Learning to Listen to Nature

In June 2015, at the opening of the EU Green Week, one of the speakers, Almir Surui, stood out from the rest of the panel due to his unique feather headdress.  Almir was the chief of the Surui, a tribe of the Amazonian Rainforest in Brazil.  Since 1992 his people had been trying to find sustainable ways to live whilst remaining in harmony with their natural environment.  

Almir described how, in his experience, the forest has a spirit and that it communicates with people, about where to find medicines, about dangers to be avoided.  He said that nature wants to cooperate with us.  However, people have lost the ability to connect with nature and learn from its wisdom, the result being the use and abuse of the natural world rather than a relationship of mutual respect in which both can benefit and thrive.   Almir said he had wanted to find a way to share with others the ancient ways of the Surui people so that they too might learn to live in harmony with nature and put an end to the devastation of rainforests worldwide. 

For this undertaking, Almir knew that he would need to embrace technology!

Almir took the unprecedented step to visit the Google headquarters and ask them to partner with him and his people.  Since then and until present day, Google Earth has worked with the Surui people to map their territory and record their ancestral sites and social history.  Also, with the help of Google Earth, his people were equipped with mobile phones and Open Data Kit so they could instantly record any illegal logging on their land.  

Almir’s daughter, Txai Surui, is also, like her father, an indigenous leader and climate activist.  She recently wrote in Climate Home News: “I have been raised with the understanding that in order to live harmoniously on this planet we must listen to the stars, the moon, the wind, the animals and the trees. We must listen to the Earth. She is speaking and her message is clear: we have no time to waste.” 

Click here for the full fascinating story of this unlikely partnership told by Rebecca Moore and Chief Almir at a TEDX talk in Brazil in 2012: High Technology to Preserve Old Traditions.