Jaba Tañiwashskaka is a sacred place of the Kogi people at the foot of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the highest peaks of Colombia rise, facing the Caribbean. About 400 years ago, the Kogi ancestors had to abandon it to save their lives from settlers and invaders, retreating high into the mountains. They lost the routes of their pilgrimages and access to the sea. In 2010, the place, along the mouth of the Jerez river, “was a burned garbage dump, full of plastic debris, old mattresses and rotten cardboard that came from the nearby towns. The dirty swamp stank, there was no wildlife except a few cows and jays, and the river that flowed into the sea was polluted, ”describes Isidoro Hazbun, from the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) in Colombia.
The Kogi asked for their help. "We were able to support them to buy the land in 2013," he says. They removed tons of garbage, even from the beaches; they restored the mangroves to filter the water and protected the nests of the creatures. "And, in parallel, they made offerings to the visible and invisible beings of their territory as part of the restoration." The crabs, alligators and capybaras returned. In just seven years, "the soil was enriched, the vegetation sprouted, the marshes had a sweet smell again and a beautiful lagoon was filled with fish."
In 2004 I visited the ACT headquarters in Washington, in the middle of an explosion of cicadas (flying cicadas that littered the sidewalks and collided with one). Its founder, the ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, taught me a curious thing. Large maps that delimited indigenous lands hung from trouser racks, maps that their collaborators had created with the help of local chiefs. Maps, Plotkin explained, were a necessary legal strategy that allowed them to claim ownership of the lands inhabited by their ancestors from governments.
I did not fully understand its importance at the time.
But the restoration of the Kogi shrine is no accident.
Scientific evidence now confirms Plotkin's intuition.
To protect South America's rainforests from destruction - the planet's terrestrial lung that absorbs CO2 equivalent to 25 years of car emissions each year - it is best to leave their management in the hands of their indigenous peoples.
Its influence is even visible from space.
"Where indigenous people have access to full property rights, deforestation was 66% lower," concludes Kathryn Baragwanath, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego and author of a study that analyzes satellite images and collects the Proceedings magazine.
The evidence is overwhelming. The Xingú Indigenous Park, in Brazil, was created in 1961. The satellite collects a green oasis, sustained by the management that the indigenous people develop within it with the help of ACT. Wherever the hand of the locals does not reach, the emaciated and devastated land stretches, victim of large-scale agricultural exploitation.
The effects are seen elsewhere under indigenous control, Hazbun says. In the Peruvian Amazon, deforestation was cut in half in just five years; in Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia it was three times lower in just over a decade. In the latter country, almost 90% of indigenous territories have forest coverage. Scientists are already talking about a change of chip: natural reserves in regions so sensitive and important against climate change must include the management of indigenous people as a guarantee of survival.