The Brazilian government yesterday announced a 10-year plan to slash rainforest destruction by 70% days after new figures showed Amazon deforestation was again on the rise.
Officials said the targets, which are part of Brazil's Climate Change Plan, were the first time the Brazilian government had set specific goals for deforestation reduction.
The plan outlines a 40% reduction of deforestation until 2009, a 30% reduction between 2010 and 2013 and a further 30% cut between 2014 and 2017.
"The target is that in 2017 deforestation will be [reduced to] 5,000 sq km," environment minister Carlos Minc told reporters in Brazil's capital, Brasilia.
He said the slowdown in deforestation would mean a 72% reduction in climate changing carbon emissions. That, he added, "is an even more daring target than in England which aims for an 80% reduction but [not] until 2050."
The blueprint for deforestation reduction makes it clear that hitting the targets depends on Brazil's ability to raise funds for its fight against the loggers.
In August 2008 Brazil's government created the Amazon Fund, a mechanism for foreign governments to help pay for the protection of the world's largest tropical rainforest and combat global warming. In September Norway's government became the first to contribute to the fund, pledging $1bn (£668m).
Mr Minc said he hoped for donations of $1bn a year, in order to bankroll Brazil's campaign against deforestation.
The plans follow the release of government figures on Friday showing that deforestation rose 3.8% in the year leading up to July 2008 – the first annual increase in three years.
Satellite images captured by Brazil's Space Research Institute, Inpe, showed that 11,968 sq km of forest were cleared until July this year, up from 11,532 sq km the previous year.
Mr Minc said the rise would have been even greater had it not been for an anti-deforestation drive launched at the start of 2008. Deforestation levels had fallen in the 36 regions that suffered most deforestation in 2007 as a result of the crackdown, he said.
Known as the Arc of Fire, the crackdown has triggered violent uprisings in several Amazon towns where the economies, dependent on logging, have been badly hit.
Speaking to the Guardian earlier this year Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil's minister for strategic affairs and the coordinator of its Amazon development plan, said his country needed to embark on a "revolutionary" project for the Amazon.
"We cannot preserve the Amazon without a project of development otherwise we are just playing with words," he said.
Without offering economic alternatives to logging it would be impossible to effectively combat illegal logging, he said.
"I have heard from a few foreigners the idea that the Brazilian state should actually transport the 27 million Brazilians out of the Amazon but our country is not governed by Stalin and we will not do that," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/02/forests-brazil
rainforestpower Headline Animator
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Antioxidants of the Acai Berry
Of all the benefits of the Acai berry, the antioxidant properties are given the most attention. Perhaps that's because most of the health benefits offered by the Acai berry are related to its antioxidant properties. Being antioxidant means that the berry is capable of getting rid of harmful toxins in the body.
Toxins may cause injuries or diseases in the human body. They may come from our daily diet, or from the environment. Everyday, we are exposed to harmful toxins in the environment. Such toxins come from pesticides, mold, heavy metals, chloroform (found in washing agents) and other substances.
In addition, some of the food that we consume may contain their own toxins. For instance, we may be unaware of pesticide on vegetables, or harmful toxins from certain type of fish. Sometimes, symptoms such as dizziness and headaches result from consuming such harmful toxins.
Of course, if the condition is severe, always seek professional medical help immediately. However, sometimes toxins may just be building up in the body, with no visible symptoms showing. This may lead to lethargy and listlessness. The affected individual may also feel sleepy. This is because blood circulation is impeded by the harmful toxins. And when blood circulation slows down, the brain receives less oxygen. Hence, this leads to drowsiness and a persistent lack of energy.
For sure, this is harmful to the individual because without energy, all aspects of the individual's life is affected. For example, the individual may find it hard to complete his work, which in turn affects his professional life. Or he may find himself unwilling to go out to socialize, which in turn affects his social life.
Fortunately, by eating the right food, such problems can be totally avoided. Acai berries antioxidant capabilities have been widely promoted by the media. Many health experts have used the fruit to help improve the general health of those they are trying to help. Some even consumer Acai berries on a regular basis to help them lose weight.
Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight know that they must exercise regularly to improve their metabolism rate. A higher metabolism rate means that the body is able to burn off excess fats automatically, which leads to loss of weight. Therefore, exercise is a must for any sustainable weight loss program. However, if an individual has a lot of harmful toxins in the body, which leads to energy loss, he may find himself unwilling to stick to a strict exercise program.
Even when taken without exercise, the Acai berry has the natural ability to help regulate cholesterol levels in the body. This helps with weight control.
When consumed regularly, the Acai berry helps to slow down the aging process, and may even help prevent cancer. No wonder thousands of health experts are heavily endorsing the Acai berry!
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/82764
Toxins may cause injuries or diseases in the human body. They may come from our daily diet, or from the environment. Everyday, we are exposed to harmful toxins in the environment. Such toxins come from pesticides, mold, heavy metals, chloroform (found in washing agents) and other substances.
In addition, some of the food that we consume may contain their own toxins. For instance, we may be unaware of pesticide on vegetables, or harmful toxins from certain type of fish. Sometimes, symptoms such as dizziness and headaches result from consuming such harmful toxins.
Of course, if the condition is severe, always seek professional medical help immediately. However, sometimes toxins may just be building up in the body, with no visible symptoms showing. This may lead to lethargy and listlessness. The affected individual may also feel sleepy. This is because blood circulation is impeded by the harmful toxins. And when blood circulation slows down, the brain receives less oxygen. Hence, this leads to drowsiness and a persistent lack of energy.
For sure, this is harmful to the individual because without energy, all aspects of the individual's life is affected. For example, the individual may find it hard to complete his work, which in turn affects his professional life. Or he may find himself unwilling to go out to socialize, which in turn affects his social life.
Fortunately, by eating the right food, such problems can be totally avoided. Acai berries antioxidant capabilities have been widely promoted by the media. Many health experts have used the fruit to help improve the general health of those they are trying to help. Some even consumer Acai berries on a regular basis to help them lose weight.
Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight know that they must exercise regularly to improve their metabolism rate. A higher metabolism rate means that the body is able to burn off excess fats automatically, which leads to loss of weight. Therefore, exercise is a must for any sustainable weight loss program. However, if an individual has a lot of harmful toxins in the body, which leads to energy loss, he may find himself unwilling to stick to a strict exercise program.
Even when taken without exercise, the Acai berry has the natural ability to help regulate cholesterol levels in the body. This helps with weight control.
When consumed regularly, the Acai berry helps to slow down the aging process, and may even help prevent cancer. No wonder thousands of health experts are heavily endorsing the Acai berry!
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/82764
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia
The Biggest Floating Christmas Tree in the World,
is Inaugurated in Rio De Janeiro
Event brought together thousands of people at the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Nov 29, 2008 The inaugural event of the 13th consecutive edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, the biggest floating Christmas tree in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records, brought together thousands of people this Saturday (November 29, 2008). Considered the third greatest event in the city of Rio de Janeiro, after Carnaval and New Year's Eve, the Tree brings something new for 2008 in the form of "A melody of peace for the Brazilian family." The spectacle of lights and colors has taken on a musical touch. An electronic carillon, imported from Italy and similar to the one used in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, has been installed within its structure to reproduce Christmas carols with bells played manually by professional bell-ringers. There are also fireworks scheduled for every Saturday.
The programming of the inaugural event, with a live television broadcast in real time by the Tree's hot site included a concert given by popular Brazilian artists such as singers Elba Ramalho, Joao Bosco, Roberta Sa and guitarist Turibio Santos, as well as the Choir of the Bradesco Foundation, made up of 112 young students. The American soprano Carol McDavit, who has been settled in Brazil for the past 20 years, also made an appearance.
The project has become the largest event sponsored by a single private company in Brazil. This is the 13th edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, which for the first time will have thirteen flashing sequences of different images to dazzle the public. At the top of the 85- meter Tree, the star is now accompanied by two angels representing peace. The 52 kilometers of lighted strands are to evoke the Christmas theme, and 1,600 flashing lights are to evoke twinkling stars.
Certification in the Guinness Book
The second certification in the Guinness Book of Records, as the "largest floating Christmas tree in the world," was obtained because of the height of 85 meters in 2007 and recorded in the recently published 2009 edition. With its launching in 1996, the Tree was 48 meters high and up until the 2006 edition, 82 meters. The first certification in the Guinness book was awarded in 1999, when this symbol of Christmas measured 76 meters.
Technology and the Environment
For the past three years, the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia has had generators fueled by biodiesel to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. For the third year, to ensure rationality in the consumption of fuel, the generators will be controlled by a computerized system.
Neutralization of Carbon
Emissions of carbon gas into the atmosphere produced by the assembly, display and dismantling of the Tree will be neutralized by the planting of trees in regions of the Mata Atlantica rainforest.
WWW.ARVORENATALBRADESCOSEGUROS.COM.BR/FOTOS
is Inaugurated in Rio De Janeiro
Event brought together thousands of people at the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Nov 29, 2008 The inaugural event of the 13th consecutive edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, the biggest floating Christmas tree in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records, brought together thousands of people this Saturday (November 29, 2008). Considered the third greatest event in the city of Rio de Janeiro, after Carnaval and New Year's Eve, the Tree brings something new for 2008 in the form of "A melody of peace for the Brazilian family." The spectacle of lights and colors has taken on a musical touch. An electronic carillon, imported from Italy and similar to the one used in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, has been installed within its structure to reproduce Christmas carols with bells played manually by professional bell-ringers. There are also fireworks scheduled for every Saturday.
The programming of the inaugural event, with a live television broadcast in real time by the Tree's hot site included a concert given by popular Brazilian artists such as singers Elba Ramalho, Joao Bosco, Roberta Sa and guitarist Turibio Santos, as well as the Choir of the Bradesco Foundation, made up of 112 young students. The American soprano Carol McDavit, who has been settled in Brazil for the past 20 years, also made an appearance.
The project has become the largest event sponsored by a single private company in Brazil. This is the 13th edition of the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia, which for the first time will have thirteen flashing sequences of different images to dazzle the public. At the top of the 85- meter Tree, the star is now accompanied by two angels representing peace. The 52 kilometers of lighted strands are to evoke the Christmas theme, and 1,600 flashing lights are to evoke twinkling stars.
Certification in the Guinness Book
The second certification in the Guinness Book of Records, as the "largest floating Christmas tree in the world," was obtained because of the height of 85 meters in 2007 and recorded in the recently published 2009 edition. With its launching in 1996, the Tree was 48 meters high and up until the 2006 edition, 82 meters. The first certification in the Guinness book was awarded in 1999, when this symbol of Christmas measured 76 meters.
Technology and the Environment
For the past three years, the Christmas Tree of Bradesco Seguros e Previdencia has had generators fueled by biodiesel to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. For the third year, to ensure rationality in the consumption of fuel, the generators will be controlled by a computerized system.
Neutralization of Carbon
Emissions of carbon gas into the atmosphere produced by the assembly, display and dismantling of the Tree will be neutralized by the planting of trees in regions of the Mata Atlantica rainforest.
WWW.ARVORENATALBRADESCOSEGUROS.COM.BR/FOTOS
Friday, November 28, 2008
Amazon deforestation rises slightly to 4,600 square miles in 2008
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased slightly for the August 2007-July 2008 period, reports the country's National Institute of Space Research (INPE). The rise is the first since 2004 when 27,379 square kilometers were destroyed, but is lower than forecast. The 2008 figure is the second-lowest annual loss since 1991.
INPE estimates that 11,968 square kilometers (4,600 square miles) of rainforest were cleared during the recent period, a 3.8 percent increase from the 11,532 sq km lost during the prior year. The figures are lower than forecasts put forth earlier this year, possibly due to the recent collapse in commodity prices. Clearing in the Amazon is increasingly linked to beef and grain markets — as prices rise, farmers and ranchers convert more rainforest land.
The Brazilian government has also stepped up efforts to rein in illegal forest-clearing, including enacting new environmental laws, establishing protected areas, and launching a series of highly-publicized raids on illicit logging and farming operations. In August President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a $21 billion donation-based fund to finance conservation and sustainable development projects in the region. Norway has already committed a billion dollars to the initiative.
While low commodity prices and increased government action may temper forest clearing in the Brazilian Amazon, Earth's largest rainforest is far from safe. Regional climate trends indicate that large swathes of the Amazon are increasingly susceptible to drought and fire. Coupled with continued deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation, some researchers say the Amazon is approaching a critical tipping point which could see more than half of the forest damaged or destroyed within a generation.
The Brazilian Amazon accounts for roughly sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest. The bulk of Amazon deforestation occurs in Brazil, although clearing is increasing in Peru due to infrastructure expansion and logging.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1128-amazon.html
INPE estimates that 11,968 square kilometers (4,600 square miles) of rainforest were cleared during the recent period, a 3.8 percent increase from the 11,532 sq km lost during the prior year. The figures are lower than forecasts put forth earlier this year, possibly due to the recent collapse in commodity prices. Clearing in the Amazon is increasingly linked to beef and grain markets — as prices rise, farmers and ranchers convert more rainforest land.
The Brazilian government has also stepped up efforts to rein in illegal forest-clearing, including enacting new environmental laws, establishing protected areas, and launching a series of highly-publicized raids on illicit logging and farming operations. In August President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a $21 billion donation-based fund to finance conservation and sustainable development projects in the region. Norway has already committed a billion dollars to the initiative.
While low commodity prices and increased government action may temper forest clearing in the Brazilian Amazon, Earth's largest rainforest is far from safe. Regional climate trends indicate that large swathes of the Amazon are increasingly susceptible to drought and fire. Coupled with continued deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation, some researchers say the Amazon is approaching a critical tipping point which could see more than half of the forest damaged or destroyed within a generation.
The Brazilian Amazon accounts for roughly sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest. The bulk of Amazon deforestation occurs in Brazil, although clearing is increasing in Peru due to infrastructure expansion and logging.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1128-amazon.html
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
New Brazil plan to save Amazon tribes
Radar to be used to locate groups of isolated Indians
Rio de Janeiro: The Brazilian government has said it would employ heat-seeking radar in a last-ditch attempt to save the country’s remaining groups of isolated Indians. The body-heat sensors will be mounted on a Brazilian air force jet normally used to monitor rainforest destruction and will be used to locate an estimated 39 groups of isolated indigenous people, hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.
The authorities hope the system will help to protect them from loggers, goldminers and ranchers.
Antenor Vaz, the coordinator for isolated tribes at Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, said the system would allow authorities to locate tribes without disturbing their way of life.
“We have been using planes more and more, not just to monitor [isolated tribes] but also to find new references,” he said. But even the use of small planes brought disruption to the tribes because they flew at low altitude, he said.
Brazil’s isolated Indians hit the headlines in May when aerial photographs of a remote tribe near the border with Peru were released. Several tribesmen could be seen firing arrows at the plane.
Mr. Vaz said the sensors mounted on planes flying at high altitude meant the tribes would not even know they were being monitored.
By locating Brazil’s last isolated tribes, campaigners hope the process of land demarcation can be speeded up, helping to guarantee the protection of their ancestral lands.
Campaigners say the Amazon may be home to the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the world. The authorities have long grappled with the dilemma of how best to treat indigenous groups who have had little or no contact with outsiders.
For hundreds of years colonisers and explorers have trekked through the jungle, coming into contact with these tribes, often with catastrophic results. There are thought to have been around six million indigenous people when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500. Today there are fewer than 3,00,000. Violence and western diseases such as flu have devastated many indigenous communities.
In the 1980s thousands of gold prospectors poured into areas inhabited by Yanomami Indians, in northern Brazil, triggering genocide, human rights groups claimed. Some sources say up to 20% of the Yanomami people died in seven years. Since the late 1980s government policy towards uncontacted tribes has shifted to a “stay away” approach. A handful of sertanistas, or explorers, work in the rainforest trying to locate tribes without coming into direct contact with them.
No life in danger
Fiona Watson, Brazil campaigner for Survival International, an indigenous rights group, said there could be as many as 20 uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon rainforest. “The idea of the remote sensors means you are not going to put any lives in danger [by making contact],” she said.
She said contact between isolated tribes and government employees had proved disastrous in the past, with 50% of some tribes being wiped out by disease in the first year after contact.
Mr. Vaz said the radar’s first mission would be to confirm the existence of isolated tribes in the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, a region that loggers, ranchers and soy farmers have turned into ground zero for rainforest destruction.
“The priority will be Mato Grosso where the process of devastation is happening the quickest,” he said.
He said members of the military and representatives of the National Indian Foundation would meet soon to plan “when and where” the flyovers would take place.
‘Emergency’
In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, the president of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, Marcio Meira, admitted that time was running out for isolated Indians in the region. According to newspaper reports there were only two male members left of one of the region’s tribes, the Piripkura.
“The situation there is an emergency,” Mr. Meira said.
Ms. Watson said several of the region’s tribes were “facing genocide unless the Brazilian authorities take immediate action to demarcate and protect their land”.
www.thehindu.com/2008/11/24/stories/2008112455482000.htm
Rio de Janeiro: The Brazilian government has said it would employ heat-seeking radar in a last-ditch attempt to save the country’s remaining groups of isolated Indians. The body-heat sensors will be mounted on a Brazilian air force jet normally used to monitor rainforest destruction and will be used to locate an estimated 39 groups of isolated indigenous people, hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.
The authorities hope the system will help to protect them from loggers, goldminers and ranchers.
Antenor Vaz, the coordinator for isolated tribes at Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, said the system would allow authorities to locate tribes without disturbing their way of life.
“We have been using planes more and more, not just to monitor [isolated tribes] but also to find new references,” he said. But even the use of small planes brought disruption to the tribes because they flew at low altitude, he said.
Brazil’s isolated Indians hit the headlines in May when aerial photographs of a remote tribe near the border with Peru were released. Several tribesmen could be seen firing arrows at the plane.
Mr. Vaz said the sensors mounted on planes flying at high altitude meant the tribes would not even know they were being monitored.
By locating Brazil’s last isolated tribes, campaigners hope the process of land demarcation can be speeded up, helping to guarantee the protection of their ancestral lands.
Campaigners say the Amazon may be home to the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the world. The authorities have long grappled with the dilemma of how best to treat indigenous groups who have had little or no contact with outsiders.
For hundreds of years colonisers and explorers have trekked through the jungle, coming into contact with these tribes, often with catastrophic results. There are thought to have been around six million indigenous people when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500. Today there are fewer than 3,00,000. Violence and western diseases such as flu have devastated many indigenous communities.
In the 1980s thousands of gold prospectors poured into areas inhabited by Yanomami Indians, in northern Brazil, triggering genocide, human rights groups claimed. Some sources say up to 20% of the Yanomami people died in seven years. Since the late 1980s government policy towards uncontacted tribes has shifted to a “stay away” approach. A handful of sertanistas, or explorers, work in the rainforest trying to locate tribes without coming into direct contact with them.
No life in danger
Fiona Watson, Brazil campaigner for Survival International, an indigenous rights group, said there could be as many as 20 uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon rainforest. “The idea of the remote sensors means you are not going to put any lives in danger [by making contact],” she said.
She said contact between isolated tribes and government employees had proved disastrous in the past, with 50% of some tribes being wiped out by disease in the first year after contact.
Mr. Vaz said the radar’s first mission would be to confirm the existence of isolated tribes in the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, a region that loggers, ranchers and soy farmers have turned into ground zero for rainforest destruction.
“The priority will be Mato Grosso where the process of devastation is happening the quickest,” he said.
He said members of the military and representatives of the National Indian Foundation would meet soon to plan “when and where” the flyovers would take place.
‘Emergency’
In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, the president of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, Marcio Meira, admitted that time was running out for isolated Indians in the region. According to newspaper reports there were only two male members left of one of the region’s tribes, the Piripkura.
“The situation there is an emergency,” Mr. Meira said.
Ms. Watson said several of the region’s tribes were “facing genocide unless the Brazilian authorities take immediate action to demarcate and protect their land”.
www.thehindu.com/2008/11/24/stories/2008112455482000.htm
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Tribe and Tribulation
DANIEL Everett looks and talks much like the middle-aged American academic he is — until he drops a strange word into the conversation. An exceptionally melodic noise tumbles from his mouth. It doesn't sound like speaking at all.
Apart from his ex-wife and two ageing missionaries, Everett is the only person in the world beyond the sweeping banks of the Maici River in the Amazon basin who can speak Piraha.
Just 350 Piraha (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) hunt and gather from their simple homes in the Brazilian rainforest. Linguists believe their language is unrelated to any other. This obscure Amazonian people speak using only three vowels and eight consonants (including the glottal stop) but their language is far from simple.
Like Chinese, for example, Piraha is tonal, and speaking in a different pitch transforms the meaning of a word. Unlike other tonal languages, Piraha can also be hummed and sung. The Piraha have no socially lubricating "hello" and "thank you" and "sorry". They have no words for colours or numbers and no way of expressing any history beyond that experienced in their lifetimes.
In the late 1970s, Everett was dispatched to the Amazon to learn their language, translate the Bible and convert them to Christianity. The idea that we can be enlightened or destroyed by living with exotic people has transfixed Western societies since before Joseph Conrad's rogue trader Kurtz was corrupted in the Congo. Yet Everett's life could be a more dramatic example of enlightenment and destruction than any fictional encounter with a drastically different culture.
Thirty years of living with the Piraha destroyed his evangelical faith in God, wrecked his marriage and estranged him from two of his three children. It also dismantled his intellectual framework and set him on a collision course with one of the most influential intellectuals in the world.
Today, he is continuing his fight with Noam Chomsky in a debate that could transform our understanding of human language.
Everett is taking a working break from his professorial duties at Illinois State University. He grew up in a "redneck" home on the Mexican border. His father was a cowboy but Everett developed an interest in language after mixing with Spanish speakers at school. He was "pretty heavily into drugs" in '60s California, he says, until he met Keren Graham at high school. She had spent her childhood with her missionary parents in the Amazon; Everett was converted. "I credit religion with getting me out of drug culture," he says.
He and Graham were married at 18 and had three children. After joining a missionary organisation and studying linguistics, Everett and his young family were dispatched to the Piraha, where two other missionaries had spent two decades struggling to pick up the language and failing to convert any Piraha. Everett's first visit ended when his wife and daughter nearly died from malaria. He persevered, spending all of 1980 with the Piraha and returning to live with them for four months or so every year for the next two decades.
Despite close encounters with snakes and Brazilian traders who incited the Piraha to kill Everett, the missionary/linguist befriended the Piraha and painstakingly picked up their extraordinary language.
Everett's discovery of the elegant linguistic theories of Chomsky was his second conversion experience. At the time, Chomsky was not merely known for his trenchant, left-leaning political activism but was revered as the father of modern linguistics for his theory of "universal grammar".
Following Chomsky's idea that humans are innately programmed to produce language according to a fixed and finite set of rules, Everett studied for a doctorate in the '80s and took advice from Chomsky. Gradually, however, as he spent more time with the Piraha, he came to doubt Chomsky's claims of universality.
These doubts exploded three years ago like "a bomb thrown into the party", in the words of psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, who initially welcomed Everett's findings against Chomsky before becoming more critical. In 2005, Everett published a paper about the Piraha that rocked the foundations of universal grammar.
Chomsky had recently refined his theory to argue that recursion — the linguistic practice of inserting phrases inside others — was the cornerstone of all languages. (An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".) Everett argued that he could find no evidence of recursion in Piraha.
This was deeply troubling for Chomsky's theory. If the Piraha don't use recursion, then how could it be a fundamental part of a universal grammar embedded in our genes? If the Piraha don't use recursion, then is their language — and, by implication, other languages — determined not by biology but by culture?
Thirty years of living with the Piraha has taught Everett that they exist almost completely in the present. Absorbed by the daily struggle to survive, they do not plan ahead, store food, build houses or canoes to last, maintain tools or talk of things beyond those that they, or people they know, have experienced. They are the
"ultimate empiricists", he argues, and this culture of living in the present has shaped their language.
Everett's claims created a furore. Chomskyites rushed to defend universal grammar and academics cast doubt on Everett's view of the Piraha. Nineteenth-century anthropologists had judged exotic peoples similarly, saying they had no creation myths and apparently crude languages that could not count or convey abstract thought, before it was proved it was our erroneous understanding of these "primitive" societies that was primitive.
"By framing his observations as an anti-Chomsky discovery rather than as un-PC Eurocentric condescension, Everett was able to get away with claims that would have aroused the fury of anthropologists in any other context," wrote the increasingly sceptical Pinker, who argued that even if there was "a grain of truth" in the Piraha's preoccupation with the here and now, it was by no means unique to their society. In other words, Everett was an almost racist throwback to the days of, well, missionaries.
Yet Everett's life with the Piraha didn't just cause a gradual disenchantment with the Chomskyan intellectual framework he had once cherished: it also triggered another, even more dramatic, de-conversion.
Soon after he first arrived in the Amazon, Everett was nearly killed when the Piraha discovered he was ordering passing river traders not to give them whisky. The Piraha were rarely violent, but intensely rejected any kind of coercion.
Crucially, Everett came to see his religion as fundamentally coercive. His academic studies were ultimately designed to help him translate the Bible into Piraha. When they heard the word of God, his evangelic mission believed, they would be converted. Everett translated the Book of Luke, read it to the Piraha and they were utterly unmoved. By 1985, he had privately lost his faith.
"It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies," he says. "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often.
"So then I find myself with the Piraha. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell."
His wife, Keren, and three children were all committed Christians. Extraordinarily, Everett couldn't tell them of his loss of faith until the late '90s. "I kept hoping that I might get my faith back," he says.
He likens telling his wife to coming out as gay. "I said, 'I just can't do this any more, I can't pretend, I don't believe this stuff.' So she immediately called the kids to tell them. It was just such utter shock and revulsion."
Did they feel betrayed? "Yes, they felt betrayed. My youngest daughter said, 'Were you a hypocrite the whole time you were raising us? Did you teach us to believe one way, which you never believed?' I did believe. I had a genuine, sincere conversion experience. I was quite a successful evangelist. I've had people write to me and say, 'Gee, I'm a Christian because of you and I hear you're not a Christian, that's shocking to me.' I don't take these things lightly but that's who I am. I can't change it."
Murder is rare among the Piraha. The only punishment they regularly practise is ostracising members of their society. It seems a bitter irony that Everett's loss of faith caused his ostracism not from the Piraha, but from his own family. His marriage broke up. "After a couple of months I tried to get us back together and she said, 'Only when you come back to religion will I even consider it,' and I said, 'Well, then it's over.' "
Two of his grown-up children, Shannon, a missionary like her mother, and Caleb, an anthropologist like his father, cut off all contact. Three weeks ago, after the death of a close friend, they got back in touch for the first time in years. "Now they are coming around." An almost imperceptible tremor registers in Everett's voice. "Maybe I'm coming around. We're approaching one another and realising the most important thing is love."
Everett, who has remarried, has not visited the Piraha since January 2007. It has been his longest period apart from them. Occasionally, his ex-wife, who is still pursuing her missionary work on the banks of the Maici, will put them on the satellite phone.
"I know they are not understanding why I haven't been there," he says. But it is difficult to return with his ex-wife there. "There will always be tension," he says. "She believes that if the Pirahas reject the gospel, it's because it hasn't been communicated clearly. I believe it has been communicated clearly and they reject it because it's utterly irrelevant."
It's almost tragic: Keren's beliefs impugn Everett's competence; Everett's findings attack her entire belief system.
For academics rushing to the defence of the Chomskyan model there is another problem: Everett is the only linguist in the world who is fluent in Piraha and virtually the only academic to have gathered data on the language. It must be hard not to feel possessive of the Piraha, but Everett claims he wants academics to go there and test his theories. He just doesn't want to be dragged along to translate for them.
Despite challenging the linguistic theories he once followed, Everett insists he still has tremendous respect for Chomsky. "I'm not denigrating his intelligence or his honesty but I do think he is wrong about this and he is unprepared to accept that he is wrong."
Everett hopes his story of his life with the Piraha will demolish charges that his account of their society is crude and politically incorrect. "If you can find evidence that I am making 19th-century claims, I will be shocked and disappointed in myself," he says. "If anything, they are superior in many ways to us. Thinking too much about the future or worrying too much about the past is really unhealthy. The Piraha taught me that very lesson.
"Living in the moment is a sophisticated way to live. I don't see depression. I don't see some of the things that afflict our society — and that's not because they don't face pressures. People who claim that I'm Eurocentric and putting these people down need to read the book and decide for themselves."
THE Piraha population has climbed back to 350 after a measles epidemic is believed to have reduced it to about 100 in the 1950s. They have had contact with traders and missionaries for 200 years and have proved remarkably resistant to change. They live on a 300,000-hectare reservation, which is reasonably secure, says Everett. So far, at least, no precious minerals have been found in the area as has happened elsewhere in the Amazon, bringing miners, deforestation, pollution and disease.
Everett, however, is pessimistic about their future. Missionaries and government officials see Piraha society as poor and seek to help by giving them money and modern technology.
"The Piraha aren't poor. They don't see themselves as poor," he says. He believes capitalism and religion are manufacturing desires. "One of the saddest things I've seen in Amazonian cultures is people who were self-sufficient and happy that now think of themselves as poor and become dissatisfied with their lives. What worries me is outsiders trying to impose their values and materialism on the Piraha."
I wonder whether Everett feels grateful for his life with the Piraha or scarred by it.
"It has been a traumatic experience," he says. "There is a lot of good and there has been a lot of pain. There are times when I think of the Piraha with great nostalgia and want to be with them, and there are other times I think I am really tired."
He hopes to return next winter to help a BBC/HBO documentary and continue his research, but only on the condition that the visitors do not disrupt the Piraha.
What does he miss the most? "I miss the evenings. After I've gone down to the river to have a bath, I would make coffee for everyone in the village. We'd sit around on logs out in the open and wait until the night fell, and talk. They are just an incredibly peaceful, sweet people to be with. The time spent talking to them, these will always be the best memories I have."
http://www.theage.com.au/world/tribe-and-tribulations-20081121-6e47.html?page=-1
Apart from his ex-wife and two ageing missionaries, Everett is the only person in the world beyond the sweeping banks of the Maici River in the Amazon basin who can speak Piraha.
Just 350 Piraha (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) hunt and gather from their simple homes in the Brazilian rainforest. Linguists believe their language is unrelated to any other. This obscure Amazonian people speak using only three vowels and eight consonants (including the glottal stop) but their language is far from simple.
Like Chinese, for example, Piraha is tonal, and speaking in a different pitch transforms the meaning of a word. Unlike other tonal languages, Piraha can also be hummed and sung. The Piraha have no socially lubricating "hello" and "thank you" and "sorry". They have no words for colours or numbers and no way of expressing any history beyond that experienced in their lifetimes.
In the late 1970s, Everett was dispatched to the Amazon to learn their language, translate the Bible and convert them to Christianity. The idea that we can be enlightened or destroyed by living with exotic people has transfixed Western societies since before Joseph Conrad's rogue trader Kurtz was corrupted in the Congo. Yet Everett's life could be a more dramatic example of enlightenment and destruction than any fictional encounter with a drastically different culture.
Thirty years of living with the Piraha destroyed his evangelical faith in God, wrecked his marriage and estranged him from two of his three children. It also dismantled his intellectual framework and set him on a collision course with one of the most influential intellectuals in the world.
Today, he is continuing his fight with Noam Chomsky in a debate that could transform our understanding of human language.
Everett is taking a working break from his professorial duties at Illinois State University. He grew up in a "redneck" home on the Mexican border. His father was a cowboy but Everett developed an interest in language after mixing with Spanish speakers at school. He was "pretty heavily into drugs" in '60s California, he says, until he met Keren Graham at high school. She had spent her childhood with her missionary parents in the Amazon; Everett was converted. "I credit religion with getting me out of drug culture," he says.
He and Graham were married at 18 and had three children. After joining a missionary organisation and studying linguistics, Everett and his young family were dispatched to the Piraha, where two other missionaries had spent two decades struggling to pick up the language and failing to convert any Piraha. Everett's first visit ended when his wife and daughter nearly died from malaria. He persevered, spending all of 1980 with the Piraha and returning to live with them for four months or so every year for the next two decades.
Despite close encounters with snakes and Brazilian traders who incited the Piraha to kill Everett, the missionary/linguist befriended the Piraha and painstakingly picked up their extraordinary language.
Everett's discovery of the elegant linguistic theories of Chomsky was his second conversion experience. At the time, Chomsky was not merely known for his trenchant, left-leaning political activism but was revered as the father of modern linguistics for his theory of "universal grammar".
Following Chomsky's idea that humans are innately programmed to produce language according to a fixed and finite set of rules, Everett studied for a doctorate in the '80s and took advice from Chomsky. Gradually, however, as he spent more time with the Piraha, he came to doubt Chomsky's claims of universality.
These doubts exploded three years ago like "a bomb thrown into the party", in the words of psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, who initially welcomed Everett's findings against Chomsky before becoming more critical. In 2005, Everett published a paper about the Piraha that rocked the foundations of universal grammar.
Chomsky had recently refined his theory to argue that recursion — the linguistic practice of inserting phrases inside others — was the cornerstone of all languages. (An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".) Everett argued that he could find no evidence of recursion in Piraha.
This was deeply troubling for Chomsky's theory. If the Piraha don't use recursion, then how could it be a fundamental part of a universal grammar embedded in our genes? If the Piraha don't use recursion, then is their language — and, by implication, other languages — determined not by biology but by culture?
Thirty years of living with the Piraha has taught Everett that they exist almost completely in the present. Absorbed by the daily struggle to survive, they do not plan ahead, store food, build houses or canoes to last, maintain tools or talk of things beyond those that they, or people they know, have experienced. They are the
"ultimate empiricists", he argues, and this culture of living in the present has shaped their language.
Everett's claims created a furore. Chomskyites rushed to defend universal grammar and academics cast doubt on Everett's view of the Piraha. Nineteenth-century anthropologists had judged exotic peoples similarly, saying they had no creation myths and apparently crude languages that could not count or convey abstract thought, before it was proved it was our erroneous understanding of these "primitive" societies that was primitive.
"By framing his observations as an anti-Chomsky discovery rather than as un-PC Eurocentric condescension, Everett was able to get away with claims that would have aroused the fury of anthropologists in any other context," wrote the increasingly sceptical Pinker, who argued that even if there was "a grain of truth" in the Piraha's preoccupation with the here and now, it was by no means unique to their society. In other words, Everett was an almost racist throwback to the days of, well, missionaries.
Yet Everett's life with the Piraha didn't just cause a gradual disenchantment with the Chomskyan intellectual framework he had once cherished: it also triggered another, even more dramatic, de-conversion.
Soon after he first arrived in the Amazon, Everett was nearly killed when the Piraha discovered he was ordering passing river traders not to give them whisky. The Piraha were rarely violent, but intensely rejected any kind of coercion.
Crucially, Everett came to see his religion as fundamentally coercive. His academic studies were ultimately designed to help him translate the Bible into Piraha. When they heard the word of God, his evangelic mission believed, they would be converted. Everett translated the Book of Luke, read it to the Piraha and they were utterly unmoved. By 1985, he had privately lost his faith.
"It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies," he says. "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often.
"So then I find myself with the Piraha. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell."
His wife, Keren, and three children were all committed Christians. Extraordinarily, Everett couldn't tell them of his loss of faith until the late '90s. "I kept hoping that I might get my faith back," he says.
He likens telling his wife to coming out as gay. "I said, 'I just can't do this any more, I can't pretend, I don't believe this stuff.' So she immediately called the kids to tell them. It was just such utter shock and revulsion."
Did they feel betrayed? "Yes, they felt betrayed. My youngest daughter said, 'Were you a hypocrite the whole time you were raising us? Did you teach us to believe one way, which you never believed?' I did believe. I had a genuine, sincere conversion experience. I was quite a successful evangelist. I've had people write to me and say, 'Gee, I'm a Christian because of you and I hear you're not a Christian, that's shocking to me.' I don't take these things lightly but that's who I am. I can't change it."
Murder is rare among the Piraha. The only punishment they regularly practise is ostracising members of their society. It seems a bitter irony that Everett's loss of faith caused his ostracism not from the Piraha, but from his own family. His marriage broke up. "After a couple of months I tried to get us back together and she said, 'Only when you come back to religion will I even consider it,' and I said, 'Well, then it's over.' "
Two of his grown-up children, Shannon, a missionary like her mother, and Caleb, an anthropologist like his father, cut off all contact. Three weeks ago, after the death of a close friend, they got back in touch for the first time in years. "Now they are coming around." An almost imperceptible tremor registers in Everett's voice. "Maybe I'm coming around. We're approaching one another and realising the most important thing is love."
Everett, who has remarried, has not visited the Piraha since January 2007. It has been his longest period apart from them. Occasionally, his ex-wife, who is still pursuing her missionary work on the banks of the Maici, will put them on the satellite phone.
"I know they are not understanding why I haven't been there," he says. But it is difficult to return with his ex-wife there. "There will always be tension," he says. "She believes that if the Pirahas reject the gospel, it's because it hasn't been communicated clearly. I believe it has been communicated clearly and they reject it because it's utterly irrelevant."
It's almost tragic: Keren's beliefs impugn Everett's competence; Everett's findings attack her entire belief system.
For academics rushing to the defence of the Chomskyan model there is another problem: Everett is the only linguist in the world who is fluent in Piraha and virtually the only academic to have gathered data on the language. It must be hard not to feel possessive of the Piraha, but Everett claims he wants academics to go there and test his theories. He just doesn't want to be dragged along to translate for them.
Despite challenging the linguistic theories he once followed, Everett insists he still has tremendous respect for Chomsky. "I'm not denigrating his intelligence or his honesty but I do think he is wrong about this and he is unprepared to accept that he is wrong."
Everett hopes his story of his life with the Piraha will demolish charges that his account of their society is crude and politically incorrect. "If you can find evidence that I am making 19th-century claims, I will be shocked and disappointed in myself," he says. "If anything, they are superior in many ways to us. Thinking too much about the future or worrying too much about the past is really unhealthy. The Piraha taught me that very lesson.
"Living in the moment is a sophisticated way to live. I don't see depression. I don't see some of the things that afflict our society — and that's not because they don't face pressures. People who claim that I'm Eurocentric and putting these people down need to read the book and decide for themselves."
THE Piraha population has climbed back to 350 after a measles epidemic is believed to have reduced it to about 100 in the 1950s. They have had contact with traders and missionaries for 200 years and have proved remarkably resistant to change. They live on a 300,000-hectare reservation, which is reasonably secure, says Everett. So far, at least, no precious minerals have been found in the area as has happened elsewhere in the Amazon, bringing miners, deforestation, pollution and disease.
Everett, however, is pessimistic about their future. Missionaries and government officials see Piraha society as poor and seek to help by giving them money and modern technology.
"The Piraha aren't poor. They don't see themselves as poor," he says. He believes capitalism and religion are manufacturing desires. "One of the saddest things I've seen in Amazonian cultures is people who were self-sufficient and happy that now think of themselves as poor and become dissatisfied with their lives. What worries me is outsiders trying to impose their values and materialism on the Piraha."
I wonder whether Everett feels grateful for his life with the Piraha or scarred by it.
"It has been a traumatic experience," he says. "There is a lot of good and there has been a lot of pain. There are times when I think of the Piraha with great nostalgia and want to be with them, and there are other times I think I am really tired."
He hopes to return next winter to help a BBC/HBO documentary and continue his research, but only on the condition that the visitors do not disrupt the Piraha.
What does he miss the most? "I miss the evenings. After I've gone down to the river to have a bath, I would make coffee for everyone in the village. We'd sit around on logs out in the open and wait until the night fell, and talk. They are just an incredibly peaceful, sweet people to be with. The time spent talking to them, these will always be the best memories I have."
http://www.theage.com.au/world/tribe-and-tribulations-20081121-6e47.html?page=-1
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Brazil's endangered species list triples in size
Deforestation and illegal animal trade have done enormous damage to the species of Brazil over the last 20 years. The country's list of endangered animals now stands at 627 species -- 288% higher than the 218 species that were on the same list in 1989.
It's not clear if this is the first major revision to Brazil's endangered list since '89, but it's a significant update: 489 species were added to the list, while 79 were considered recovered enough to be dropped from the list.
Environment Minister Carlos Minc said "Industry is expanding, agriculture is expanding, people are occupying protected areas and our conservation units do not have the protection needed," but "We'll fight to remove the largest number of species possible from that list."
Minc reported that 90% of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest, where most of these newly endangered species reside, has been chopped down. More than 232,000 square miles of Brazilian forest have been destroyed since 1970.
Minc took over as Environment Minister earlier this year, after his predecessor, Marina Silva, resigned, citing government "stagnation" in the fight against deforestation.
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