This report, prepared by the Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia at the initiative of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty and supported by the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, is based on the concept of an Amazonia that exists above and beyond the world of fantasy and myth: an Amazonia of flesh and blood, of human toil, of human history, of human faces and hopes, and future human beings. It is an analysis based not only on the experiences and technologies of today’’s world but also, and with greater emphasis, on the wisdom accumulated for centuries by Amazonia itself: standing Amazonia.
The Amazon region has the largest area of tropical forest on the planet, and concern for its environmental deterioration extends well beyond the borders of the eight countries that form a part of it. With support from the IDB and UNDP, the Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia prepared this report that provides data on the region's natural resources, population, health and infrastructure.
The oldest pottery of the western hemisphere, dating from 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, was found in the Amazon Basin near Santarem, Brazil. In just one hectare of this vast world laboratory can be found more different tree species than in all of North America -- and on just one of these trees can be found as many species of ants as exist in all England. This majestic basin covers only seven percent of the earth s surface but comprises more than half of the world s biological heritage. Its rivers hold one fifth of all the fresh water of the planet, and by itself the Amazon River is the largest tributary to all the world s oceans. More than twenty million people live in this enclave of age-old myths and fantastic illusions which, over time, have become intermixed with reality. This, in the world s imagination, is the earth s ultimate paradise.
It is, however, a paradise on the verge of extinction. Its slow and silent agony poses one of the most dramatic threats to human survival. The common belief has been that the world would end in a Biblical cataclysm. But reality is more disturbing than that: the world began to die many years ago, at the hand and disgrace of environmental degradation.
The facts are harrowing. An estimated six living species disappear every hour as a result of the massive destruction of the tropical forests. Originally, many of the native tribes that inhabited the Amazon jungles, aware of the ruin that they could cause, moved their settlements every five years in an effort to reduce to a minimum the damage to their environment. The ancestral wisdom of these tribes is being forgotten and extinguished, however, by the predatory actions of interests foreign to the region, which year after year destroy five million hectares. Thus have many of the native dynamics of preservation and survival been defeated. Of the six to nine million Indians who once inhabited the Amazon, only some dispersed and scanty groups remain. In this century alone, ninety entire tribes have ceased to exist.
However, an analysis of the deterioration in the Amazon cannot ignore the false ethic of the industrialized countries, which limits the world s ecological disaster to the deterioration of the tropical forests. In reality, the most serious causes originate in these same countries: the contamination of the air and the waters with all types of waste, global warming, the ozone layer depletion, the threat of a nuclear holocaust. And the most unpunished of all: social injustice and chronic poverty, which inflict destruction and ruin the length and breadth of the continent and, in the final analysis, affect all marginal areas of the industrialized countries themselves. In this regard, the salvation of Amazonia must become not merely a heroic feat of its natural trustees but a crusade that all humankind no longer can defer.
This report, prepared by the Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia at the initiative of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty and supported by the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, is based on the concept of an Amazonia that exists above and beyond the world of fantasy and myth: an Amazonia of flesh and blood, of human toil, of human history, of human faces and hopes, and future human beings. It is an analysis based not only on the experiences and technologies of today s world but also, and with greater emphasis, on the wisdom accumulated for centuries by Amazonia itself: standing Amazonia.
Our gratitude must first go to the eight Amazon countries for the perseverance and courage with which they have kept alive until today the providential nature and cultural wealth of the region. Unfortunately, these prodigious and solitary efforts are being overcome by reality.
One of the great lessons of history is that the achievement of liberty must be immediately converted into a common responsibility and a just demand for cooperation. Generally, political decisions have a deeper impact on international conscience than ecological emergencies and the interests of state stimulate thought more rapidly than the penury of nature. In the case of Amazonia, achieving balance between these joint forces is not only possible but also unpostponable, and this is the spirit in which the present report has been inspired.
Given the magnitude of the problem, the challenge, therefore, is to change the global outlook: an international vision grand enough to fulfill the basic objectives of true development and to foster, at the same time, the ongoing welfare of Amazonia without affecting its ecological balance or the sovereignty of its people.
The present report understands and explains this. Its purpose, therefore, is not a simple request for aid to save the region, but rather the urgent announcement of an inescapable commitment which the international community owes to itself as it faces its own destiny.
Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia, with the special collaboration of Gabriel Garcíía Máárquez
