This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Indigenous leaders from the Amazon have implored major western brands and banks to stop supporting the ongoing destruction of the vital rainforest through mining, oil drilling, and logging, warning that the ecosystem is on the brink of a disastrous collapse. 719…
About Barbara Crane Navarro - Rainforest Art Project
I'm a French artist living near Paris.
From 1968 to 1973 I studied at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, then at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, for my BFA.
My work for many decades has been informed and inspired by time spent with indigenous communities. Various study trips devoted to the exploration of techniques and natural pigments took me originally to the Dogon of Mali, West Africa, and subsequently to Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil.
Over many years, during the winters, I studied the techniques of traditional Bogolan painting. Hand woven fabric is dyed with boiled bark from the Wolo tree or crushed leaves from other trees, then painted with mud from the Niger river which oxidizes in contact with the dye.
Through the Dogon and the Yanomami, my interest in the multiplicity of techniques and supports for aesthetic expression influenced my artistic practice. The voyages to the Amazon Rainforest have informed several series of paintings created while living among the Yanomami. The support used is roughly woven canvas prepared with acrylic medium then textured with a mixture of sand from the river bank and lava. This supple canvas is then rolled and transported on expeditions into the forest. They are then painted using a mixture of acrylic colors and Achiote and Genipap, the vegetal pigments used by the Yanomami for their ritual body paintings and on practical and shamanic implements.
My concern for the ongoing devastation of the Amazon Rainforest has inspired my films and installation projects. Since 2005, I've created a perfomance and film project - Fire Sculpture - to bring urgent attention to Rainforest issues. To protest against the continuing destruction, I've publicly set fire to my totemic sculptures. These burning sculptures symbolize the degradation of nature and the annihilation of indigenous cultures that depend on the forest for their survival.
But some people — though their souls are as precious as that of every other human being — apparently can be perceived and treated by an otherwise free, democratic and relatively civilized society as though they’re somehow disposable and, by extension, their suffering is in some way less worthy of general societal concern.
Many indigenous people have learned this the hardest way.
While obviously no person should ever be considered disposable, one can observe this with indigenous-nation people living with substance abuse/addiction related to lasting, formidable residential or boarding school trauma. In Canada’s atrocious case at least, this includes the many indigenous children buried in unmarked and even officially unrecorded grave sites.
The whole ordeal was a serious attempt at annihilating native culture.
For me, a somewhat similar inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in protractedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations. The worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers. Those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news.
Meantime, the anti-democratic goal(s) of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro may be yet another instance of that potentially very dangerous philosophy: the end justifies the means. The most frightful example of that philosophical justification is the pogrom, the primary implementers of which know they’re committing mass murder yet still genuinely perceive it all as part of an ultimately greater, moral good.
He’s also the same despot who allows the Amazonian rainforest to be razed by both meat farmers and wildfires.
In the midst of yet another unprecedented wildfire two summers ago, the evangelical-Christian president declared that his presidency — and, I presume, all of the formidable environmental damage he inflicts while in power — is “fulfilling a mission from God”. [Similarly, Canada’s previous prime minister, the thinly-veiled-theocratic also-evangelical-Christian Stephen Harper, was unrelenting in his pro-fossil-fuel/anti-natural-environment war against environmental science.]
There’s a generally shared yet bizarre belief held amongst such people that to defend the natural environment from the planet’s greatest polluters, notably big fossil fuel, is to go against God’s will and is therefore inherently evil. Some even credit the bone-dry-vegetation areas uncontrollably burning in California each year to some divine wrath upon collective humankind’s ‘sinfulness’.
Ergo, there’s a serious hazard in such theologically-inclined people getting into and remaining in high office.
I, one who believes in Christ’s unmistakable miracles, am greatly stressed by all of this.
Barbara Crane Navarro 
Yes. It is a big issue that US companies should tackle with. Thank you 🌍🙏
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Thank you! 🌍
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You are welcome
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🍃🌿🌳🌴🌲🌱🌿🍃
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But some people — though their souls are as precious as that of every other human being — apparently can be perceived and treated by an otherwise free, democratic and relatively civilized society as though they’re somehow disposable and, by extension, their suffering is in some way less worthy of general societal concern.
Many indigenous people have learned this the hardest way.
While obviously no person should ever be considered disposable, one can observe this with indigenous-nation people living with substance abuse/addiction related to lasting, formidable residential or boarding school trauma. In Canada’s atrocious case at least, this includes the many indigenous children buried in unmarked and even officially unrecorded grave sites.
The whole ordeal was a serious attempt at annihilating native culture.
For me, a somewhat similar inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in protractedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations. The worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers. Those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news.
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Yes. Annihilating native culture of indigenous people is bad 🌍
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🍃🌿🌳🌴🌲🌱🌿🍃
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😊🙏🌍
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🌍🌍🌍
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Meantime, the anti-democratic goal(s) of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro may be yet another instance of that potentially very dangerous philosophy: the end justifies the means. The most frightful example of that philosophical justification is the pogrom, the primary implementers of which know they’re committing mass murder yet still genuinely perceive it all as part of an ultimately greater, moral good.
He’s also the same despot who allows the Amazonian rainforest to be razed by both meat farmers and wildfires.
In the midst of yet another unprecedented wildfire two summers ago, the evangelical-Christian president declared that his presidency — and, I presume, all of the formidable environmental damage he inflicts while in power — is “fulfilling a mission from God”. [Similarly, Canada’s previous prime minister, the thinly-veiled-theocratic also-evangelical-Christian Stephen Harper, was unrelenting in his pro-fossil-fuel/anti-natural-environment war against environmental science.]
There’s a generally shared yet bizarre belief held amongst such people that to defend the natural environment from the planet’s greatest polluters, notably big fossil fuel, is to go against God’s will and is therefore inherently evil. Some even credit the bone-dry-vegetation areas uncontrollably burning in California each year to some divine wrath upon collective humankind’s ‘sinfulness’.
Ergo, there’s a serious hazard in such theologically-inclined people getting into and remaining in high office.
I, one who believes in Christ’s unmistakable miracles, am greatly stressed by all of this.
LikeLiked by 1 person
🍃🌿🌳🌴🌲🌱🌿🍃
LikeLike
Yes, it’s tragic…
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