EDITORIAL – ‘The sky is about to fall’, by Paula Litaiff

“The forest is alive. It will only die if the whites insist on destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the ground will crumble, the trees will wither and the rocks will crack in the heat. Then we and the whites will die one after the other. When there are none of them left alive to hold up the sky, it will collapse.”

Excerpts from the book “A Queda do Céu: palavra de um xamã Yanomami” (The Fall of the Sky: words of a Yanomami shaman) (2010), which features the account of one of the Yanomami people’s greatest spokespeople, David Kopenawa, clearly show the indigenous cosmovision about man’s action on the climate, the forests, the rivers and the risk of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples disappearing.

In the 19th century, Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) first considered the human capacity for climate change in 1896, when he stated that adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere would warm the Earth’s average temperature. Arrhenius’ research was reinforced decades later by other scholars, who pointed to climate emergencies. In this issue, CENARIUM MAGAZINE brings to mind ancient predictions that have come to be considered by scientific academic circles, including anthropological research in the field of traditional knowledge, and draws a parallel with the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul, where more than 170 people have lost their lives as a result of the effects of the climate crisis.

But it’s not just Rio Grande do Sul that is suffering from these effects. In the Amazon, the state of Acre recorded one of the biggest floods last year, leaving thousands of families homeless and many deaths invisible because they were from a region outside the South-Southeast context. Amazonas, Pará and
Roraima have also suffered and are still suffering from dry rivers, which have left thousands of families without food.

The effects of the climate crisis are global. Joining forces should also be global, but the denial of the traditional knowledge of native peoples and scientific research has thrown us into the epicenter of this affliction, which does not choose ethnicity, skin color or social class, but puts those who protect the forests and live on the outskirts, isolated by environmental racism, on the front line of death.

The “fall of the sky” is no longer a distant ancestral prediction for future generations. It is happening now and is a reality for us and our children. The question is what can we, within the reality of each individual, do to stop the climate tragedy? The answer is not in the present, it is and always has been in the past.

This was the subject of the cover story and special report in the new May 2024 issue of CENARIUM magazine. Click here to read the full article.