By Robin Van Loon | Executive Director
When Ana was five years old, her father brought three seedlings home with him from the hacienda-like operation along the Putumayo River where he’d been working under an arrangement we would now call indentured servitude.
New liberty and a young family life were celebrated on this promontory overlooking the sinuous Shumón River, a tiny tributary that eventually, far away, flows into the unimaginably wide Amazon proper. Producing abundant creamy fruits, umarí trees were planted extensively, plus a variety of edible palm fruits, dye plants, and trees that provide materials to make hammocks and houses.
It was a rainforest idyll. Perhaps ironically given the spirit of the moment, the site they settled and its surroundings were the scene of infamous hardships inflicted on Ana’s grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations. The Ocaina, Huitoto and Bora – Ana is the latter – were brought to these rivers to harvest the tears of the weeping trees, rubber. They were resettled by the sociopathic rubber baron Julio César Arana, as part of his “terroristic reign of slavery over the natives of the region” (Wikipedia). By the time Ana was born the jungle had grow back over most of the rubber infrastructure, but not the memories from that time.
Right behind the family homestead, near the outhouse, Ana’s father planted those seedlings from Putumayo. Only one of the three survived, but now, fifty-five years later, the tree stands tall and healthy: Aniba rosaeodora, also known as Brazilian rosewood. As we contemplate its stout trunk there is little trace of the family homestead, no evidence of the outhouse. The forest has reclaimed the farm, but we can still see and taste clear signs of its existence – ripe umarí fruits dot the forest floor. Plopped into the ground cover of low fern-like plants they are shiny and golden-orange, green, yellow, and black – it’s hard not to think of easter eggs. And the children we’re with are quick to snatch them up, peeling the fruit with their teeth while darting to grab another.
This rosewood tree has many stories to tell, many chapters in its life. It went from early years in the careful tending of a home garden plot, to the wild and fertile chaos of secondary overgrowth (when years later the family moved to a racent son-in-law’s community several hours downstream by canoe), to the rapid establishment of a forest canopy – such that now the half century-old secondary forest could be mistaken for a primary rainforest by an untrained eye.
Despite the evident hands-off approach to old farms, it would be a mistake to think of the rewilding of this plot as a product of negligence. It’s a mistake that many Western visitors have made in the presence of Amazonian farming techniques and land management. Sure, the forest is just being left to do what it wants, but in the meantime the farm plot becomes more productive than ever from the non-management. The encroachment of secondary forest into farms that are better described as agroforestry systems (think of all those umarí trees planted) doesn’t drastically reduce the productivity of the suite of fruit trees there. And it does enrich the diversity. Most of the trees that grow back were actually left on purpose – selected from among the hundreds of species of seedlings that are constantly sprouting up as a kind of expression of the forest’s volition to recuperate the artificially and temporarily ceded ground.
As the forest grows back in, these tangled farm plots are visited regularly for the harvest of fruit and for one other key function – as hunting grounds. All the new growth provides cover for animals that wouldn’t readily visit an actively managed farm (many mammals especially avoid clearings such as croplands), and these secondary forest fallows (called purmas in the local Spanish) contribute the majority of game meat to the diet in many communities.
After 55 years of careful non-management, what we have is a forest where most of the trees are useful to human needs and wants. It’s a point driven home by one of our Bora companions, a cousin of Ana’s, as he casually harvests a few especially straight young trees for poles to patch part of his roof. The minimalist simplicity of the approach calls to mind Fukuoka’s do-nothing exhortations on farming. For some reason it also reminds me of the hammock, an Amazonian invention which has to be the most resource-efficient way ever designed to support a reclining human body. As with Amazonian farming its genius is invisible, is in the negative space of what it is not.
Now people only come to this forest to harvest from its generosity. As we examine the rosewood tree we see another evidence of use – a portion of the trunk seems to have been cut out, and now has grown over with thick bark. Ana’s cousin remembers the occasion well. It was for the birth of a curaca, a new village chief, an event marked in Bora custom by the creation of a sort of ceremonial seat, a throne. Rosewood was always used for this purpose, a recognition of the regality and beauty of the wood, and perhaps because it smells so nicely.
It’s remarkable that these customs based in naturalist knowledge persisted through the series of holocausts to which many Amazonian people including Ana’s forefathers were subjected. It’s ambiguous whether this knowledge will survive the most recent cultural transformations associated with globalization and technology. In the midst of the modernization of agricultural practices throughout the rainforests of the world, the naturalist knowledge possessed by indigenous farmers is more relevant and vital than ever before. By harnessing the power of natural processes, by working in alignment with what the forest wants, Amazonian farmers gain a great deal by doing less.
It’s a different way to conceive of farming and forestry, rooted in a practical understanding of the human role within an ecosystem – as arbiters and catalyzers of an extremely productive natural order. It’s a knowledge-based management practice rooted in adept familiarity with local species with potential to provide economic empowerment to communities that have historically been marginalized or worse and are rapidly entering the cash economy. It’s called agroforestry by some, and people in the Amazon have been doing it for millennia.
Carrying it forward to today, Ana’s family and 30 others planted over 400 rosewood seedlings last week as part of a 5 year program to reintroduce this valuable, endangered tree into the agroforestry systems of today – tomorrow’s forests. This doubles the number of trees planted by Camino Verde and our allies at the Center for Amazon Community Ecology in native communities. It’s a small effort now, but with your support this year we hope to expand our rosewood planting efforts. Seeds from that 55-year old tree are going into nurseries this year.
This is Amazonian regeneration in action, planting trees that bring back biodiversity, improve livelihoods, and empower communities. And we couldn’t do it without you. Please support Camino Verde generously today.
By Robin Van Loon | Executive Director
By Robin Van Loon | Executive Director
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