A cabruca in Terra Vista during the chocolate harvest.Teia dos Povos A crowd of protesters - largely Indigenous Amazonian people - marched into a restricted area of the 30 th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) this month in Belém, Brazil, declaring that their forests are not for sale. "We want our lands free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers," one Tupinamba community leader proclaimed. Global carbon emissions continue to rise, and deforestation is moving full speed ahead across Brazil.
Protesters blockaded the main entrance to the Cop30 climate conference for several hours early on Friday morning, demanding to speak to Brazil's president about the plight of the country's Indigenous peoples. About 50 people from the Munduruku people in the Amazon basin blocked the entrance with some assistance from international green groups, watched by a huge phalanx of riot police, soldiers and military vehicles.
Spain, which initially dismissed any possibility of issuing such an apology in strong terms, acknowledged last Friday through Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares that there was pain and injustice inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. While the statement did not come directly from the Crown, as the Mexican government had hoped, it nonetheless represents a gesture of enormous symbolic and political significance, aimed at repairing the strained diplomatic relationship which at times verged on hostility.
I am a young Xipai Indigenous man, and have lived my entire life in a village in the middle of the largest tropical forest on the planet, the Amazon. As an Indigenous man, I know very well the pain of the forest, because its body is an extension of ours. When I speak of the body of the forest, it is neither this nor that; it is everything.
Brazil's Petrobras has been given permission to drill for oil near the mouth of the Amazon River, casting a shadow over the country's green ambitions as it prepares to host UN climate talks. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the president, has come under fire from conservationists who argue his oil expansion plans clash with his image as a global leader on climate change. Brazil will host Cop30 climate talks in the Amazon city of Belem next month.
After two decades of political debate, a government-led commission voted on Friday against creating the Yavari Mirim Indigenous reserve, a 1.2m-hectare (2.9m-acre) expanse of pristine rainforest along the border with Brazil. The tally was decisive: eight against, five in favour, with three members absent from the crucial vote. The rejection comes despite evidence of human presence deep in the forest.
On August 9 and 10, a massive storm over southeastern Wisconsin dropped up to 13 inches of rain in just a few hours, sending floodwater gushing downriver and destroying more than 1,800 homes in Milwaukee. The disaster was the second-worst two-day rain event in the United States since 1871. "For years, scientists have warned about what can happen when climate change supercharges extreme weather events. This is exactly what they meant," the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported, describing the disaster as a 1,000-year flood.
"We were displaced from our homes, back in 1957, my mom, dad, I, sister and my brother lived up in Deer Flats for two weeks for my dad to find a house, and you think the city would have been more considerate in finding us a place," Rosales said.
Rudy Rosales, a community leader, described his family's hardship during displacement, indicating the city’s lack of support in finding replacement housing after losing their home on Dutra Street.
The Australians are pretty wound up about the idea of you seeing the Aborigines at all, Sawers wrote in a note to Blair. Their high commissioner rang me to press you not to see them: they were troublemakers.
