Climate Change Crisis and Environmental Justice in the Amazon 2024

Albert Ko

Dr. Albert Icksang Ko is the Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and a Collaborating Researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazilian Ministry of Health. His research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. Dr. Ko coordinates a research program in Brazil, which focuses on delineating the role of social marginalization, urban ecology and climate in the emergence of infectious disease threats in slum communities and informal settlements. He and his team have mobilized research capacity to develop and implement community-based interventions to epidemics of meningitis, leptospirosis, dengue, Zika virus infection and associated birth defects, and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Marina Silva

Maria Osmarina Marina da Silva Vaz de Lima (born Maria Osmarina da Silva; 8 February 1958), known as Marina Silva, is a Brazilian politician and environmentalist and current Brazil’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change (since 2023). She is the founder and former spokeswoman for the Sustainability Network (REDE). During her political career, Silva served as a senator of the state of Acre between 1995 and 2011 and Minister of the Environment from 2003 to 2008. She ran for president in 2010, 2014 and 2018.

Alessandra Sampaio

Alessandra Sampaio is a stylist with a focus on sustainability and an environmental entrepreneur. She has a degree in Fashion, specializing in accessories and costume design. She has participated in various editorials, fashion shows, and TV shows, and was a partner in two handbag brands. She has taught classes on developing craft potential in NGOs and companies.

She is the president of the Dom Phillips Institute.

“Life has offered me a radical change of direction. I embrace Dom’s legacy with great affection and care, and am gradually learning more about our forests, their peoples, and their allies. It is within this sustainable and regenerative universe, with abounding concepts of connection with ourselves and our surroundings, that I would like to share with all who are interested.”

João Biehl

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Brazil LAB at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. In his ethnographic work, Biehl explores how science and technology move from laboratories to markets, health policies, and unequal lifeworlds in the Global South, with a focus on the pharmaceuticalization of care and the judicialization of the right to health. In his historical anthropological work, Biehl traces nature-based healing practices and the afterlives of anti-colonial insurgencies in southern settler frontiers. Biehl is currently leading a new transdisciplinary and collaborative research project, “Indigenizing Conservation Research and Policy,” which seeks to incorporate Indigenous principles and practices into effective tools for promoting a sustainable Amazon.

Eliane Brum

Eliane Brum (born May 1966, in Ijuí) is a Brazilian journalist, writer and documentarist. In 2019, she was long-listed for a National Book Award and has many other awards and prizes to her credit. She has published several books, both fiction and non-fiction, and has a column in El País Internacional and also writes regularly for The Guardian. In 2017, she moved to Altamira in the Amazon basin and then, a few years ago, she bought a small plot of land with her husband, Jonathan Watts, the environment editor for The Guardian. Alongside others in their small community, the couple are reforesting land that was cleared for cattle pasture.

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/eliane-brum-banzeiro-okoto/

Caetano Scannavino

Caetano Scannavino is the Coordinator of the Health and Happiness project which he founded with his brother Eugenio, a rural doctor. Its mission is providing 30,000 inhabitants of the Amazon jungle with education, health, and economic services.

David Cordero-Heredia

David Cordero-Heredia is a Law Professor and RFJ Journal Director at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. He is currently visiting Cornell University as a Visiting Fellow of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. He has served as a visiting professor at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (UASB), Universidad de las Américas (UDLA), Universidad Estatal Península de Santa Elena, and University of Azuay (UDA). From 2018 to 2019, he co-taught the International Human Rights Clinic: Policy Advocacy at Cornell Law School as a Senior Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow. His research focuses on the interaction between social movements and the law, particularly on implementing the rights of nature with a concentration on indigenous peoples’ participation.

Professor Cordero-Heredia is a dedicated human rights advocate, representing indigenous peoples from Ecuador and Colombia in the Inter-American Human Rights System. In 2022, he was part of the legal team that presented the case of the Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation, Tagaeri & Taromenane, before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The decision of the Court will set the protection standards for over 300 isolated indigenous groups around the world.

Daniel Camargos

Daniel Camargos is an investigative reporter with 20 years of experience focusing on conflicts in the Amazon. He won several journalism awards, including the Vladimir Herzog. He was vice president of the Union of Professional Journalists of Minas Gerais and director of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji). He has been working as an investigative journalist at Repórter Brasil since 2018 and has worked at Folha de S.Paulo and Minas Gerais newspapers. He has published in international outlets such as The Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, Mongabay, and El País, and in several national publications such as Revista Piauí, Estado de S. Paulo and UOL.

Beto Marubo

Beto Marubo is a prominent Indigenous leader in Brazil and coordinating member of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (UNIVAJA). He worked alongside Bruno Pereira, the activist murdered in 2022 when investigating illegal mining and logging with the journalist Dom Philips, to protect the Javari Valley, whose location on the border with Peru and near Colombia has made it especially susceptible to illegal incursions.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/after-two-murders-a-brazilian-indigenous-leader-steps-up-his-fight

Olimpio Guajajara

Mr. Guajajara is the coordinator of the “Guardians of the Forest,” a group of around 100 indigenous activists (among whom 6 have been murdered in the past few years) that defend indigenous lands from illegal miners and loggers.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/09/29/olimpio-guajajara-guardian-of-the-amazon-rainforest-with-lula-dialogue-will-be-possible_5998498_4.html

Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips is the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent. During almost 20 years as a foreign correspondent, he has reported from nearly 30 countries including China, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Philippines, South Korea and Venezuela. Tom started his career in Brazil, where he has reported extensively from the Amazon, and was the Guardian’s bureau chief in Beijing before returning to Latin America in 2018. Since then, he has reported on a right-wing coup attempt in Brasília, an Indigenous uprising in the Peruvian Andes, the drug conflict in Ecuador and Mexico, Venezuela’s economic collapse, and the election of the libertarian radical Javier Milei in Argentina. He lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Joenia Wapichana

Joenia Wapichana, a Brazilian lawyer and politician, is from the Truarú da Cabeceira indigenous community in Roraima and belongs to the Wapichana indigenous people. With a career marked by the defense of indigenous peoples, she was the first indigenous woman to practice law in Brazil and the first to act before the Supreme Court, in the case that guaranteed the territorial delimitation of the indigenous reserve Raposa Serra do Sol. Joênia was also the country’s first indigenous federal representative, from 2019 to 2022. She is currently the president of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI), becoming the first indigenous woman to lead this organization. In December 2018, she won the UN Human Rights Prize, one of the most important in the world. For her parliamentary work, she received the Congress in Focus award in the Climate and Sustainability category in all the years she has been in office (2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022).

Daniela Alarcon

Daniela Fernandes Alarcon (Ph.D. Social Anthropology, National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2020; M.A. Social Sciences, University of Brasília Brazil, 2013) works at the Brazilian Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as a General Coordinator in the Department of Mediation of Indigenous Land Conflicts. From 2021- 22, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Project “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present”, at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, from 2017-18, she was a Visiting Scholar at the LLILAS Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the past 15 years, she has developed in-depth studies among Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities in Brazil, focusing on territorial rights and the mobilizations of these groups to defend their territories, lifeways and collective projects.

Her master’s thesis earned the Norm and Sibby Whitten Publication Subvention Award for Anthropological Monographs on Lowland South America by the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. It was published in book form in 2019 (in translation, The Return of the Land: The Land Retakings in Serra do Padeiro, Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Territory, Southern Bahia). Her Ph.D. dissertation, awarded Honorable Mention for the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s National Dissertation Award, was published in 2022 (in translation, The Return of Relatives: Mobilization and Territorial Recovery Among the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro, Southern Bahia).

Kristina Lyons

Dr. Kristina Lyons is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania with affiliations with the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.  Her research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, feminist and decolonial science studies, and legal anthropology in Latin America.  Her award-winning manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020), moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms in the capital city of Bogotá, Colombia and the Andean-Amazonian department of Putumayo. It weaves together an intimate ethnography of two kinds of practitioners – state soil scientists and peasant farmers – who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them. Her current work focuses on the memory and mourning of water, hydrogeological processes, participatory forms of territorial planning, socio-natural disaster, and water-inspired subjectivities.  She has also worked on the creation of soundscapes, street performances, photographic essays, graphic novels, community radio programs, digital storytelling platforms, and various forms of literary, journalistic writing, and public engaged scholarship. Kristina has engaged in participatory action research in the Colombian Amazon for over twenty years.

Glenn Shepard

Glenn H. Shepard Jr. attended Princeton University and received his doctorate in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. As an ethnobotanist, medical anthropologist, and filmmaker, he has carried out fieldwork for over thirty years among diverse indigenous peoples around the world, particularly in Amazonia. He has published over 140 research articles on topics including shamanism and traditional medicine, indigenous health and resource management, the rights of isolated peoples and indigenous appropriations of digital media. He has participated in the production of several films, including the Emmy Award-winning documentary, Spirits of the Rainforest. His research, photography and writing has gained visibility in magazines like National Geographic, The New Yorker, Financial Times and The New York Review of Books. He is currently a staff researcher in the Human Sciences Division at the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil. He also serves as anthropology director for Rainforest Flow. He blogs at Notes from the Ethnoground (http://ethnoground.blogspot.com/).

Claudia Valeggia

Professor Claudia Valeggia is originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She received her degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires and her PhD from the University of California, Davis.  She followed up with a postdoc at Harvard University and in 2005 she joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2014, she was appointed as a Professor of Anthropology at Yale University where co-directs the Yale Reproductive Ecology Lab and the Chaco Area Reproductive Ecology Program.

Her work is primarily concerned with the interactions between human reproductive biology and the ecological and cultural context in which it develops. Her research program takes a biosocial and situated approach, that is, the interplay between biology, society, and culture takes a central role in interpreting lived experience of humans. Her research interests include human reproductive ecology, reproductive endocrinology, maternal and child health, and the health of indigenous people in Latin America.

Gerald Torres

Gerald Torres is Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School.

A pioneer in the field of environmental law, Torres has spent his career examining the intrinsic connections between the environment, agricultural and food systems, and social justice. His research into how race and ethnicity impact environmental policy has been influential in the emergence and evolution of the field of environmental justice. His work also includes the study of conflicts over resource management between Native American tribes, states, and the federal government.