The Amazon is a mirror reflecting the deep contradictions in our approach: development which is a monoculture of thought, authoritarianism disguised as progress, the extractive zeal that devours everything, including the future. The mirrors brought by the Xapiri to Yanomami shamans could help us to see, to listen, and to learn. Will the leaders who are gathering for COP30 in Belém be capable of looking into these mirrors?
The Amazon has long been considered a promise of the future. For development plans, it is the final frontier; for governments, it is a land to be exploited in the name of national sovereignty; for the markets, it is fertile ground for raw materials; for NGOs, it is the epicentre of an environmental crisis.
But what if these perspectives were reversed? What if, instead of projecting futures onto the Amazon, we allowed ourselves to be seen through it? The rainforest sees, after all. It sees us and, if we are watching, it reveals to us who we are. When we observe what is happening in the Amazon, we are, in fact, looking into a mirror that reveals the fissures in our society. Development is revealed as backwardness and destruction: a monoculture of thought, authoritarianism disguised as progress, the extractive zeal that devours everything, including the future. The Amazon, with the vast scope of its knowledge and its encylopaedic experience of ways of life, exposes the failure of modern planning which, in the name of development, has normalized destruction as its method.
It is now generally accepted that the Amazon rainforest, which Europeans reached in their quest to conquer in the 16th century and later, was never a wilderness left by God, as either a terrible mistake or a powerful blessing, but rather, as French anthropologist Phillipe Descola states in La nature domestique: Symbolisme et praxis dans l’écologie des Achuar 1)Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1986 it has always been and remains a ‘cultured jungle’. That is to say, the Amazon cannot be understood without considering the thousands of years of ecological and social relationships of the numerous peoples who live within its space, each of whom has configured and shaped their particular territories, leaving their cultural imprint on the jungle, just as the jungle leaves its imprint on their cultures.
There is a profound difference betweem these two perspectives. That of the Amazon’s Indigenous peoples has been carefully crafted and practised for thousands of years, as a continuous process of complementarity and coexistence with the living forest. The modern Western perspective, on the other hand, is based on appropriation, domination, and extraction. Where traditional peoples see life as something that can be shared, modernity sees only resources and commodities ripe for exploitation.
The xapiri mirrors
In Yanomami thought, the xapiri descend from the sky on their mirrors, bright, reflective surfaces through which they travel between worlds. These mirrors serve as mediums connecting the visible and invisible realms. The shamans, who nurse or care for these mirrors, are the only ones able to see and hear the xapiri. Through them, the shamans interpret the forest’s messages and help sustain the balance between humans, spirits, and the natural world.
The mirrors are not instruments for ordinary eyes – they are cosmic devices of vision and communication, handled only by those trained to do so. When Yanomami shaman David Kopenawa describes these mirrors he evokes a world where reflection itself is active, an exchange between realms, between the human and the forest, the past and the future. Modernity, by contrast, sees nothing in the mirrors; it has become a civilization of forgetting, deaf to the relational and spiritual echoes that shamans, through thexapiri, continue to preserve.
This distinction is important. For decades, the hegemonic environmental discourse promised ‘rescue’, ‘salvation’, often masking, behind good intentions, a colonial bias, describing their actions either as ‘conservation’ or ‘preservation’. But the Amazon does not require saving. It needs to be listened to. And listening requires humility, courage, and an ethical commitment to those who have inhabited and protected the region for millennia.
There are two defining characteristics of the arrogance with which the West has attempted to disguise its provincial viewpoint and establish its falsely universalist premise. The first is its claim to the superiority of its ‘civilization’, whereby all its actions, even if destructive, are considered necessary for the ‘salvation of humanity’, or more accurately, the salvation of its humanity.
It is therefore a falsely salvationist civilization, because it places emphasis – its second characteristic – on knowing how to speak, but never on knowing how to listen. As the philosopher Carlos Lenkersdorf says in Aprender a escuchar: enseñanzas maya-tojolabales 2)Plaza y Valdés, 2008, ‘listening seriously demands, above all, that we approach the person or people we want to listen to and who listen to us, that we lean close in to this person’s voice to listen to them and so that they too can listen to us. In this way, “us” becomes a tangible reality.’
Thus, the arrogance of the West not only prevents it from seeing the Amazon – except through the lens of its ambition to accumulate goods – but deafens it to the words of the people who live there. In this way, it consigns thousands of years of experience and wisdom to waste, because, quoting Lenkersdorf again, listening to the people implies an ‘approach that demands behaviors never previously considered, [since] coming together is the first step into unknown lands, and is the entry into the perspective of those who see and live the world differently.’
Some of us are not insensitive to the signals the Amazon sends. We do not see the rainforest as a stage for Western redemption. Our key beliefs are different: solidarity, integration, respect, and the defense of a plurality of ways of life. Our environmentalism is not merely a reaction to collapse, but a civilizing ideology that emerges from it, an active and creative resistance to extermination: of peoples, of rivers, and of possible worlds, including our own. It is resistance that also reimagines and rebuilds; an act of continuity with the living histories of the forest, shaping new and symbiotic relations between the Earth and our cultures.
Saying we won’t ‘save’ the Amazon is not an act of resignation. It is an ethical stance. The rainforest and its peoples have endured centuries of colonial violence. Our goal is not merely to prevent further destruction, but to nurture the conditions for renewal – to fight with all our might so that those who protect it can continue to exist, and so that we may imagine and build a livable future for ourselves and our children.
I was in Atalaia do Norte on the third anniversary of the murders of the British journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. I saw up close how the memory of what happened has sown seeds – on the faces of the Indigenous people, in the canoes that travel the rivers, in the community radio stations that continue to denounce invaders. What I saw was not a place of mourning, but one of struggle. And there I understood, once again, that the Amazon is not a static, passive backdrop. It is a lesson. It is both a rearview mirror and a beacon. And as long as there are those who fight for it, there will be another world determined to be born.
COP30: Performance or turning point?
On 10 November, the 30th UN Climate Summit, or COP30, will begin in the Amazonian city of Belém, capital of the state of Pará. Will it be just another exhibition? Another performance, in which Brazil presents itself as a green power while relaxing environmental licensing regulations, persecuting human rights defenders, and pushing miners onto Indigenous lands? Or will it be a turning point, where we finally listen to what the forest is saying?
In fact, on Monday, 20 October, just a few weeks before the start of COP30, the government of Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) through the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), authorized the state oil company, Petrobras, to drill a well to search for offshore oil in the Amazon estuary, a region of high environmental sensitivity and rich biodiversity.
The effects of this on the Amazon can only be quantified a posteriori, once the corporations involved have moved on, as they usually do, to other extraction. However, the forest and its people will almost certainly suffer the disastrous consequences almost immediately, and for decades or centuries in the future.
So, sadly, the political decisions affecting the Amazon and its peoples taken by Jair Bolsonaro and Lula differ only in form: Bolsonaro would certainly have openly trumpeted such concessions to anyone who would listen, while Lula and the Workers Party act behind closed doors in the run up to an event at which they will present themselves to the world as the president and party of ‘green development’ and supporters of the Amazon and its peoples.
Both leaders agree on a supposed ‘horizon of progress’, albeit from seemingly radically different ideological positions: Bolsonaro seeks to impose such a view without a word of explanation, acting not merely to prejudice but to eliminate the peoples of the Amazon; Lula aims to impose his view through the cultural and territorial disintegration of such peoples. Both are arrogant in their belief that there are no other possible horizons, because they do not have the courage to listen to the words of the very people who have evolved and described them for millennia.
In short, the Amazon, already bled dry by the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant (authorized by a previous Lula government in 2010 and finally opened fully in 2019) and with its peoples fighting against every new proposal made in the name of ‘progress’, is not just the front line of the climate crisis. It is the mirror in which our deepest contradictions are reflected. If we want a future, we must begin by seeing and recognizing what this mirror shows us. Looking into the Amazon’s mirror, we glimpse not only what lies behind us but also who we have become and what we might yet be. Turned toward the past, it helps us reconstruct forgotten memories; turned toward the present, it reveals us to ourselves more truthfully; turned toward the future, it reflects another horizon of meaning for all our lives. Its reflection reminds us that what we see always depends on the direction of our gaze.
Main image: Indigenous boy in the city of Lábrea during coverage of the Purus River floods in the region. Photo: Edmar Barros, 2012
Marcos Colón is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is the director, writer and producer of Beyond Fordlândia: An Environmental Account of Henry Ford’s Adventure in the Amazon (2018) and Stepping Softly on the Earth (2022). He is the editor and founder of Amazônia Latitude, a digital environmental magazine. His latest book, The Amazon in Times of War, was published by LAB and Practical Action Publishing in October 2024.
