To save the Amazon, what if we listened to those living within It?
Beneath a setting sun, marchers clad in feathered headdresses and hand woven clothing streamed across the Alto Beni River bridge on a muggy June evening, calling out:
“Agua si! Minería no!”
“Viva Amazonia!”
The march marked the opening of a four-day gathering known as the Pan-Amazon Social Forum (FOSPA), a semi-annual incubator where activists and leaders from Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other land-based communities exchange ideas for defending nature and the people of the Amazon rainforest.
Attendees, young and old, brown, Black and white, chanting “Water, yes! Mining no!” clasped signs representing dozens of organizations and causes, from “Women in the Northern Amazon” to “Nunca Más Un Mundo Sin Nosotros,” or Never Again a World Without Us.
For the 1,400 who descended on this small, bucolic Amazonian town, most of whom hail from Indigenous and other local communities across the nine …
