Articles by Xavier Bartaburu

Xamã is a year old. In August 2022, the jaguar cub was found all by himself, extremely malnourished and feeble, on private land in the municipality of Sinop, in Brazil’s…

Márcio Werá Mirim, chief of the village of Tekoá Yvy Porã, shares his people’s sacred story in a mix of Portuguese and Guarani as he walks along a path in…

YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil – Four officers from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, throw themselves from a helicopter into the murky waters of the Uraricoera River below and swim toward…

“One of the most important days of my life,” are the words that anthropologist Beatriz Matos uses to describe her February visit to the Javari Valley on her first project…

SANTA CATARINA, BRASIL — A serene orange hue cuts across the horizon with the first rays of sunlight as dawn breaks in the mountainous countryside of Brazil’s second-most southerly state,…

If increasing global warming and deforestation were to transform Amazonia into an irreversibly degraded dry savanna, what could happen to the approximately 300 species of mammals that live there? These…

PERUÍBE, Brazil — On Oct. 2, 2020, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court overruled the marco temporal cutoff criteria for demarcating Indigenous lands, and upheld the 2016 homologation of the Piaçaguera Indigenous…

Journalists in Brazil have a saying, an expression penned by Brazilian poet Gonçalves Dias: “Boys, I saw it!” It’s popular among anyone going to the field to make reports, interview…

When it comes to environmental destruction in Brazil, the world’s focus tends to be on the deforestation and burning of the Amazon. Yet the Cerrado, the second-largest Brazilian biome, at…

Canadian mining company Aura Minerals plans to establish a major gold extraction project in Brazil’s Tocantins state without hearing the Quilombola (slave descendant) community that will be affected by the operations, thus violating their right to free, prior and informed consultation.

Reverse logistics, a principle introduced in Brazil in 2010 in the Brazilian government’s National Policy for Solid Waste (PNRS), is an approach that seeks to minimize levels of waste generated…

Whether you’re looking at her giant paintings of Indigenous women creators or having a chat before the interview, Daiara Tukano always transmits her power, her well-honed critical viewpoint and excellent…

The resumption of work on the controversial EF-170 railway project — also known as the Ferrogrão — in the Brazilian Amazon has sparked demands for a proper consultation process from…

At a conference on herpetology — the branch of zoology studying reptiles and amphibians — at the end of the 1980s, researchers from numerous countries began to tell of disappearing…

Barcarena – a traditional Quilombola territory in Pará – saw little of the development promised when the industrial complex was established with several mining enterprises — especially Imerys and Albras…

When we speak about destruction of the Amazon, deforestation data are often the reference. Over the last few decades, it is the rates of clear cutting that are best documented,…

“Everything is happening at the wrong time,” says Myrian Pereira Vasques. “The trees are blossoming at the wrong time, the soil isn’t the same, the weather is too hot and…

As unbelievable as it may seem, a neighborhood in the city of Salvador did not have electricity until the late 1980s and piped water until the end of the 20th…

"Keeping the nest tree standing and protecting a small area around that tree is one of our goals," says Tânia Sanaiotti, founder of the Harpy Eagle Project, 25 years old…

Canadian mining company Belo Sun wants to build a huge gold mine in the Big Bend of the Xingu region, in Pará; project foresees the extraction of 74 tons of gold in 20 years of operation.

Residents of a landless worker’s settlement in Anapu, Pará state in Brazil’s Amazon region, accuse the Federal Government of favoring large landowners, land grabbers and corporations at the expense of poor and landless peasants.

The sun had not yet risen when the men and women of the Mehinako people, inhabitants of the Xingu Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, started their…

Dom Roque Paloschi, president of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) and archbishop of Porto Velho in the state of Roraima, Brazil, has been under attack because he denounced Indigenous people’s rights violations. In 2021, 355 attacks against Indigenous people were reported in Brazil — the most since 2013, according to a CIMI report.

“Nothing for us without us.” On a video published on Instagram by the Fundação Amazônia Sustentável (FAS – Sustainable Amazon Foundation), Samela Sateré Mawé, a young activist, appears in a…

"Our Atlantic Forest has several very important living beings, species that are already endangered and that we need to bring back," says the Pataxó Matias Santana, president of the Foresters…

From the coastline to freshwater streams, people living in Amazonia say industrial fishing, deforestation, hydroelectric dams and climate change have reduced fish populations. Industrial fishing is one of the main explanations for the low numbers. Fishermen report that large boats are trawling with nets up to 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) in length that do not allow fish to reach the shore.

Marked by a fine for illegal deforestation, Agro Xavante, an initiative created with the blessing of president Bolsonaro, moves ahead with leasing public lands and a failure to conduct prior consultation with the local population.

Neidinha, Almir and Txai Suruí are leading the fight against invaders destroying two of the most threatened Indigenous territories in the Brazilian state of Rondônia: the Sete de Setembro and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau reserves.

Even before a definitive license was issued by the Brazilian main environmental agency, paving works had already begun on the so-called Middle Section of the BR-319, the highway that connects the Amazonian cities of Porto Velho and Manaus.

Small- and large-scale fishers report an increase in the volume and variety of fish species in the Patos Lagoon and the coast of Rio Grande do Sul state. Such abundance came after a bill banning motorized trawling on the state’s coast was passed and signed into law in 2018. Drafted by fishers and scientists and passed unanimously in the state parliament, the law goes against the interests of President Bolsonaro’s allies.