Amazon Kid Style

Manaus - While visiting home in the United States (Eastham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts) last month I was invited to give a talk about the Amazon to a group of 60 11-year olds at a local school. The following is a condensation of that presentation.

The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world. It is a huge forest found in a part of the world called the tropics. The tropics ring the earth’s belly along a line called the equator. Other tropical forests are found in Africa and Indonesia for example. But South America’s tropical rainforest is the largest in the world. And through it runs the world’s largest river, the Amazon River. It takes its name from an ancient Greek legend about a group of women warriors called the Amazons. Early South American explorers brought these legends with them from home in Europe and it was the thought of beautiful women and cities of gold that kept them going during their explorations in the mysterious forests of South America.

Parts of the Amazon rainforest are found in nine South American countries, though the largest portion of the Amazon is found in Brazil. The Amazon not only contains the largest forest in the world, it is also home to some of the largest rivers in the world like the Negro and the Madeira Rivers. With all of these rivers it should be no surprise that the Amazon produces more fresh water than any other region in the world; three-quarters of the world’s freshwater comes from the Amazon. It is also home to more species of plants and animals than any other region in the world. And the Amazon is also home to more traditional Indian groups than any other region of the world. For a lot of people the Amazon means BIG. And it is big in every way.

The Amazon is certainly important because of all the water, animals and plants it contains. But it is also important because it produces much of the world’s oxygen and consumes much of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. We ourselves breathe out carbon dioxide and we breathe in oxygen. The Amazon forest breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen. The Amazon also consumes the carbon dioxide our factories produce so it helps us get rid of air pollution. But the forest cannot consume all the pollution we produce and this is something we have to be careful about. If we destroy the rainforest we are really destroying ourselves. Without the forest there will be no oxygen. Also without the forest we will start to have higher winds, higher sea levels and higher temperatures around the world. We will begin to see more flooding, more tornados, more droughts etc.

Millions of people have seen the film, The Day After Tomorrow, and we all saw on the news the awful destruction caused by the tsunami, or tidal wave, in the Indian Ocean at the beginning of the year. The film was fiction, something you thought could never happen…until you saw that tsunami which was the real thing. Maybe rainforest destruction doesn’t directly cause these disasters but the combination of air pollution and forest destruction creates conditions that make these disasters worse, in property loss and human life loss.

The Amazon contains many characters. And like a good book or film there are lots of good guys and bad guys. The Amazon is not just one big forest full of Indians and guys chopping down trees. There are many other people working and living in the rainforest. And actually it is almost next to impossible to visit with traditional Indians in the Amazon. That is because most Indian groups live far away from the cities and towns of the region and they live in closed and protected reservations. The Amazon is also a place rich in mineral wealth and there are many mining companies digging for gold and diamonds and other stones. There are many lumber companies working there too. There is oil in the Amazon, and even fresh water is a product that is collected and exported from the Amazon. Many of the bigger oil and lumber companies are owned by foreigners or Brazilians who have come to the Amazon from bigger cities in the south of Brazil. And they are often more interested in making money than helping the local people of the region or in protecting the environment.

People who live in the Amazon are descendents of Indians and settlers and these mixed blood people are called caboclos. Most of them are poor, simple people who work as farmers and fishermen along the rivers of the Amazon. There are also many who work collecting things from the forest like rubber and Brazil nuts and medicines from the many amazing trees found there. These people may be poor but they know more about the plants and animals of the forest than anyone. Many of them learned directly from the Indians. Many secrets of the Amazon, especially knowledge about the medicines we can take from the forest, are known only by these people. And by destroying the rainforest we are destroying these people too.

Because the Amazon is a complex place full of so many different resources and so many kinds of people it is very difficult to protect and to develop the region. Everybody has a different view of the Amazon. And very often there are conflicts between people over how best to develop the Amazon. The Brazilians have their own vision of how they wish to develop the Amazon and this is not always the same as how more developed countries like the United States would like to see the region developed. This is an important lesson for people to understand. No single development plan is perfect and it is only through talking together that a plan for everyone will be created. Our duty as world citizens is to support this many-sided discussion. We should try to see how the gold prospector can live side by side with the Indian and how the rubber-tapper can live side by side with the woodcutter. If we are to save the rainforest and still benefit from its resources in a responsible way we need to study all the sides of the argument and try to bring all the people involved together.

One of the newest characters in the rainforest story is the ecotourist. Ecotourism is a new form of tourism that focuses very strongly on ecology and the environment. But it also focuses on the economy. In other words ecotourism is a form of tourism that helps the economy of the local people of the place that you visit. Back home on Cape Cod we have had a form of ecotourism for a long time. People have been coming to cape and islands there for more than a hundred years to enjoy the environment and ecology of this beautiful part of the world. Staying at hotels and eating at local restaurants are forms of ecotourism. More recently renting kayaks and bikes and going whale watching and bird watching are more developed forms of ecotourism.

For a lot of people ecotourism today is associated with exotic and often tropical places. Ecotourism forms a bridge between, let’s say, affluent tourists from developed parts of the world such as North America and Europe and usually poor communities in undeveloped regions of the world such as Africa, Asia and South America. Tourists will pay a lot of money to visit exotic places and visit with exotic people. But it wasn’t until the environmental movement began perhaps 30 years ago that tourists started to begin caring about the people and places they wished to visit. Before that travellers treated the local people like slaves and liked to shoot the beautiful animals they saw. Ecotourists want to see these people respected and these places protected now and for generations to come. And the money they spend on their trips helps to guarantee that this is what happens.

Ecotourism operators are professional people who have studied biology, environmental sciences, anthropology, ecology and other subjects in order to best represent and protect the traditional peoples and endangered environments we still have around the world. Wherever you travel to today you have a choice. You can choose a traditional vacation where you just stay at a hotel and visit the beach and ride the bike trails or you can choose an ecotour, which usually means having a little more contact with the local people and learning a little more about the environment of the place you are visiting. The idea is that by knowing more about a place you will care more about that place and you will do more to protect that place for future generations to come.

“Think globally. Act locally.” We’ve all heard this saying before. What it means is that while you dream about the big world out there and all the great adventures you’re going to have there when you grow up you should never lose touch with where you are from and what is around you that makes home such a special place to be. When I wasn’t travelling with my backpack in the Andes mountains or visiting with Amazon Indians in the Brazilian rainforest or scuba-diving in the Galapagos Islands I was at home on Cape Cod getting involved in local politics and writing letters to the editors of the local papers about local and national environmental and political issues. But I eventually decided to take my actions one step further, and you can too.

I went to a place in the world I had dreamed about as a kid and I had read about as a young boy. But I only really started learning about the Amazon at college and after joining the environmental group Greenpeace. After college I started travelling around South America. I saw for myself what an amazing place the southern continent was, what a place it was full of new sights and sounds, but also full of problems. The rainforest was being cut down. There were too many poor people. Governments like our own were meddling in the internal affairs of these countries and trying to tell South Americans how to run their countries. When I met my wife she was a 15 year old girl who guided foreign tourists from all over the world through the rainforest and taught them all about medicine plants and poisonous snakes and jaguars and Indians. I was just a surfer from Cape Cod but I thought this was something very, very different.

This place we call the Amazon really is something amazing. And I decided that I would stay there to learn more about it and I would start a tour company to help people down there- beginning with my wife’s family - and I would do my little bit to help save the rainforest if I could by showing tourists from all over the world what a wonderful place it is and why it is worth saving. The Amazon is an amazing place full of amazing plants and animals and people. But if people don’t know about it, if you don’t learn about it at school and tell your parents about it and hopefully one day visit it…if you don’t know about it you just won’t see how important it is to our world and it will be destroyed by people who don’t care about it and that’ll be the end of it.

Think local; do what you can to learn about the environment around you and what you can do to help keep it clean and protected. And think globally; read the newspaper, and watch the world news, and read every National Geographic Magazine you can find. Learn about the world around you…the people, the places, the problems and of course the wonders of it all. If you care about where you live you will probably care more than most people about other places in the world too. And it is only by caring that you will be able to save the world and make it a better place for all of us.

The past is the past. What’s done is done. There’s no point in complaining about problems already past. I am the present. I have chosen my home and my battleground and I am doing what I can to make the world a better place. You guys are the future. You will have even more knowledge and opportunity than I had. The world is awaiting you. It is a big and sometimes scary place. But it is also a place full of fantastic people and great places to visit. I invite you to get out there and enjoy it and do all you can to preserve it and make it better.

Save the Amazon rainforest. There is only one.

Visit the website of Mark’s company Swallows and Amazon Tours.