Shamans Called in to Fight Amazon Blaze
3/29/98
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Title: Shamans Called in to Fight Amazon Blaze
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 3/29/98
Byline: Joelle Diderich
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Two shamans were called in Sunday to help fight the fires
that have raged through the Amazon rainforest for two months and shown up
Brazil's lack of readiness to combat such disasters by conventional means.
``They are going to hold a ceremony inside the Yanomami reservation,'' said
Marcos Ferreira, an official at the government's Indian Foundation (Funai).
``It is a ritual to repel the smoke and if possible, bring on rain.''
Firefighters say only heavy rains can douse the fires, set by poor subsistence
farmers, which have burned out of control in northern Roraima state and
destroyed an area of highland savannah and virgin rainforest potentially as
large as Lebanon.
The state government declared a state of calamity in January but its appeals
for help from the federal government went largely ignored until the press and
environmental pressure groups drew attention to the scope of the disaster in
March.
Wherever reporters went, they found large swathes of savannah reduced to a
blackened wasteland, pristine rainforest covered in a thick blanket of smoke
and skeletal cattle huddling around depleted water holes.
Two weeks ago, 40 firemen were fighting the flames in a territory the size of
Britain. By Sunday, that figure had swelled to 1,400, including volunteers
from Argentina and Venezuela.
Significantly, the Brazilian government has now accepted help from the United
Nations and the World Bank in a region whose sovereignty military officials
have traditionally jealously guarded.
Officials from the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) first offered to send a
team of experts to Brazil in November, saying they could share experience
gained in helping to fight forest fires in Indonesia last year.
Despite its huge forests, Brazil has no aircraft equipped to carry water and
has relied so far on four Argentine helicopters equipped with monsoon
buckets. The few Brazilian firemen trained to combat forest fires had never
set foot in the Amazon.
The team of U.N. experts is due in Brasilia Sunday. A similar mission was
heading back to Indonesia, where fires were reported to be spreading again in
East Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo island.
Environmentalists said the Indonesia blazes, which cast a thick pall of smoke
over parts of Southeast Asia, would have catastrophic consequences for the
area's wildlife and could have a negative impact on the climate.
They now fear the same is true of the Amazon, although nobody knows yet how
widespread the ecological damage has been.
Respiratory illnesses have risen sharply in the state capital Boa Vista, where
residents have been breathing smog for more than eight weeks, but no one has
resorted to the surgical masks used by Indonesians last year.
Environmental experts say the large quantities of carbon monoxide being
released into the atmosphere could cause long-term health problems and
contribute to global warming.
Amid fears that the fires could spread to the southern Amazon when the dry
season begins there in May, pressure is building for Brazil to work on a long-
term solution to the problem such as an environmental protection team.
Meanwhile, the two elderly mystics, known as ``xapuris'', are expected to
perform a rain ceremony similar to a Yanomami ritual in which shamans enter a
hallucinogenic trance by snorting powdered bark of the Virola tree.
The Yanomami Indians see the smoke of the fires as a sign from spirits in the
sky that epidemics are on the way.
The Yanomami have in the past blamed wild-cat gold diggers, known as
``garimpeiros'', for angering the spirits by robbing the earth of its minerals.
The garimpeiros brought malaria into the reservation and polluted rivers with
mercury used for mining.
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