Google Earth Community: A Sad Place on Earth

Maribop's world is shrinking. Mile after square mile of dense rainforest where, for centuries, his people hunted among the trees and tangled vines is vanishing.

For 40 years he lived by the bow, as ignorant of the white man as they were off him - until 1969 when the invaders arrived, bringing with them the greed and diseases of the civilised world.

Within a decade those diseases had decimated his people, until there were just 300 of the original 5,000 tribesmen left.

Now it is the greed that is threatening the few who remain as illegal loggers rip the heart out of Maribop's hunting grounds.

Which is why Maribop and his tribe have turned to the internet for help.

Their forest is being raped - and Maribop's people, the Surui, have asked the scientists from Google Earth to help them win a war they once fought with poisoned arrows.

Soon, anyone with access to the internet will be able to watch for illegal logging as a Google Earth satellite makes its pass over Maribop's homeland in Brazil and, hopefully, to press the world's governments into action before too much more vanishes beneath the chain saw and bulldozers.

Maribop, now 86, says: "Before contact with the outside my life was happy. For a long time we lived with the threat of invaders and our shaman told us that when contact came it would bring massacres and enslave us. Yes, there was a lot of fear."

The Surui's spokesman is Maribop's son Chief Almir, who was born just six years after first contact with the so-called civilised world. Almir has travelled the world, including Britain, to protect his culture and their part of the forest and he quickly realised the potential of Google Earth to help them.

The first member of his tribe to go to university, he is convinced the internet will win where bows and arrows have failed.

Google Earth has grown to 400 million users in just three years, using satellite imagery and 3-D topography and map data to create a virtual world. Most people use it to look at their home or where they are going on holiday.

But in June 2007 the company set up Google Earth Outreach, developing internet tools to improve Google maps with non-profit organisations.

They have come to the Surui village to launch the Brazil Outreach project which they hope will be a model for other indigenous tribes in Brazil and around the world.

It will provide a 21st century window to their world and may, at last, keep the loggers at bay.

Google project manager Rebecca Moore said: "Chief Almir told us he realised it was time to put down the bow and pick up the laptop.

"He asked us to train his people so they could tell their story, their history and the beauty of their land and culture and gain support from the world to fight the loss of the forest. At the moment their territory is just a green blob on Google Earth.

We knew we could help not just with Google maps, but with blogs and You Tube because they have videos of their elders. Imagine you could fly through Surui territory watching parrots and jaguars. Or you could show the site of first contact and click on it and see an image or a video or an interview with an elder telling a story of life before contact.

"Or visit the site of an important battle or where they gather medicinal plants and berries and discover why these plants are important to them and the world. But it is up to them what they do with it once we have trained them how to add their own stuff.

"The way they greeted me into their village was very moving. I don't understand all their traditions but I could see just great respect."

Mark Aubin, one of the founders of Google Earth is also on the team. He said: "I am not sure yet how the Surui people are going to use it. But I try to imagine how people could use our tools, being here in the village and seeing how people live very differently from me gives me ideas how they might do it."

Chief Almir plans to use Google to show their plans to replant the 7,000 hectares they have lost with 80,000 saplings and 40,000 fruit trees with the help of partners like Swiss charity AquaVerde and to develop sustainable goods from Surui land.

"It is possible to have knowledge of life and a good wealth without having to destroy or curse or hurt the forest," he says. "This is not because we are better than others, but to show our concern and the danger the land is in.

"People who live in the forest and believe in the forest are considered naive. But the people who are really naive are those who are destroying the forest and, like children, don't know what they are doing. We believe there is a way to achieve a better world with a standing forest.

"It is also very important for the Surui people themselves to understand technology is an instrument and a partner in this search.

"Each person should be proud of their own people's history. I am honoured to have been born a member of the Surui people.

His father Maribop hopes the history of the Surui people and the knowledge they can offer lives on through Google "I have lived in this place for a long time and I have walked very far to be here. I learned from my own father.

Even though I have contact now with non-Indians I am always an Indian and I am proud to be who I am.

"They should teach that the forest is everything. Even the people who live in cities are there because of the forest.

We are maintaining our forest because we love the forest and we love the land.

"The forest touches everyone in some way ... it is within everything."

Tracking the tree smugglers

The destruction of the forest came home to us when we came across two illegal logging lorries loaded with trees just a few miles from the Surui village.

Loggers sneak onto the conservation lands to cut down trees during the day, leave them to rest and then steal them away under the cover of darkness Depending on the tree, a trunk can fetch £250 to £500 and are processed at legal mills that turn illegal at night.

Around three-quarters of the illegal wood is used in Brazil because it is difficult to get export licences.

The soil is poor beneath the trees so cleared land becomes scrub and the soil washes away silting up rivers and killing river fish, something the tribes that live there are fighting hard to end.

Vasco van Roosmalen, director of Brazil programmes for the Amazon Conservation Team said: "It is simple. Where you have Indians you have forests; where you don't have Indians, you don't have forests. That is what the satellite pictures show already."

www.actbrasil.org.br to see the work of the Amazon Conservation Team

Source: Daily Mirror

Edited by Groovy23 (06/22/08 02:49 PM)