Conservationists And Local Forest People example essay topic

The conflicts emerging between conservationists and local forest people, as well as the failure of many environmental sustainability projects to really take hold among local communities, seem to be supremely rooted in these often conflicting ways of looking at and valuing the forest. For the most part, conservationists have justified and promoted the protection of Latin Americas rainforest's based primarily on values and perceptions inherent in Western conservation science and culture. They seek to preserve biodiversity, sustain a scientific laboratory, stem global warming, and protect an aesthetic wonder. In contrast, people who live in these areas more often view the forest as the source of their life, both materially and culturally a source of daily sustenance and of meaning, a resource to be cared for in order that it remain to provide for the generations that follow. Twenty years of oil drilling practices in Latin America have caused widespread destruction of the Amazon rainforest and have endangered the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Producing purely for subsistence may decrease pressure on the forest, but it also precludes a major means by which villagers obtain the small amounts of cash they need today to buy clothing, kerosene, soap, and salt, as well as to pay for medicines and schooling when and if they are available. American origin myths sometimes seem as simple as Aesop's fables, but there are many complexities and depths, many accretions through time and the movements of peoples who impart certain cultural notions as they move and pick up new ones as well. Animal lore is always rooted in the obvious practical uses of animals for food and for pelt, shell, feathers, bones, antlers, teeth, claws, spines, and sinew and in the case of the llama, for transport and wool. But the other side of the coin the symbolic, metaphoric, mythical, supernatural, shamanic, and otherworldly is never far away. Animals are not just practical resources, not just neighbors; they are part of Latin American culture and represent a parallel world with which humans interact, through which animals play roles in the world of humans.

One provocative observation that demonstrates a complication in this structure is the fact that poisonous animals toads, fish, snakes, and bivalves are notable in iconography, in ritual, and in archaeological remains, both in offering contexts and trash middens. Some venous might have been eaten safely with proper preparation. Some might have been converted to psychoactive drugs for ritual use. Some might be toxic only in certain seasons, which is precisely when the spiny oyster is offered.

The quantity of such remains suggests that something more is involved than simple food offerings to the god or the dead or than presentations with modest symbolisms of fertility or contact with the otherworld. There is a dimension of risking death while promoting life, of offering a particularly powerful substance, of controlling poisons in positive use. Inhabitants of rainforest in some sense conquer or control animals by using them in human lore. It is another aspect of the dualism that is the basic structure of indigenous philosophy.