Fight For Amazonia: Internet Indians

Our Eco Film on Friday, November 2nd will be another part of the series Fight For Amazonia: Internet Indians.

Documentary, 2012 – 48 minutes. Al-jazeera. Brazil, English.

Watch the full episode here (embedding is disabled) and an extract here:

Amazonia is much more than just the earth’s lungs: It is home to 20 per cent of the world’s fauna, 20 per cent of its fresh water reserves and countless animal species.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil started the conquest of the massive ancient forest in order to increase the country’s prosperity – people without land moved to land without people, built roads, dams and cities. Since then, two million hectares of tropical rainforest have been burned down and cleared in the Amazon every year. An area approximately the same size as France, 65 million hectares, has now disappeared.

Today, the earth’s largest forest is home to 20 million people: All of them have their own, usually conflicting, ideas about the future development of the Amazon region.

“The internet is our weapon. We gave up fighting with bows and arrows a long time ago,” says Benki Piyako, the son of the chief of the Ashaninka in the Brazilian rainforest. “We all need to be interconnected if we want to live in safety on our territory.”