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The Growth Machine versus the Earth 495

Cultural Diversity around the World

The Rain Forests: Lost Tribes, Lost

Knowledge
In the past hundred years, 90 of Brazil’s 270 Indian tribes
have disappeared. Other tribes have moved to villages as
ranchers and gold miners have taken over their lands. Tribal
knowledge is lost as a tribe’s members adapt to village life.
Contrary to some stereotypes, tribal groups are not igno-
rant people who barely survive. On the contrary, these groups
have developed intricate forms of social organization and
possess knowledge that has accumulated over thousands
of years (Briand 2013). The Kayapo Indians, for example,
who belong to one of the Amazon’s endangered tribes, use him sought the advice of a native doctor. He applied
250 types of wild fruit and hundreds of nut and tuber species. crushed termites to the open wounds. To the amazement
They cultivate thirteen types of bananas, eleven kinds of man- of the nuns, the man made a remarkable recovery.
ioc (cassava), sixteen strains of sweet potato, and seventeen
kinds of yams. Many of these varieties are unknown to non- The disappearance of the rain forests means the destruc-
Indians. The Kayapo also use thousands of plants as medicine, tion of plant species that may have healing properties. I don’t
one of which contains a drug that is effective against intestinal mean to imply that these tribes have medicine superior to
parasites. ours, just that we can learn from their experience with nature.
Western scientists used to dismiss tribal knowledge as su- Some of the discoveries from the rain forests have been
perstitious and worthless. Some still do, but others have come astounding. The needles from a Himalayan tree in India con-
to realize that to lose tribes is to lose valuable knowledge. tain taxol, a drug that is effective against ovarian and breast
cancer. A flower from Madagascar is used in the treatment
In the Central African Republic, a man whose chest was of leukemia. A frog in Peru produces a painkiller that is more
being eaten away by an amoeboid infection lay dying powerful, but less addictive, than morphine (Wolfensohn and
because the microbes did not respond to drugs. Out of Fuller 1998). A researcher noticed that the Mapuche people
desperation, the Roman Catholic nuns who were treating in the rain forests of Chile were using an avocado plant to
heal wounds. Tests showed that this plant overcomes the
bacteria’s resistance, allowing antibiotics to work (Holler et al.
2012).
On average, one tribe of Amazonian Indians has been
lost each year for the past century—because of violence,
greed for their lands, and exposure to infectious diseases
against which these people have little resistance. Ethnocen-
trism underlies some of this assault. Perhaps the extreme is
represented by the cattle ranchers in Colombia who killed
eighteen Cueva Indians. The cattle ranchers were perplexed
when they were put on trial for murder. They asked why they
should be charged with a crime, since everyone knew that
the Cuevas were animals, not people. They pointed out that
there was even a verb in Colombian Spanish, cuevar, which
means “to hunt Cueva Indians.” So what was their crime, they
asked? The jury found them not guilty because of “cultural
ignorance.”
Sources: Durning 1990; Gorman 1991; Linden 1991; Stipp 1992; Nabhan
1998; Simons 2006; “Last Remaining Amazon Tribes” 2011.

For Your Consideration
What do you think we can do to stop the destruction of
A member of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau tribe in Brazil. The way of life of
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the world’s few remaining rain forest tribes is threatened. the rain forests?