Jena Webb

This chronicle follows the causal arc from biodiversity loss through to increasing pandemics, putting at risk the most vulnerable sectors of society, including the very indigenous people who are some of the best custodians of biodiversity. We review evidence of the links between the destruction of the environment and disease emergence and expand the discussion to cover the potential for epidemics to arise in the Amazon.

Researchers looking at the links between the health of ecosystems, animals and humans have foretold of a pandemic for years (Fan et al. 2019). The who, what, where and when of the current, surreal drama in which we have all unwittingly become pivotal characters in central casting were a mystery. But the stage was set on the ‘how’ decades ago.

The alarm raised by scientists mostly fell on deaf ears, until crisis hit.

The story begins with human encroachment into natural landscapes. Across the world, industrial activities such as agriculture, ranching, hydroelectric dam construction, urbanization, logging, oil extraction and mining are replacing earth’s original biomes with ones in which humans dominate. 76% of the earth’s land has already been altered, leaving only 23% to wilderness (Watson et al. 2018). This is the setting…

…now, the scenario. Land degradation provokes biodiversity loss, which in turn facilitates the propagation of diseases. Here is how it plays out. Diverse ecosystems harbor high biodiversity with significant genetic diversity. The genetic diversity of potential victims hampers the spread of disease by consistently posing unique challenges to would-be-killers (van Houte et al., 2016). If the genetic diversity of the potential target animal is high it will be harder to find a foolproof way to circumvent the immune system designed to thwart it and sneak past the cellular wall. On the other hand, if the gene pool is low, as it is when animal biodiversity is lost, pathogens quickly find solutions to dupe hosts’ immune systems and then spread rapidly throughout the relatively uniform population.

Enter HUMANS. Meanwhile, landscapes where humans dominate lead to a greater proportion of species that can tolerate the presence of humans, such as rodents and bats, as the more reclusive types slink deeper and deeper into the remaining wilderness. Exit more BIODIVERSITY. Furthermore, some of the characteristics that make these species adaptable to human environments also make them excellent hosts for infectious diseases: high mobility, longevity, and social living in colonies (Mühldorfer, 2013). As demonstrated by indigenous people across the globe, we do have the capacity to occupy spaces without dominating and degrading them: 80% of the world’s biodiversity resides inside traditional indigenous territories (Sobrevilia, 2008). But when human activities run amok and push really comes to shove, it’s Mother Nature who has the last words: Back off!

Here’s where the plot thickens. As humans inhabit these shifting landscapes containing less and less biodiversity they come into contact with unforeseen pathogen hosts. The most common suspects are either domesticated animals or those sociable, adaptable, human tolerant characters, the rodents and bats. Original hosts develop immunity to pathogens over eons, carrying them unknowingly. Spillover events – when a pathogen adapts to use a new host – sometimes lead to permanent host shifts and are common in evolutionary history (Longdon et al. 2014). This is the making of an epidemic, because the new host has no immunity to the “novel” virus.

Coronaviruses, which are a large class of viruses normally found in rodents, bats and birds, cannot directly affect humans, and must pass through an intermediary host first. In a foreshadowing of what is coming to pass with COVID-19, SARS took center stage in 2002 when this coronavirus moved from bat to civet, a small nocturnal mammal, before becoming virulent for humans. Avian and swine flu often originate in domesticated animals. The H1N1 epidemic of 2009 has been traced to central Mexico and is believed to be the result of long-distance live pig travel allowing several strains of virus to recombine, generating a bug that could inflict harm on humans (Mena et al. 2016).

The “Spanish” flu of 1918 infected 500 million and killed between 50 and 100 million people (Sutton, 2018). The origins of this H1N1 virus are murky, but there was certainly a crossover from birds to humans, likely involving pigs as intermediary hosts (van Wijhe et al. 2018). Interestingly, it is believed that this virus was able to attain pandemic proportions despite the simplified demographics of the time due to troop movements throughout Europe and back to North America during WWI (van Wijhe et al. 2018). Few places escaped the pandemic, which reached its tendrils into the remotest regions of the world, including the Amazon (Chowell et al. 2011).

Scientists are furiously investigating how the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped the species barrier to arrive in humans causing COVID-19. Inquiries have revealed that the original host is most certainly a bat. Molecular studies are pointing to the intermediary host being either pangolin – an endangered mammal traded illegally in wet markets of Asia – snakes or turtles, which are both legally sold at market (Liu, et al. 2020). This fact points to the primacy of clamping down on the illegal trade of wildlife and tightening up laws where they are lax, especially with respect to the sale of live animals at ‘wet’ markets.

It would be all too easy to point the finger at the bat or the ‘Chinese’ in this modern-day mystery, but the real culprit is human greed and its accomplice, rampant resource extraction. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, news outlets have published countless articles describing the settings in which pandemics arise and the UN’s environment chief, Inger Andersen has emphasized that “our long-term response must tackle habitat and biodiversity loss”. Hopefully, central protagonists, such as researchers and health care professionals, can control the narrative keeping the focus on the underlying causes of the COVID-19 crisis, not easy ‘scapebats.’

The 2019 dry season in the Amazon had the world on the edge of its seat as unfathomable acreage of pristine rainforest and previously cleared forest burned at the hands of land owners hungry for more land on which to grow cash crops, such as soy and cattle. All of this charred land is on the ancestral territories of the Amazon’s original people; however, it is unclear how much of the burned area was on land currently under indigenous jurisdiction. Contrary to elsewhere in the world, the main driver of land use change in Brazil is rising affluence, not poverty or population growth (Nava et al., 2017). In this sense, avarice is the principal motor of land clearing, while fire is the vehicle, setting in motion biodiversity loss and potentially providing the spark for a spillover event.

The vast majority of emerging zoonotic diseases in South America are vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and zika, which require a vector, like a mosquito, to infect humans. COVID-19 is an ‘air-borne’ infectious disease. Vector-borne diseases are dependent on the ecological niche of the vector (temperature range, humidity, etc.) making it much less likely that they would reach pandemic scale; whereas airborne diseases travel easily from one human to the next in a wider range of habitats.

Hantaviruses, common in South America, are airborne viruses of bat origin which are known to occasionally spillover into rodents. In humans, they cause different ailments including hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS). Hantavirus infections increased 800% in Brazil between 2001 and 2009 (Laerte Pinto, et al. 2014). As opposed to coronavirus, very little human-to-human transmission of hantavirus has been observed, but the few cases in which it did arise in Argentina demonstrate that it is possible.

Research along the deforestation arc of Brazil, the world’s largest deforestation frontier, has demonstrated that bat diversity is significantly lower than in the rest of the Amazon. Two species, the greater spear-nosed bat, Phyllostomus hastatus, and the gnome fruit-eating bat, Dermanura gnoma, were found to have antibodies signaling that they are hantavirus carriers (Sabino-Santos Jr, et al. 2019).

Fires further aggravate the problem because as fields and forests are lit, rodents flee flames taking shelter in dwellings, where humans come into direct contact with them (Laerte Pinto et al. 2014). Bats are also disturbed by fires. Prior to the deadly Nipah outbreak in Asia in 1997-1998, smoke from severe forest fires drove fruit eating bats from the forest into orchards, where a novel virus was forged upon recombination with pig viruses (Bonilla-Aldana et al. 2019). Climate change also contributes to diminishing biodiversity: projections show that, as it heats up and dries out, large swaths of the Amazon could shift to savannah-type landscapes, which house considerably less wildlife than tropical rainforests.

Furthermore, very preliminary data coming out of Italy is leading some scientists to believe that air pollution acts as a carrier for COVID-19. Viruses hitchhike on the particles in the air, facilitating its spread. Previous research has shown that dust storms (Chen et al., 2010) and haze (Ye et al., 2016) act as propagation mechanisms for other respiratory illnesses. If this is the case, COVID-19 or a potential hantavirus outbreak could be widely broadcast by the next Amazon fire season. The lower fauna richness in general, proliferation of human tolerant animals and proximity with settlers following deforestation through burning, would constitute significant risk factors for possible disease emergence in the Amazon. And indigenous people, who are in the firing line between settlers and the falling forest, could be the first to fall victim to an Amazonian virus making its debut.

Several recent deaths in Ecuadorian indigenous Shuar and Siekopai communities are suspected to be COVID-19 related, while in Brazil, there have been at least three COVID-19 deaths and 27 confirmed cases among indigenous people to date.

The specter of new pandemics adds one more motive in our arsenal of reasons to conserve intact forests. One way of doing this is to slow down resource extraction and agricultural expansion in a post COVID-19 era. Already, indigenous peoples in the Amazon have been demanding an immediate moratorium on any activity that includes the entrance of foreigners into indigenous territories, mining activities, logging, oil exploration and extraction, industrial agriculture, religious proselytization, or increased militarization, especially in trans-border territories under pressure from armed actors and organized crime.

Unfortunately, in some places companies and desperados are taking advantage of the dire situation to push ahead with controversial activities including mining. Meanwhile, in the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous people have witnessed an increase in illegal activities and reduced law enforcement. This lapse in vigilance could exacerbate the 2020 fire season, and as we have seen, fires in the Amazon pose a particularly volatile situation in which diseases could emerge and propagate rampantly among some of the world’s most vulnerable people. However, the COVID-19 crisis has, in other instances, temporarily paused many of these industrial activities, fugitives on the lam, and, in some places, encouraging signs of cleaner air and animals repossessing key habitats are emerging. These beacons show us that another world is possible. Indigenous land management practices are another lodestar: 40% of the world’s protected and natural spaces overlap with indigenous lands (Garnett et al. 2018), highlighting that their management strategies simultaneously allowed for their own survival and the survival or abundant biodiversity.

We still have time to contain the impact of COVID-19 on indigenous communities and avoid a catastrophic loss of life. Please donate to the Amazon Emergency Action Fund to help indigenous communities get information, supplies and medical services to protect themselves during this crisis.

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Over the centuries many parallels have been drawn between women and the earth, starting with the age-old (and, for some, contested) Mother Earth, or Pachamama. More recently, the destruction of the earth for natural resource extraction has been compared with and attributed to the same underlying patriarchal forces as violence against women. Correspondingly, research has shown that environmentalism is perceived as un-masculine (Brough et al. 2016) and even that men are less likely to recycle than women because they are worried people will think they’re homosexual.

There is another parallel that deserves attention, but, due to its very nature, receives little – that of invisibility. Both women and ecosystems are often invisible in the same ways. Ironically, both are also omnipresent and so crucial. Omnipresent but invisible. Invisibility has dire consequences for the health of both women and ecosystems. This blog explores the ways that the perpetuation of this invisibility is structurally built into our institutions, societies and systems with a specific focus on consequences for Amazonian Indigenous women.

It will come as no surprise to readers to state that women are underrepresented in many spheres: politics, business, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Manuela Lavinas Picq’s (2014) in depth analysis of gender in Ecuadorian Indigenous politics points out that despite a discourse that advocates social justice and despite women’s prominence in indigenous struggles, Ecuador’s contemporary, Indigenous movement counts few women in its political leadership ranks.

Strong, female, indigenous leaders have broken through structural barriers throughout Ecuador’s history and fortunately are more and more frequent. In an early example, Tránsito Amaguaña, a Kichwa woman, helped set up the first Indigenous organization in Ecuador in the 1930s and, along with Dolores Caguango, was instrumental in the establishment of bilingual schools. In 1992, a historic march from Puyo to the capital, Quito, to fight for land rights was led by Kichwa women. More recently, in 2019, a women’s march in Brazil brought together hundreds of Indigenous and allied women to protest the destruction of the Amazon and the even more recent Indigenous mobilization against the International Monetary Fund-imposed austerity measures in Ecuador featured a women’s march. But we must not let the exceptions further blind us to the structural and systemic factors which keep women and issues important to them, for the most part, out of public purview.

Nor should we fall into the trap of concluding that because women are not on the fore, they are not involved or are complacent. Women are key actors in Indigenous social justice and environmental struggles (Jenkins 2015), such as climate change. Feminist approaches to climate change are often holistic, systemic movements that address multiple environmental and justice issues at the same time (Rodriguez Acha, 2017). Further, women who are denied public tribune engage in powerful “everyday resistance” (Scott, 1985; Zanotti, 2013). Laura Zanotti (2013), in a study entitled “Resistance and the politics of negotiation: women, place and space among the Kayapó in Amazonia, Brazil” found that the everyday events and decision making processes that most villagers engage in can be as important to resistance movements as the highly visible, public acts that only a few leaders of the community participate in. Finally, western ideas of individualism, and even a feminist emphasis on autonomy and leadership, can obscure the ways in which indigenous women exert influence in their communities for the good of the collective, rather than angling for individual women’s rights (Figueroa Romero, 2018).

Tear gas, a chemical weapon, was the Ecuadorian police and military’s primary method to disperse crowds during the nationwide indigenous-led protests in October 2019

This gap between what is and what is seen exists across cultures and domains and it is also present in sectors such as sustainable forestry management (Elias et al. 2017) and health research. Karen Messing, a trailblazer of gender studies in occupational health, a field that largely considered women’s work as “light” and therefore without risk, wrote a book entitled “One-eyed Science” (1998) in which she lays bare the untold stories of women’s suffering at work and the structural issues that blind us to their suffering. More recently, Caroline Criado Perez (2019) exposes the gender data gap and reveals an invisible bias toward the male body. Her book is a startling litany of examples in which using “male” as default harms women: diagnosis of heart attacks, protective gear, and male-biased disaster warning systems. She calls this “male-unless-otherwise-indicated thinking.”

Numerous scholars and movements have also pointed out that women’s labor is widely unrecognized. They draw attention to women’s invisible role in housework, as caretaker, as food provider. To cite an Amazonian example, Susanna Hecht (2007) noted that in the Amazonian Rubber Boom context “the quotidian presence of toiling women in households was viewed as unremarkable, and so remained unremarked.” (p.324)

The powerful ‘#metoo’ movement has exposed the pervasiveness of violence against women. Violence most often occurs in private spaces – homes, hotel rooms, dark alleyways – out of view. The fear of reprisal and shame prevents women from calling out their aggressors, perpetuating a cycle of voluntary blindness on the part of some and fearful silence on the part of others. Research by the World Health Organization shows that the lifetime prevalence of violence against women in rural Peru is 61% (WHO, 2005). In the Ecuadorian Amazon, researcher Isabel Goicolea (2001) found that the single most commonly cited women’s health problem was ‘husband beats wife,’ cited by 84% of respondents.

The corollaries between women’s invisibility and ecosystems’ invisibility are striking. Ecosystems do not have representatives in governments or advocates on boards of directors. Their streams burble and the wind rustles through their leaves all over the world, but there is a generalized hush about them in parliaments and board rooms in those very same places. Ecosystems are largely absent from public discourse, planning, and decision making. When and where the environment is present, it is mostly viewed as a natural resource to be exploited in production processes, not as an entity with inherent value.

In this sense, women and ecosystems can also be perversely conspicuous in the some of the same ways. While women’s bodies are objectified, landscapes are eyed for their resources. While women are prized for their reproductive services, ecosystems are valued when they are ‘productive.’

In some few instances and localities, people and systems are seeking ways in which the earth’s voice can be heard. For example, in 2008, Ecuador was the first country to enshrine the “rights of nature” in the constitution. Bolivia soon followed suit and since several countries, including New Zealand, Australia and India, have given legal rights to specific rivers (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018). For years, the Ecuadorian edict remained quiet, until a series of court cases, including one brought to trial by the community of Sinangoe in 2018 against illegal mining, “activated” it. Nonetheless, Environmental Impact Assessments – the tool used by governments to evaluate the impacts of development projects on the health of the ecosystem – are too often done hastily, willfully turning a blind eye to the very factors that might impede the project.

Parallels also exist in the invisibility of the work that women and ecosystems carry out. Ecosystem ‘work’ is sometimes referred to as ecosystem services or the “subsidy of nature.” The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) shone a light on these services, giving them names and classifying them as provisioning services (e.g. food), regulating services (e.g. wastewater treatment), supporting services (e.g. habitat) and cultural services (e.g. mental health). Similar to women in their households, ecosystems “toil” to provide us with clean water, food, fertile soils, and materials, while this work remains patently “unremarked.” Seeing the hidden services of nature is essential for developing best practices and effective resource policies that protect ecosystems and the services they provide (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010).

Lindsay Ofrias (2017), argues that the widespread contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon by oil is an ‘invisible harm’ in that the violence that it represents is unseen even though the actual contamination is often very obvious. She also contends that this ‘invisible harm’ leads to ‘invisible opportunities’ to companies in the form of cost-cutting and even, contentiously, silencing opponents through their oppression. This ‘invisible opportunity’ has its equivalent in the gender sphere in that as women are silenced, men and their voices can benefit. Similarly, in a piece about the process of First Nations-Settler reconciliation in Canada, Hiba Zafran notes that reflexive attention to which discourses are used to frame concerns is central, as certain languages and ways of seeing “…render[…] invisible, [and do] not provide a language for the mixed intentionalities of oppressors, and possibilities within oppressive systems.” (Zafran, 2019).

The “Not in my backyard” (NIMBY) syndrome is an expression of the religation of environmental violence to out-of-the-way places, whereby toxic waste sites and open pit mines are exceedingly more likely to be located in poorer neighbourhoods and communities. The #NoDAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) movement was precisely about a push to eclipse the potential damage of a pipeline by moving its original path from the white-dominated town, Bismark, to the Indigenous reserve, Standing Rock (Estes, 2017). Similarly, Maurice et al. (2019) recently documented local people’s testimony of oil companies using antiquated and now-illegal disposal practices that release wastes directly into the Ecuadorian Amazonian environment, clandestinely under the cover of night.

Many contaminants inflicting violence on the environment literally are invisible: mercury, lead, PCBs, endocrine disruptors, all cannot be seen with the naked eye. As Michelle Murphy so aptly puts it, “…the infrastructure of chemical relations that surround and make us largely resides in the realm of the imperceptible (Murphy 2006). We might feel some of our chemical relations and the pain they cause, but the fullness of our chemical relations ends up being largely conjectural” (Murphy, 2017, p. 496). She later makes the point that, in this post-industrial era, these contaminants are also ubiquitous (Ibid, p. 497).

Donna Mergler (2012), a Canadian researcher with 50 years of experience investigating toxic hazards, makes the case that different exposure to contaminants for women and men can be obscured if data is not disaggregated along gender lines, while differential impacts can be occluded if data is not analyzed separately by sex. For example, women in the Amazon were found to be exposed to mercury (Webb et al., 2016) and hydrocarbons (Webb et al., 2017) through their relationship with water, whereas other factors were considered more important in exposure for men. If the data had not been explored separately for women and men this relationship would never have been uncovered.

These multiple layers of invisibility – gender, ecosystem, race and contaminant – add up to create a virtual opaqueness in which the complexity and nuances involved seem too daunting to disentangle and depict. This parallel of invisibility is no coincidence. As Sharlene Mollett and Caroline Faria (2013) point out, “Gender and race are a historically important coupling that shapes and is shaped by space. Take the “myth of virgin land” in former “colonies” where women, and land are posited in the colonial texts to be “discovered”, “named” and “owned” and where indigenous peoples are made invisible by male conquers.”

Pulling back the invisibility cloak shrouding women and ecosystems exposes the roots of some of the more symptomatic, societal ills. Admitting that there is a gender imbalance in negotiating tables, editorial boards, high stakes meetings, parlaments, top executives, panels, health data, and so much more is a first step to redressing this inequality. Recognizing and embracing women’s and nature’s perspectives could lead to major paradigm shifts, such as more collaborative decision making processes and laws that are conceived, built and applied with a view to conserving ecosystem health into the future.

While we should be wary of “pinkwashing,” we should celebrate the courage of women who break through structural barriers to project their voice. Women’s marches and coalitions, such as the one in August 2019 in Brazil, are so important in rendering the work and perspectives of women in the Amazon visible. It is not because the system is biased against heeding women and incorporating them into official decision making processes that they are not there carrying out crucial work in the struggle against injustice. The 2019 upheaval in Ecuador sparked by International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed austerity measures is perhaps an illustration of a society in transition. Indigenous women were at the forefront of the protests on the streets, as many emblematic images made clear, however, when it finally came time to negotiate with the government they were conspicuously underrepresented. Interestingly, while the protests were triggered by economic factors, they quickly became about much more as Indigenous peoples began to pronounce on their territorial rights.

Let this be a rallying cry to each of us to recognize where gender enters into our lives and work and to name it. We, as a society – meaning both men and women – need to look for opportunities to amplify women’s voices, from youth to elders, multiplying the occasions for women to lead, express themselves and take action.

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