Is It Really Climate Change?

Al Jazeera, an alternative on-line media presence with a somewhat different perspective on world affairs, has digitally published an essay on how "climate change pushes indigenous people from their land".

Perhaps the author of the piece and the writer of the headline occupy different offices but the substance of the article and its headline don't reflect the same facts.

While Neil Giardino's article points out the many problems indigenous peoples face, at least those in the Amazon basin, few, if any, are caused by the inevitable changes in climate. In fact, practically all of them are the result of the encroachment of 21st century society, economics and technology. The Ashaninka of eastern Peru, residents of the remote upper Amazon for who knows how long, are rightly devastated that their corner of the world is being over run by loggers, cattlemen, miners and all the other representatives of modernity. The reality is that they and their ancestors far back in time faced and overcame many episodes of climate change. They may not be able to overcome an invasion of technologically superior invaders. No new world culture has done so.

 

 Pachaka Samaniego, right, and her family search for water in the Amazon rainforest [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

Furthermore, like all victims of the colonial era, now in its 532nd year, they have quickly adopted the most useful items of the invader technology. The lady cooks in a modern metal pot, something that the Ashaninka have never been able to produce. Of course no small society has ever been able to produce such items. The European descendants  who live in a place like Minot, North Dakota can't manufacture their own pots and pans either. They buy them from distant strangers. 

Giardino mentions that many of the Amazon indigenous have moved to the big cities in South America, like that was a bad thing. Everywhere, rurals have pulled up stakes and left for the urban mega-cities where they hope to make things better for themselves and their families, at least in economic terms. Climate has nothing to do with it.

The US has had, and continues to have, similar issues with its now tiny indigenous population, once in the many millions, which has been swindled of its land and banished to the least hospitable and infertile areas of the continent, which includes the most dangerous areas of major cities as well as deserts. 

The point is that climate change isn't a real burden on the Ashaninka or the Masai or the Aborigines or the Comanches. In their pre-colonial state they would have been unlikely to have even noticed a cooler winter or a warmer summer. They can't fail to notice the social and economic changes forcing their way into the once pre-technological era in which they lived.