Amazon sees further logging murder

15 June 2011 Last updated at 08:47 GMT Small-scale farmers are often in conflict with illegal loggers in the Amazon A rural worker has been shot dead in Brazil's Amazon - the sixth murder in a month in the region, amid conflicts over land and logging.

The body of Obede Loyla Souza was found in dense forest close to his home in the northern state of Para.

The 31-year-old had argued with illegal loggers in the area, the Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission said.

Violence in the Amazon prompted the Brazilian government last month to offer more protection for activists.

Police believe Mr Souza was killed last week, but news of his death was only confirmed on Tuesday.

He was found close to his home in a settlement for landless rural workers near the town of Pacaja.

'Marked man'

The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) said Mr Souza had received death threats after a run-in with loggers, who were reportedly cutting down trees illegally.

"There is in this region a really dangerous group of loggers," Hilario Lopes Costa from the CPT told the Associated Press.

"He had a fight with one of them over the cutting of these trees and he was a marked man from then on."

Local residents told the CPT they had seen four people in a pick-up truck drive to the camp where Mr Souza lived.

Forensic tests showed he was killed by a shot to the head.

Since May, there have been six murders in the states of Para and Rondonia.

Police say not all were linked to land disputes.

However, some of those targeted had been threatened.

Joao Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espirito Santo were found murdered on a nature reserve near Maraba in Para state, where they had been working for the past 24 years.

According to family and friends, the couple had received numerous threats in the past two years for their environmental activism.

Their deaths were followed days later by the killing of rural leader Adelino Ramos in Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia.

The government said it would increase protection for those activists considered most at risk and boost co-operation with state governments to tackle the violence.

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Tree-frogs act as Amazon warning

13 June 2011 Last updated at 09:50 Amazonian tree-frogs are exceedingly well established Tree-frog hot spots in the Amazon have been established over tens of millions of years, say scientists.

To explain why some areas have greater species richness, experts analysed the distribution of 360 tree-frog species.

They found that the most diverse sites were established over 60 million years ago and more recently colonised areas had fewer unique species.

Researchers suggest this is evidence that damaged rainforest could take millions of years to recover.

Continue reading the main story The Amazonian region of Colombia has the highest tree-frog species richness on the planetGlobally, species can vary dramatically. The gladiator frog pictured has enlarged spiny "thumbs" for fighting Tree-frogs can range in size from roughly palm sized to roughly thumbnail sized Scientists from Stony Brook University, New York, US, aimed to shed light on an ongoing debate with their study published in the journal Ecology Letters.

"The question of why there are more species in the tropics has been a puzzle to biologists for more than 200 years, and a particularly challenging part of the problem is to explain why some sites in the rainforest can have more species than an entire continent," explained principal investigator Dr John Wiens.

In the past, species richness had been attributed to climate and some scientists believed that the biodiversity of tropical rainforest was due to their hot wet conditions.

However, by studying the distribution of 360 different tree-frog species from around the world, Dr Wiens found that not all tropical rainforest habitats were home to many different species.

"We found that many tropical rainforest sites have the same, limited number of tree-frog species as some sites in the temperate zone," he said.

"These tropical rainforest sites with low species diversity are in regions that have been colonized by tree-frogs relatively recently, like northwestern South America, Central America, and Australia."

By analysing the DNA relationships between species, Dr Wiens and his colleagues were able to map tree-frog evolution to understand where and when they originated.

Continue reading the main story

The loss of species richness during our lifetimes may actually take tens of millions of to recover from”

End Quote Dr John Wiens The team discovered that areas of high species richness were established before the dinosaurs became extinct.

"The Amazon rainforest have large numbers of tree-frog species per site because tree-frogs have been present and producing new species [there] for more than sixty million years," said Dr Wiens.

The suggestion that high species diversity is established over millions of years could have serious implications for vulnerable habitats.

"As more of the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed and more species are driven to extinction by human activities, the loss of species richness during our lifetimes may actually take tens of millions of to recover from," Dr Wiens warned.

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Brazil to tackle Amazon violence

31 May 2011 Last updated at 10:39 GMT Joao Claudio and Maria had received numerous threats, their famiily said The Brazilian authorities say they are ready to offer increased protection to environmental activists considered most at risk after receiving death threats.

Ministers held an emergency meeting on violence in the Amazon, where three activists were killed last week.

"We will not accept these murders," said Rural Development Minister Afonso Florence.

The Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) has a list of 125 activists who have been threatened.

Justice Minister Luiz Paulo Barreto said they would analyse the CPT's information and respond on a case-by-case basis.

At their meeting in the capital, Brasilia, on Monday, ministers agreed to increase co-operation between the federal and state governments.

"We will intensify monitoring and investigation and strengthen actions leading to sustainable development in the region," Mr Florence told reporters.

Threats and violence

The talks came after three campaigners were killed in the Amazon.

On Friday, rural leader Adelino Ramos was shot dead in Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia.

The CPT said Mr Ramos had denounced illegal loggers in the states of Acre, Amazonas and Rondonia.

He had survived a bloody dispute in 1995, when some 300 police officers opened fire on a landless workers' camp near the town of Corumbiara, killing at least 10 people.

On 24 May, the bodies of Joao Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo were found on a nature reserve, Praialta-Piranheira near Maraba, where they had been working for the past 24 years.

According to family and friends, the couple had received numerous threats in the past two years for their environmental activism.

On Saturday, farmer Eremilton Pereira dos Santos was found shot dead in the same area as the couple. Police said there was no link between the murders.

The CPT says that over the last decade, 1,855 people have received death threats. Of these, 42 were murdered and another 30 had actual attempts on their lives.

"In the Amazon, killing and clearing (the forest) go hand in hand," the CPT said in a statement, calling on the government to do more to tackle the violence.

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Brazilian Amazon activist killed

25 May 2011 Last updated at 06:43 GMT The couple worked to defend the Amazon rainforest A prominent Brazilian conservationist and his wife have been killed in the Amazon region, police have said.

They said Joao Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo were ambushed in Para state, near the city of Maraba.

The environmentalist had repeatedly warned of death threats against him by loggers and cattle ranchers.

News of the killings came hours before Brazil's Chamber of Deputies passed a law that eases deforestation rules.

The government has ordered an immediate investigation and promised to catch those responsible for the deaths of Mr Da Silva and his wife.

The bodies of the couple were found inside the nature reserve, Praialta-Piranheira, where they had been working for the past 24 years.

According to family and friends, the pair had been subjected to numerous threats in the past two years for their environmental activism.

They made a living with eco-friendly cultivation of nuts, fruit and rubber.

Environmental amnesty

News of the deaths came just hours before Brazil's Chamber of Deputies voted on changes to the existing Forest Code.

The legislation, first enacted in 1934 and subsequently amended in 1965, sets out how many trees farmers can cut down.

Regulations currently require that 80% of a landholding in the Amazon remain forest, 20% in other areas.

The new bill, which now needs approval from the Senate and President Dilma Rousseff, reduces the amount of land farmers must keep as forest.

Other changes include some amnesties for those who have illegally cleared land in the past.

Proponents of change argued that the law impeded economic development and said that Brazil had to open more land for agriculture.

Opponents described the legislation as a "disaster".

"It heightens the risk of deforestation, water depletion and erosion," Paulo Gustavo Prado from Conservation International-Brazil told Reuters.

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Amazon tribe has no word for time

20 May 2011 Last updated at 01:04 GMT By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News The Amondawa were first "discovered" by anthropologists in 1986 An Amazonian tribe has no abstract concept of time, say researchers.

The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space - as in our idea of, for example, "working through the night".

The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.

The idea is a controversial one, and further study will bear out if it is also true among other Amazon languages.

The Amondawa were first contacted by the outside world in 1986, and now researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have begun to analyse the idea of time as it appears in Amondawa language.

"We're really not saying these are a 'people without time' or 'outside time'," said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

"Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events," he told BBC News.

"What we don't find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don't have a notion of time which is something the events occur in."

The Amondawa language has no word for "time", or indeed of time periods such as "month" or "year".

The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

But perhaps most surprising is the team's suggestion that there is no "mapping" between concepts of time passage and movement through space.

Ideas such as an event having "passed" or being "well ahead" of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the "mapping hypothesis".

The Amondawa have no words for time periods such as "month" or "year"

But in Amondawa, no such constructs exist.

"None of this implies that such mappings are beyond the cognitive capacities of the people," Professor Sinha explained. "It's just that it doesn't happen in everyday life."

When the Amondawa learn Portuguese - which is happening more all the time - they have no problem acquiring and using these mappings from the language.

The team hypothesises that the lack of the time concept arises from the lack of "time technology" - a calendar system or clocks - and that this in turn may be related to the fact that, like many tribes, their number system is limited in detail.

Absolute terms

These arguments do not convince Pierre Pica, a theoretical linguist at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who focuses on a related Amazonian language known as Mundurucu.

"To link number, time, tense, mood and space by a single causal relationship seems to me hopeless, based on the linguistic diversity that I know of," he told BBC News.

Dr Pica said the study "shows very interesting data" but argues quite simply that failing to show the space/time mapping does not refute the "mapping hypothesis".

Small societies like the Amondawa tend to use absolute terms for normal, spatial relations - for example, referring to a particular river location that everyone in the culture will know intimately rather than using generic words for river or riverbank.

These, Dr Pica argued, do not readily lend themselves to being co-opted in the description of time.

"When you have an absolute vocabulary - 'at the water', 'upstream', 'downstream' and so on, you just cannot use it for other domains, you cannot use the mapping hypothesis in this way," he said.

In other words, while the Amondawa may perceive themselves moving through time and spatial arrangements of events in time, the language may not necessarily reflect it in an obvious way.

What may resolve the conflict is further study, Professor Sinha said.

"We'd like to go back and simply verify it again before the language disappears - before the majority of the population have been brought up knowing about calendar systems."

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