Indigenous Peoples + Rights = Living Forests
By Wanda Bautista, January 19, 2015
Individuals from dozens of nations lay on the sand and turned their bodies into a work of art that would spell out the message they had come to Lima to communicate to the world: “Pueblos + Derechos = Bosques Vivos”, or (Indigenous) Peoples + Rights = Living Forests.
This past December, Peru became the first Amazonian forest nation to host the UN climate change conference, commonly known as the COP. The event attracted the usual committed global advocates, researchers and policy makers who flock to the COP every year. In Lima, however, they were joined by a new set of actors—thousands of indigenous peoples from Africa, Asia and Latin America—the ancestral guardians of the world’s carbon-sequestering forests, people whose voices had been all but silent during past debates over how best to slow the pace of climate change.
Everywhere, the forests of indigenous and traditional peoples are under siege from a great, global hunger for new sources of food, fuel, petroleum, hydropower and mineral wealth. Every minute, huge swaths of forestland disappear—enough to cover 50 soccer fields.
Yet increasingly, forestry researchers are identfiying a common theme: Where indigenous land rights are strong, the forests are standing.
Strengthened by new evidence of their role as forest guardians, indigenous leaders attended the COP to claim a central role in combating climate change, and to demand the land rights they need in order to continue to protect their forests, where billions of tons of carbon are stored. They spoke at press conferences, made presentations, and met with policy makers.
But their most dramatic gesture they made in silence, when hundreds of native peoples and their supporters gathered on a beach in Lima to say what these fierce defenders of the forests say they need to do their job. Brought together by Amazon Watch and by leaders of AIDESEP, Peru’s national Amazonian indigenous group, individuals from dozens of nations lay on the sand and turned their bodies into a work of art that would spell out the message they had come to Lima to communicate to the world:
“Pueblos + Derechos = Bosques Vivos”, or (Indigenous) Peoples + Rights = Living Forests.
Designed by aerial artist John Quigley, the image depicts the Pachamama, or mother earth—a goddess respected by indigenous peoples of the Andes. It can be seen only from above.
