Forest Communities: Front Lines of Fighting Environmental Degradation

The people living in the forests are its best stewards

Forests are the nexus of our planet's major ecosystems and home to hundreds of indigenous cultures and forest communites. Forests are also the setting for many of the most acute ecological and social conflicts over globalization and industrialization.

Deforestation, illegal logging and soil erosion affect local and global climate, water cycles and species diversity. They also affect the livelihoods of the indigenous peoples and forest communities who rely on tropical forest ecosystems.

Example: Chico Mendes and Amazon forest communities

Brazilian rubber tapper and land rights leader Chico Mendes pioneered the world’s first tropical forest conservation initiative advanced by forest peoples themselves. His work led to the establishment of Brazil’s extractive reserves protected forest areas that are inhabited and managed by local communities.

Chico Mendes and his colleagues were a tiny, marginalized minority in the 1980s, but their efforts brought them to power in parts of Brazil’s Amazon by the end of that decade. Tragically, Mendes became world-famous only when he was gunned down for his work in 1988.

EDF’s Steve Schwartzman, an early ally of Mendes and a long-time participant in the Amazon land rights struggle, continues working on national and international policies to help bring Mendes’ vision of independence for forest peoples and forest reserves to fruition.

Learn more about Chico Mendes: rubber tapper, union organizer and environmentalist.

Indigenous peoples are key to preserving forests

The most important actions curbing tropical forest destruction have arisen out of local peoples’ struggles struggles to secure land rights for indigenous peoples and traditional forest-dwelling populations, and struggles to maintain sustainable economic livelihoods for these forest peoples.

Forest dwellers’ civil society organizations and leaders are critical allies in efforts to conserve tropical forests and increasingly they provide input to national and international policies to reduce deforestation.

Indigenous peoples have lived in and used forests throughout human history. Regions that we often think of as "wilderness" or "pristine nature" have in fact been inhabited over the long term.

The Amazon, for example, probably had a higher population before 1500 A.D., when Europeans first arrived, than any other time until the last few decades. Large parts of the indigenous population died from diseases introduced by European colonizers; areas that appear "pristine" today were once inhabited. Many scientists think that low-level human occupation of forests may actually increase species diversity by creating small-scale ecological disturbances.

Indigenous peoples often stand to lose the most from predatory development, including illegal logging, unchecked agricultural expansion and industrial-style development in tropical forests. They are critical allies in conservation efforts.

Posted: 08-Oct-2009; Updated: 18-May-2009