We wanna hear from you! Every month, Live Worldly will select a guest blogger to write about any international issue that they feel should be addressed. This gives anyone and everyone a chance to reach a wider audience and express their opinions. Make your voice heard. Email lauren@liveworldly.com with your piece and our favorite will be posted the first week of the month! Our first guest blogger this month is Danny Sale, a sophomore who attends UNC Chapel Hill majoring in Global Studies. Let’s hear what Danny has to say this month…
Fifty years ago oil was discovered in the Amazon rainforest, the home of hundreds of indigenous tribes. Many of these tribes had never come in contact with any sort of “civilization” before and were bewildered when Western oil companies began to harvest their ancestral home for petroleum. A particularly large amount of oil was believed to be under the land of the Huaorani, known as the most primitive and fiercest tribe in the entire Amazon.
Initially Christian missionaries assigned to “civilize” the Huaorani were unsuccessful, and several were even speared within hours of contact. In fact the oil companies supported some of the missionaries, in an effort to convince the tribes to allow oil drilling on their land. They reasoned that the Huaorani would ultimately benefit from Western exposure, as these naked tribesmen who relied on hunting and gathering were clearly in need of innovation, technology, and modern civilization. With the average lifespan of a Huaorani tribesman roughly 40 years and high child mortality rates, the missionaries seemed to have a point.
However, after decades of oil drilling, pollution, and contamination by Shell and Texaco the life expectancy of the Huaorani is actually lower than it was before the missionaries first arrived. Unprecedented cancer rates, skin lesions, respiratory complications, and other health maladies plague the Huaorani today, even though they remain as the only Amazon tribe to preserve most of its land from oil drilling. So where does the seemingly superior Western way of life come into play? The Huaorani adopted many Western customs, yet they now are much worse off then they were before. Today it is estimated only 5 tribes remain free of Western exposure, as they have continually retreated further and further into the quickly disappearing Amazon rainforest. Roughly $1.5 billion of remaining, untapped oil lies under the Amazon, enough to fuel all the cars in America for 13 days. As the Huaorani and other indigenous tribes continue to fight for their land, it’s obvious they have had enough of our idea of civilization. Maybe it’s because they experienced a part of our apparently superior culture they didn’t like: greed.
