Okay. So now we start to get an understanding of the
magnitude of what this losscan actually mean for us.
And that's kind of what Iwanted people to kind of grasp.

Mm-Hmm. .

Wow.

Yeah.

It's a big number.

It's a big number. And again, the loss of biodiversity. I mean,
here in the United States, we'recomfortable. We plug into our cell phones,
we plug into cable news, whatever it is,it can feel like the Amazon's far away.
But some major drugs have been developedbased on traditional ecological
knowledge and biodiversityin the Amazon. For example,
the very first drug that treatedmalaria quinine or quinine.

Quinine.

Right?

Quinine.

Is based on, uh, derived from the bark of a tree in the Amazon.
And so that's kind of a big deal,right? There are others. There are.

And there probably, you know, as we start to, uh,
for lack of a better way of putting this,
use AI and other tools to look at the
pharmaceutical benefitsof natural extracts.

Right.

From plants and from plant life and all throughout the planet,
but particularly that in the Amazon,we're gonna discover many more.

That's right.

Right?

That's right. Yeah. So we're putting at peril future discoveries,
we're putting at peril a big chunk ofthe mosaic of life and the big chunk of
sociocultural diversity.
Part of the bad news in the Amazon isin part the attitude that outsiders have
taken and continue to takethat understanding the region as a place where you
can get rich quick .Right. So I, I hear you,

(15:55):
and it would be great if we could developsomething that would be that elixir,
but what the trick would be to developthat drug or develop that therapy
and make sure the proceeds staywith the people of the Amazon.
Because unfortunately, themore that we study the Amazon,
and I've been working there for 25 years,
there is chapter after chapterof economic boom that is all

(16:18):
about getting a particularcommodity out. First it was rubber.
The world's rubber supply was limited tothe Amazon basin because it's native to
the Amazon basin. So during theindustrial revolution of the late 1800s,
all the world's rubbercame from the Amazon.
So that resulted in actually areally bad impact on the Amazon,
because rubber is hard to extract.

(16:39):
You have to physically cutthe trees and collect the sap.
So basically slave labor, uh,indigenous peoples were enslaved,
other peoples from throughout the Americaswere taken in and dropped into the
Amazon by their bosses and forcedto work in really terrible kinds of
conditions. And that all basicallyflamed out when the British,

(16:59):
during the British Empire Grand Britanniastole some rubber trees and began a
rubber plantation in Malaysia,
which allowed for other markets andother sources to open up for rubber.
Then you get a gold boom,
similar kind of extractionwhere profits are extracted,
leaving behind very littlein the region itself.
I would argue that the cattle and soyboom that's happening right now is

(17:21):
similar. We have 50 million people livingin the Amazon. 50 million individuals,
40 million of them live in cities. A lotof people don't understand that either,
right, the Amazon is ahighly urbanized place.

Interesting.

There are cities of four and five million people,
but they are very low onthe human development index because they are the sites
of factories or farms or these sortsof things where labor and environmental
protections are looked as scantat or really not enforced.
And people are gettingby as best they can.
And the investment that goes to the area,because it is an incredibly rich area,

(17:56):
tends not to stay in the area.That's a key piece of this, too.
The environmental and socialsustainability of the area depends on
economic sustainability aswell. I believe that crucially,
you gotta have all three pillars,uh, all three legs of that stool.
And that's a key piece that wereally do need to be figuring out.

Well, that brings me to my next question,
because recently it was announced thatthe governments of Brazil and France
announced a plan to invest 1.1billion in the Amazon over the next
four years to protect the rainforest.Right. Right Now on first blush,
anytime you hear the word billionyou think, wow, it's a lot.
But there was a part of me that says,given what you just told me now,

(18:40):
it didn't seem like that muchmoney for a region that vast.
Now it's also been reported thatBrazil has contemplated allowing oil
exploration at certain partsof the Amazon as well. So,
can you talk a little bit about theseplans and what your thoughts are relative
to success?

Absolutely. Yeah. So it is good news that donor countries like Germany,
like Norway, like France,like the United States,
actually the United Stateshas pledged just under,
I think around seven 50million to the Amazon Fund,
which is an international,it's based in Brazil,
but it's an internationalscoped fund to try to set up

(19:19):
conservation areas to set upsustainable business practices,
to support community-led conservationand all these sorts of things,
which really are, project by project,
wonderful examples of keeping the social,
the environmental, and the economicflowing in the right direction.
So that's to be applauded.But I think you're right.

(19:41):
It's a drop in the bucket whencompared to the potential revenues that
Petrobras, which isBrazil's largest company,
and the second largest petroleum companyon the planet sees when they look at
oil exploration in the Amazon,
and specifically in a place thatis all in the news right now,
Brazil has been investing in offshoreoil drilling technology in the southern

(20:04):
part, uh, near Rio, near Sao Paulo.
But a lot of oil has been found justwhere the Amazon River empties into the
Atlantic. It's calledthe falls of the Amazon.
And so they are moving ahead quicklyto begin to develop that area.
And we're talking,
if it's 1.1 billion that the Frenchand the Germans and the Norwegians have
pledged for doling out projects overthe next couple years, we'll see 200,

(20:26):
300 multiples of that when it comes tothe oil revenue based upon what's there
in the offshore area. So the questionthen is, is that a good idea ?
Right? Does that not.

Well, we, well, well,
we can tell you that it's not agood idea once you have a spill.

That's right.

Uh, but the reality is,
my fundamental philosophy ondeposits of hydrocarbons in
the ground is that people aregoing to develop them. Right.
To the extent that we developtechnologies for mitigation, we need to,
the reality of the situation isuntil the planet forces us to stop

(21:03):
man will pull those hydrocarbons outof the ground and we'll burn them.

I tend to agree with you, provided that it isn't too expensive to get them out.
There has to be an economic kindof motivator. And right now,
at least for the foreseeable,
we see oil selling at a highenough level to justify those
offshore investments, which arein the billions themselves. Right.
To get started. But Iabsolutely agree with you.
And so then I think ifwe're realists about it,

(21:28):
we need to think about mitigation.We need to think about, okay,
with those tax revenues going into thepublic coffers of Brazilian nations or
multicultural corporations,
what is the dividend that needs tobe paid forward to the Amazon to
make sure that the commitment toclimate change that you're getting by

(21:49):
pumping those hydrocarbons outta theground can be mitigated with the peoples
and places?

That's right.

Here's a, a moment of hope, guarded hope:
next year in November of2025, so 18 months from now,
Brazil will be hosting the 30th meetingof the convention of the parties--COP.
So COP Paris. Right. The ParisAgreement, et cetera, Copenhagen.
Brazil and other Amazoniannations are eager,

(22:14):
very eager to appear tobe doing right by the
Amazon,
which they understand to besimultaneously a globally important asset,
but also their particular sovereignground. Right. . So Brazil,
Brazil is not interested in any,
in the UN or the US comingin and taking it over. Right.
But they are interested in a COPor in a huge international meeting

(22:38):
being able to tell a goodstory about what they're doing.
And so if they're gonna moveahead to your point, right.
If they're gonna get those hydrocarbonsout of the continental shelf,
off the falls of the Amazon,when everyone knows that, right,
what can they do when they'reup there on that stage to say,
this is what we're doing to make surethat the Amazon is not gonna be the victim

(22:59):
of these or other kinds ofeconomic development schemes.
And so many of the people thatI work with are pressing hard,
both publicly and quietly in the backhalls of power in Brazilia and other
Amazonian capitals to make surethere can be some kind of, okay,
if you're gonna do this,
or you're gonna continue with agricultureas well because we could talk about
deforestation. Right. We needto have some real commitments,

(23:20):
some measured commitments,
and a plan on how to get there whenit comes to putting the brakes on
deforestation, protecting humanrights, protecting biodiversity,
and really investing in thepotential there that's in the Amazon.

That leads me to my next question, and let me make it a little more specific.

Sure.

So what would you like to see in a response to outcomes like this?
Right? Not just from theBrazilian government,
but from other governmentsin the United Nations.
From the United States forcrying out loud. Right. Right.
So what would you like to seein terms of a, a response?

So I think that the United States and the Brazilian government and
all governments, and for thatmatter, NGOs and consumers,
need to pay a little bit more attentionto what's going on in the Amazon.
And that's where I think gettingsome of that pretty basic,
but often lacking contextout there about the Amazon,
that it is as big as it is thatit is really diverse. I mean, I,

(24:19):
I don't think I mentioned this,
but this is a good time to sortof say there's 300 different
languages spoken in the Amazon.

Really?

Yeah! Yeah. 300 different Amerindian languages, to say nothing of the,
the colonial languages, Spanish andPortuguese and French and and English.
Right. And many, manydifferent kinds of societies.
There are 2 million indigenous people.
There are roughly 6 millionQuilombola or maroon communities.
These are descendants of enslavedpeople who escaped slavery to

(24:50):
the Amazon. A lot of peopledon't appreciate this,
that Brazil was actually thedestination of most enslaved
Africans who were forced tocross in the middle passage.

Is that for sugar primarily, or what was...

For sugar.
For sugar in the northeast and for coffeein the south of the country. Right?
And so enslaved people's freeingfor freedom would go to a
place that was relatively uninhabitedand set up their own communities called
Quilombolas starting inthe 16 hundreds. Right.

Really?

Yeah. They would trade with indigenous people.
Sometimes they would fightwith indigenous peoples.
But there were cultures set up, uh,
Afro-Brazilian cultures set up that arethoroughly Amazonian and are thoroughly
unique with their own cultural,religious, and subsistence practices.
You have riverside communities aswell, who are the descendants of,
I talked about the rubber boom afterthe rubber bust when there was no more

(25:44):
money in the very laboriousproduction of rubber in the Amazon,
the communities that were brought there,
stayed there and basicallyhunted and fished and had a
relationship with the environment thatwas a very sustainable and interesting
one. And so the Amazon, in additionto being an urbanized place,
is also a place of tremendoussocial and cultural diversity.
And it's a place of poverty,it's a place of corruption,

(26:07):
it's a place of international crime.
It's a place where all ofthis is happening. And so, as with any place, I mean,
think again, it's, it'sthe size of the lower 48.
Is there one policy solution to all theproblems in the lower 48 United States?

Of course not.

No.
So there are many different things thatwe need to think about that most of the
time when we're in international audience,
we just think climate orbiodiversity or forest.
Right. We just think,yeah. Stop deforesting.
And we need to. That's absolutely crucial.

No, I get it. I get it. But what I hear you saying is that it's more than that.

Gregory Washington
government to government orcorporate or consumers needs to
appreciate that diversity of the Amazon,
needs to appreciate that Amazonianpeople have a lot to contribute to
the world in terms of beingstewards of the environment,
in terms of the knowledge that theyhave and that they can share with us.

(27:01):
But that, that has to bedone in an equitable way.
It's not the case that we can go savethe Amazon from the United States,
you know, like parachutingin. Their capacity is,
is actually there in the region,
but also the forces that are leading toits destruction are there in the region.
Not to make this too political,
but if you're in the United States andyou're in higher education like you and I

(27:23):
are,
chances are you may be invested in a TIAA
retirement account. Full disclosure,I've done research on this.
I have the receipts, but they're notthe only ones. Okay. So don't get at me,
TIAA, please. They've invested, andsubsequently, once this came to light,
they divested,
but they were investing in ranchproperties on recently deforested land

(27:46):
on the edges of the Amazon. And so, inother words, they were good investments.
These ranches were accruingin value. But I didn't know,
and maybe you didn't know that yourown retirement is vested in, you know,
deforestation.

Yeah. This is, this is the very first time I'm hearing about it. Wow.

People are concerned about meat. And they should be,
because it was the case in the 1980sand 1990s that Brazil was exporting meat
grown on deforested land to theUnited States. That has stopped.
So it's actually not the case that weshould go after McDonald's for selling
Amazonian beef in the UnitedStates. 'cause they don't.
But that beef is going to China,

(28:27):
so the rest of the world is engagedin benefiting from the Amazon's
destruction.
But the rest of the world can alsoshow up in solidarity with the people
who are the true stewards of theland, who are the indigenous.

And at the end, the reality is,
is the people who are there tryingto survive as well. That's right.

Right.

Yep. And it's hard to tell them, Hey,
make a change in yourlifestyle now and suffer now,
starve now so thatsomebody in America or some
other country could have abetter quality of life 10,
20, 30 years from now.

That's right.

Right.
And that's what makes it hard and alittle self-serving when we sit here.
Right?

I'd agree with that. And, and that actually brings to mind something that,
you ask how the US or howoutsiders could engage.
And one thing that I think wecan do is support sustainable
commodity chains. Right.
So verifiable chains ofvalue that begin in the
Amazon, and maybe the productgoes to the United States,

(29:35):
maybe just goes to urbanBrazil or urban Argentina.
But the majority of thatprofit gets reinvested in
the local community.
It does not get captured by amiddleman or by the urban retailer,
but instead it really gets returned,much like shade grown coffee.
You might think of that. Right. It'snot a good example for the Amazon,

(29:55):
but you probably have heard,and maybe you've enjoyed acai,
the wonderful super fruit fromthe Amazon. Right? Yeah. Well,
it is really wonderful and it's,
it's a great way for the Amazon tobe exported all throughout the world.
But 90% of the economicvalue chain of acai rests
outside the Amazon.

(30:16):
Only 10% rests in the actualcultivation of the Amazon.
So that needs to be switched. Right?

Not surprised by that.

Yeah. Yeah.

So talk to me a little bit about Mason's Institute for Sustainable Earth and how
it's involved with what'sgoing on in Amazonia.

So we, at the ISE, the Institute for Sustainable Earth,
are involved in a lot of differentprojects with partners in the region,
but we're also supporting a lot ofreally talented Mason faculty who are
working on a variety of issues.And really what we try to do,
our kind of theory of the case that theISE is to bring together teams that are

(30:55):
interdisciplinary to doresearch that can be of impact,
be of consequence. Right?And so along those lines,
I actually had the privilege ofconvening a high level international
symposium, I guess is thebest way to to think about it,
back in January of 2023,
where we went to the Smithsonian MasonSchool of Conservation up in Front Royal,

(31:19):
spent a couple days really hashingout the priorities for international
interdisciplinary researchthat includes communities that
valorizes and really platformsscientists working in the
region at Brazilian, Peruvian,Bolivian institutions. Right?
So that it's a realpartnership as opposed to, uh,

(31:42):
global northern institution comingin and making the discoveries or
taking the credit. And it was reallyeye-opening. We came out, we published a,
a paper,
basically a white paper laying outwhat some of the big priorities are,
and also where we want some ofthe funding mechanisms to go,
whether it's agency funding forresearch or corporate funding

(32:05):
or foundation funding for conservation,
how that needs to be thought aboutand maybe redistributed in the
context of the tippingpoint, in the context of,
we have 10 years to make asmuch progress as possible with
halting deforestation,
with supporting the human rightand dignity of Amazonian peoples,

(32:27):
with building socio bio economyvalue chains that return
economic investment to the regionwithout cutting down the forest.

So Tom Lovejoy coined that tipping point phrase in 2018. Right?
What progress have we made since then?

Overall, we have done a good job since 2018, getting the word out.
People are tuned into the Amazonmore today than they have been,
I would say since the1988-1989. Forest fires.
Grab the headlines and made the cover ofTime Magazine. Remember Time Magazine?

I do.

Yeah. Right. So that was, that was a big deal, right?

That that was.
So for those of you who don'tknow who Tom Lovejoy is,
he was a world renowned facultymember and Mason professor.
And he was studying, spent agood bit of his life studying,
biodiversity in the Amazon,
and would often take groups ofvery wealthy and very famous

(33:25):
individuals, whether wereactors and actresses.
And I saw what Leonardo DiCaprio and.

That's right. Mel Gibson. Mel.

Gibson, Cameron Diaz, and all of those people, Angelina Jolie,
he would take them intothe Amazon to learn
what you and I aretalking about right now.

That's right. And so Tom's.

And to physically see the diversity and to see the wildlife that was
there.

It makes such a difference to be up close and personal.
And Tom knew that Tom understood thepower of the forest and the power
of making that connection with thewildlife and with the people of the
Amazon. And so.

Now we still doing that now, or has that subsided with Tom's passing?

We are still actively engaged as a Mason community with the forest
fragments project that he was basicallyhis brainchild and which is under the
care of one of our partner organizations,the Amazonian Institute for Research.
We actually have a graduate student thatis funded through an ISE grant doing
research right there where Tom Lovejoytook Angelina Jolie and, and Tom Cruise.

(34:34):
We've had regular check-ins. We haveone of our colleagues, Dr. David Luther,
continues to do research there.
And Tom's legacy really has been puttingthat part of the Amazon on the map.
I think it's inspired a whole lot ofconsciousness raising in the English
speaking world about what'sgoing on in the Amazon.
And so what we're trying to doat the ISE is press that forward,

(34:55):
really press that legacy forward.

I got to spend a lot of time with Tom before he passed,
and just one of the nicest people onearth. I hate it we lost him so soon.

He's a towering figure, still. For some reason,
the phrase science diplomat comes tomind, right, because he was thoroughly,
thoroughly a scientist. Right?

Right. He would routinely, when I would have these meetings at his home,
which was extraordinarily modest, right,it's such a Tom Lovejoy home. Right.
But you would routinely havethe ambassador from Brazil.
Or some dignitary from some foreigncountry, some industrial leader.

Or a World Bank president.

A world bank president. Yeah. You, you'd have,
you routinely have thoseindividuals at his home as well.

Right. And as you say, he was so modest, so humble,
but so passionate and singularlyfocused that the story
about the Amazon got out there.And in addition to being an,
an incredible advocate and abridger of dialogues and a diplomat,
he was also a brilliant scientist.
But also the whole debt for natureidea where impoverished nations

(36:04):
would have some of their debt forgivenin exchange for conserving areas and
keeping them pristine? That was hisidea. . Right? So I mean,
practical applications, right. That havereally left their mark on the world.

And it's better and it was better than writing the debt off, right?

That's right. . That's.

Right. No, outstanding. Outstanding.
So talk to me a little bit aboutyour research. What is it you do,
what are your next steps?

Yeah, great. Thank you for that. I, as I said,
I'm a cultural anthropologist and I'vebeen working with native people and other
traditional riverside communitieswho are really taking the lead in
defending their own lands. Thephrase for this is forest defenders,
although it goes by lots of differentnames depending on the language you're
speaking. But it entailsphysically defending land from

(36:55):
loggers, from miners,
from government agencies that mightwant to do something different
with the land. And doing so not onlythrough the physical demarcation,
but through politicalalliances with non-profits,
with advocacy organizations,with researchers.
My role specifically has beenin helping the sociocultural and

(37:18):
environmental mapping of theseareas so that there can be some
translation of traditional ecologicalknowledge that's associated with a
landscape into a kind of languagethat maybe an ecologist or
a politician might understand as well,right, and so it's really fascinating,
the interplay between the kind ofethic of responsibility to lands and

(37:40):
non-humans and waters thatan indigenous person has,
and how that lines up with how anecologist sees the interaction and
interdependence of speciesand the abiotic world
and, uh, climate, et cetera.
And so I sit at that node where indigenouspeoples are organizing for their
own defense, facing an existential threat,

(38:02):
but helping connect themwith data, with science,
with storytellers, so thatthey can tell those stories.
And I'll give you an example.
The people that I've been working withfor the past 10 years now, the Munduruku,
have been tremendously successful indemarcating lands that were slated
for, to basically to goto the bottom of a lake,

(38:22):
a reservoir that was going to bebehind the world's second largest dam.
But they stood up and organized themselvesand protected their sacred land,
protected the relationshipsthat they have with non-humans.
And were able to shelve that dam andhave become sort of a real inspiration to
other indigenous and traditional societiesthroughout the Amazon standing up to

(38:43):
not just dams and dams, we can have adebate about whether that's green power,
whether it's not.
But what they were really standing up todo was to stand up and say, we're here.
I moved by their courage and thecourage of others like them who
stand up. And we see it withindigenous peoples here in,
in North America as well, who stand upand refuse to say we are in the past,

(39:06):
who refuse that maybesocial expectation that,
whether it's assimilation oryou've given up your culture,
that the expectation that indigenouspeople are, are no longer among us.
And the Munduruku and others in theAmazon are standing up and saying,
we're here and we know howto steward these lands.
We know how to make surethat the biogeochemical

(39:30):
cycles and hydrological cycles continue.They wouldn't say it in those terms,
but the terms that they would usewould be about balance, reciprocity,
relationship with the forcesof life that course around us.
So the ecology and the traditionallearning really go hand in hand.
And then we get them to policythrough making arguments,

(39:51):
through communication strategies,through raising awareness.
There's a big push that I'm part of,
and that the ISE is part of andsupporting to try to preserve 80% of
the Amazon by 2025. Now that'snext year, we're not quite there.
About 50% of the Amazonis officially protected,
whether you're talking about nationalforests or national parks or indigenous

(40:14):
lands, about 20% of it isdeforested and urbanized,
which leaves 30% up for grabs.
And we're not gonna get there next yearthrough a stroke of the pen to
lock up the other 30% of it.
The task here is toraise awareness and to,
even in the 30% that remains, makesure that whatever happens to it,

(40:37):
it's sustainable. That we don'tsee it kind of a zero sum game.
It's either a park or apaved cityscape right.
There can actually besustainable, thriving,
living landscapes with people in themwhose economic models are not based on
extraction and destruction.

How much time do you spend in Brazil?

Well, I've got two small kids, so not as much as I used to. , you know,
I'm sure you know how that goes.

I do. How old?

Uh, 9-year-old twins actually. Boy, girl twins. They keep me busy.
But I'm down there once or twice a yearusually to check up on research and
to engage my research partners, but alsoto create new opportunities for Mason.
I mentioned we've got some great facultyhere that are working. We've got, uh,
David Luther who works on birds.
We've got Louise Shelley in the ScharSchool who works on transnational criminal

(41:26):
networks, which is a big thing in thePeruvian, Colombian, Brazilian Amazon.
So I've been working with her a littlebit on sort of how to have conversations
about rule of law and cross-borderdiplomacy when it comes to
not just drug trafficking, but, get this,
trafficking of species traffickingof huge fish, the Pirarucu,
which is a fish that can grow up to50, 60 kilos that is caught in Brazil,

(41:51):
and then brought into Colombia illegallyto feed an urban frontier in Colombia
and, and Peru. So money laundering,drug trafficking species, et cetera.
Louise has been doing some really greatwork with the IUCN on traceability.
You got Mike Gilmore,
who's working in Peru on anti road
demonstrations and building a bioculturalcorridor with the Maijuna people.

(42:14):
So I don't just go to Brazil,that's where most of my research is,
but I'm also working with Mason faculty,trying to connect them better and,
and really get their research out intothe community and the community present
in what we do here at Mason.So, I used to live in Brazil.
I lived in Brazil for three years.
So I have dear friendsand colleagues and family,
so I wish I could get there more,

(42:36):
but we've got good stuffgoing on here too in Fairfax.

So your award-winning book, Conjuring Property
gives a good sense of the conflictbetween indigenous land rights and the
corporate colonization of the landfor agriculture, for ranching,
for mining, and for deforestationthat goes along with that.

(43:03):
So can you talk a littlebit about the book?
Give us a sense of how thisall plays out in actuality.

It's not unlike,
if you think about sort of the 19thcentury story of the United States,
this whole idea of manifest destiny,
that the western part of thecontinent was for the taking
of the proud, ambitious pioneer, usuallywhite, the white man, right. .

The, the few, the bold.

Exactly right. So Brazil, it's a very different country than the United States.
I don't want to suggestthat it's the, the same,
but it is continentalin scale and in size.
And often it has at different keymoments in its history likened itself to
the United States.
And so there was a kind of manifestdestiny moment in the 1950s

(43:50):
and sixties where theBrazilian government,
which at the time was a dictatorship,
encouraged people to leavethe coast of Brazil and
move into the Amazon,
which in the popular imaginationwas the next frontier.
It was empty. It was a place where youcould go and make something of yourself.
So there was a ton of propaganda.

(44:12):
There was a ton of kind ofsocial engineering to try to move the vast majority
of the Brazilian population, which dueto it being a colonial export colony,
lived along the coast, lived alongthe places that were close to ports.
The average Brazilian thought ofthe Amazon as completely empty.
The average Brazilian thought of it,
it as a place where if Igo and clear the forest,

(44:34):
what I'm doing is improving the forest.
What I'm doing is I'm makingsomething where there is nothing,
this terra nullius kind of idea.
And so the book really traceshow in the 21st century,
that idea continues toplay out with both rich
Brazilians and relatively impoverishedBrazilians coming into the region

(44:57):
and buying into andreproducing a kind of idea and
ideology of the land belonging to themand their being no indigenous people
there,
and how they actuallyuse land speculation and
access to capital and accessto political influence to
undo some of the conservation andindigenous rights protections that were

(45:21):
placed into law in the 1988Brazilian constitution. So Brazil,
as I mentioned,
was in a dictatorship in the 1960scoming out of the dictatorship,
had some of the mostprogressive environmental and human rights legislation and
constitutional provisionsof anywhere in the planet.
But we've seen a backslide since then.

(45:42):
And so the book really doesexplore that backslide and,
and explores some of the social,
political and environmental effects ofthis idea prevalent in Brazil, but again,
I would say it's, it rhymes withwhat we have in the United States,
of there being no indigenous peoplethere and it being the nation's goal
to fill up this empty space with progress,

(46:04):
and then how that motivatedpeople's activities.
It's the story that I tell in that book.

So, uh, you have a friend in Brazil, Alessandra Korap,
I, I believe the name is, who is partof one of Brazil's indigenous nations,
who you have quoted saying that,
"the resistance from the indigenouspopulation to those who would
exploit the Amazon is a fight forall of us." I think I know where this

(46:31):
is going,
but talk to me about a fightfor all of us and what exactly
does fight mean?

Alessandra Korap is an amazing person,
so I absolutely want toanswer your question,
but if I can paint justa quick portrait of her.
She stands all of maybefour foot one. Okay.
But has the fight of athousand people in her.
She is 28 years old, a law student,

(46:58):
basically went to lawschool from her village,
grew up in a village in the middle ofthe recesses of the Amazon rainforest,
has gone to law school to learn how tofight with the master's tools for the
rights of her people. And sowhen she talks about all of us,
what she means, I think, is reallyin three different registers.

First is people like her (47:20):
indigenous,
people who have been sidelined, whohave been written out of existence,
who have been bulldozed.
Second, the entire world's population,
because she understands, as her elders do,
and as her brothers and sisters do,
that the work that theMunduruku are doing and,

(47:43):
and the other indigenous peopleare doing, not just in the Amazon,
but throughout the world.Here's another statistic.
Indigenous people occupyand manage roughly 23-24%
of the world's terrestrial surface,
where 80% of the world'sbiodiversity can be found untold.
Name your metric of environmental service,
whether it's clean water or woodenfiber, or carbon sequestration.

(48:06):
So the work that indigenous people do,
managing actively managing landscapeslike the Amazon actually has a global
benefit for all humans. Sothat's the other, all of us.
The third all of us isnon-human creatures,
which for the Munduruku and manyAmazonian people are literally relatives,
literally brothers,sisters, uncles, cousins.

(48:29):
And so there's that depth of compassionand empathy for the freshwater
dolphins that you mentioned that literallybaked or boiled alive in those warm
waters. In Lago Tefe,
she sees Alessandra Korap sees heradvocacy on behalf of her people,
on behalf of non-human relatives, andon behalf of all of us, even people,

(48:50):
all of us humans, even peoplewho might be her enemy.
And so there's a kind of Gandhi like,uh, stance or a Dr. King's stance, right?
To love even the personwho would cut you down.
That's what Alessandra Korap brings.
It's not just me as a good friend andcolleague of hers, but she received the,
uh, RFK Leadership, humanitarianLeadership Award two or three years ago.

(49:13):
She's been to Switzerland,she's been to Germany,
she's been to New York a couple times,
really being an international sensationwhen it comes to advocating for the
rights of her people andthe rights of nature.

As we close,
talk to me about your level ofoptimism that we can avoid the worst
consequences of the Amazon Basin.

I am cautiously optimistic.
My optimism meter goes up a pointor two or several points when I
think about the indefatigable workof somebody like Alessandra Korap or
Ailton Krenak or other indigenousleaders who, unlike me, I,
I have the luxury of being able to bein the thick of it, but then come home,

(49:52):
right? I can come home to Fairfax, Ican come home to the United States.
For Alessandra and for Ailton,the struggle's never ending,
and they are positive.They are optimistic.
That's amazing.
They know that the world that they'regiving to their children and their
grandchildren is a better one, eventhough it is existentially threatened.

(50:12):
So I think we all haveto take our lead or,
or take their lead and fall in placeto do what we can to be innovative,
to be a science diplomat inthe model of a Tom Lovejoy,
and to really try our best.I do think it's inevitable.
Here's just the caution part. Ido think it's inevitable that 20,
30 years from now,
the Amazon will be different becausethe world will be different, right?

(50:34):
We've baked in a certain level of warming,
we've baked in a certain level ofanthropocenic and anthropogenic changes.
But from the indigenous perspective,
the world already ended in 1500 and hasbeen ending in lots of different kinds
of ways,
and transforming in lots of differentkinds of ways throughout all of that time.
You know, 90% of the indigenouspeople who lived in the Amazon,

(50:56):
there were 10 million therein 1500, 90% of them died,
were gone by the time of 1600, right?So they know a lot about resilience,
they know a lot about adaptation.They know a lot about bouncing back.
And so I think we can take someinspiration from their lead in that
respect, knowing though thatthe Amazon will be changing,
we can nevertheless try to mitigate thosechanges and adapt to the new situation

(51:21):
as it unfolds.

Well, let's hope we can stay on the right track.

Here. Here.

Jeremy Campbell,associate director for strategic engagement at George Mason University's Institute for Sustainable Earth.
Thank you for a great conversation.

Thank you, Dr. Washington. It was a pleasure.

I am Mason President Gregory Washington saying, until next time,
stay safe, Mason Nation.

Outro (51:49):
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu.
For more of Gregory Washington'sconversations with the thought leaders,
experts, and educators who take on thegrand challenges facing our students,
graduates, and higher education.That's podcast.gmu.edu.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}What will become of the Amazon?

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

All Episodes

What will become of the Amazon?

Stuff You Should Know