The Indigenous Fight for the Amazon
What Indigenous peoples are doing in Brazil, they’re doing it for us too.
Listen to what Indigenous peoples are telling us. Sometimes the land needs fire. For the past few decades, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia have been showing us that the only way to effectively and consistently control out-of-control wildfires is by lighting low-intensity and strategically small fires, which will act as “controlled burns” (also known as “prescribed burns”) and prepare the land for the bushfire season.
It’s an incredibly old and effective practice that non-Indigenous Australia has only recently (and too late, perhaps) learned to accept and embrace. The results are, after all, there for all to see.
However, unlike Australia, the Amazonian rainforest region is not prone to spontaneous wildfires. In the thick Amazonian rainforests, spontaneous fires are rare, almost non-existent. They are typically a people-induced phenomenon strictly connected to (illegal) deforestation. And here we must listen to the Indigenous…
