Forests are home to people too - not just ‘great apes, tigers, leopards and jaguars’
UK government statements ignore the millions who live in and depend on the world's forests
Earlier this month Nemonte Nenquimo, an indigenous Waorani woman from the Ecuadorian Amazon, issued a powerful statement after winning one of 2024’s Time magazine’s “Earth Awards.” “Someone recently asked me why it was important to protect the Amazon rainforest from oil drilling,” she started by saying. “The question made me angry. Can you imagine being questioned about the importance of protecting your home from being destroyed in a fire? Or about protecting your home, your extended family’s homes, and all your people’s homes from demolition? Can you imagine being asked: Why is it important to protect your country from nuclear devastation?”
“Those questions seem absurd only when you take the existence of your home and your people for granted,” Nenquimo continued. “Western civilization has always taken the destruction of my home and my people for granted. And now, this well-meaning question assumes that I must offer a defense of my existence.”
“Why is it important to protect the Amazon from oil exploitation?” she asked again when concluding. “My life, the lives of my family and people, our homes, our culture, our language, the lives of myriad plant and animal species, many of which are endemic to the Amazon, the life of the forest itself, and the lives of millions of people, perhaps even yours, all depend on it. Is that good enough?”
In other words, it’s important to protect the Amazon rainforest because, among other reasons, people like the Waorani live there. To riff on a well-worn slogan: “It’s people’s home, stupid!” Indeed, according to some estimates, the world’s four billion hectares of forest are home to 70 million indigenous people and 300 million people in total, while up to 1.6 billion depend on them for their livelihoods.
This might sound blindingly obvious, but apparently it needs to be pointed out to certain UK government representatives given how, in recent public messaging regarding the 2021 Environment Act and the urgent need to reduce UK complicity in global deforestation, the fact that forests should be protected because of the 100s of millions depending on them seems not to figure. For example, last December, during the United Nations’ “COP28” climate change conference in Dubai, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) issued a press release revealing various details about the much-delayed, still pending regulations needed to implement Schedule 17 of the Act. It was titled - with preposterous confidence - “Supermarket essentials will no longer be linked to illegal deforestation”, and subtitled “Orangutans, leopards, jaguars and other endangered species protected with new legislation to safeguard forests.”
That press release went on to say the new legislation “will protect the habitats of some of the world’s most precious and endangered species, including tigers and leopards,” and that this is required to “help tackle climate change, and [protect forests’] wildlife-rich canopies.” Rainforests in particular were mentioned for their capacity to “absorb harmful gasses and provide a home to thousands of animal and plant species”, while the Secretary of State at DEFRA, Steve Barclay, was quoted as saying how “heart-rending” it is to see deforestation “destroying the habitats of tigers, jaguars, orangutans and many other endangered species.”
Any mention of the people living in the world’s forests?
Nothing at all.
Three days later Barclay made a statement to the House of Commons: it was the same story. He described forests as home to “around 80% of the world’s wildlife on land and many species found nowhere else”, and “beloved and crucial species like orangutans and other great apes, tigers, leopards and jaguars”, as well as “habitat for endangered wildlife” and then “many beloved endangered species.”
Any mention of people?
Nothing at all.
That same statement was made - verbatim - the same day in the House of Lords by Lord Benyon, a Minister at both DEFRA and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Obviously, there was nothing in it about people either.
Perhaps Barclay, Benyon and DEFRA et al should talk to someone like Nenquimo in Ecuador? Either that, or read her Time statement.
“The forest is our grocer, our pharmacy, our hardware store, our theater, our gym, our park,” she explained. “We cultivate our small orchards and walk the forest to hunt and to gather food, medicine, tools, and beauty and art supplies. Politicians and oil executives think that we are idiots, that we plod among the trees picking things up that look yummy. They say that we don’t even know the value of the resources beneath the ground. But that is how they show their own ignorance.”