Earth Equity News

An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up. By Elisabeth Rosenthal, NYTimes, July 25, 2009. "Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá [in the Amazon] who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas... Tacuma, the Kamayurá's wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the tribe... Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations -- a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals. But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are 'literally being washed away,' said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet."