A Great Silencing Is Underway In Tropical Forests

Listening technologies are most likely to yield positive results when they restore imbalances of power. But a surer path to right the relationship between people and the forest is to change the power dynamic at its root by restoring indigenous peoples’ control over their lands and futures. We are a long way from such justice. In the United States, indigenous communities own or control 2 percent of the land area. In Australia, 20 percent. In Papua New Guinea, 97 percent. These figures illustrate wide differences among countries, but they also gloss over many nuances and imperfections in indigenous communities’ tenure of land, including violations by governments and corporations seeking minerals and timber. In general, though, these percentages are increasing as dozens of countries decentralize control of forests. Activism by local communities, pressure from foreign donors and agencies, and limited administrative capacity of central governments have driven these changes. Where land title and control have been returned to indigenous communities, rates of deforestation often decline. In the Peruvian Amazon, for example, eleven million hectares of land have been titled to more than one thousand indigenous communities since the 1970s. During the boom of forest clearing in the 1990s in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, deforestation rates in indigenous territories that overlapped protected areas were low.

Code Of Silence

But indigenous territories that lacked these formal protections had much higher rates of forest loss, partly because local communities could not prevent incursion by mining and logging and partly because some communities chose to clear land for agriculture. A 2021 United Nations report found that Latin American forests controlled by indigenous communities were better protected than others, but that there was a pressing need to compensate these communities for the benefits such as carbon storage and biodiversity that their forests provide. In Nepal, when local communities control forest management, both poverty and deforestation decrease, especially in larger forests that have been under community control for some time. Honoring the needs and rights of local communities is an end in its own right and a necessary precondition to the work of habitat protection and restoration. Ledjie Taq, chief of the Wehea, recounted in a 2017 interview with journalist Yovanda how, in the 1970s and 1980s, illegal logging, then palm oil plantations impoverished much of the forest and drove people from their land, giving them no choice but to become laborers for industry. But, he said, The Dayak people cannot be far from the forest. The forest is a storehouse of life. We gathered strength and put up a statue of our ancestors. We announced that Wehea is a customary forest [forest belonging to indigenous peoples]. We made rules for everyone, especially the local people. These rules govern hunting, tree cutting, clearing of land for agriculture, and access by outsiders. Around the forest protected by the Wehea, palm oil farms, timber plantations, and mines continue their expansion at the expense of forests, feeding the global economy.

Got To Begin Again

Fire also takes its toll, driven by climate change and the more than four and a half thousand kilometers of drainage canals dug into the wet soil of Borneo’s peat forests. Forty million people in Southeast Asia swam for weeks in a pall of smoke as thick as murky water. In cities hundreds of kilometers away, every breath brought into the body the vaporous, toxic ghosts of the burned forest and all its inhabitants. Chemical analyses of carbon in the smoke showed that the burned forest peat had lain buried in the soil for a thousand years or more. Urbanization is about to be added to the dire effects of land clearing for commodities and fire. The magnificent diversity of a rain forest’s sounds is not only the product of millions of years of past biological evolution. It is a sonic manifestation of the work of traditional custodians of the land, people whose own often endangered languages are part of this diversity of sound. Where these people’s human rights are honored, life and sound often flourish. The future vitality of these richest soundscapes on the planet depends, in large part, on whether we restore the rights and agency of forest peoples. This is not a reincarnation of the noble savage idea from the Romantic movement in Western Europe, where indigenous people and cultures were presumed to be primitively uncorrupted by the hand of civilization, childlike in their harmony with nature. Rather, might those of us in colonial cultures recognize that many forms of civilization have developed across the world, all of them entitled to freedom from murder, land theft, and disenfranchisement? These are not pristine lands. No human culture lives without effect on other species.

Forget That Your Eyes Speak

As humans spread around the world, our arrival coincides with the decline or extinction of the tastiest and easiest to hunt animals. But some cultures have found more effective and fruitful ways to guide and contain human appetites and thus be responsible members of life’s community. In an era of ecological collapse, these are the voices that should lead and advise us. Instead, many are crying out for their lives as colonialism and resource extraction continue to plunder, kill, and displace. In 2019, nearly four million hectares of primary tropical forest were lost from our planet. We’ve lost about the same amount every year for the last two decades. These forests are home to hundreds of indigenous cultures. Tropical forests also house most of the world’s terrestrial species and huge stores of carbon. The loss of these forests is accelerating the climate crisis. Culture and nature are the main wealth owned by the Wehea Dayak people, says Ledjie Taq. If we don’t look after them and pass them on to our children and grandchildren from an early age, then we won’t be able to pass on anything. The riches of nature. Look after them and pass them on. To do so, we need to listen to our animal cousins through bird surveys and recordings of the combined voices of the forest animals. But alongside these studies rooted in Western science, we also need to hear our human sisters and brothers. They have news for us about their forest homes. To listen is to honor those who are speaking. We cannot do so while also denying them agency and removing their source of life, the forest. To listen in tropical forests is to hear the need for justice.