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16.2 (Summer 1992) At the Theshold: An Action Guide for Cultural Survival

YES! - Youth for Environmental Sanity

YES!, a national speaking and workshop tour, motivates young people to get involved with issues that affect their future. The 1990-91 YES! Tour - Youth for Environmental Sanity - swept 25 cities, directly touching the lives of 80,000 students and reaching 20 million more people through the media. An entirely youth-run organization, the main focus of Yes! is the environment, but we encourage activism on other global issues.

xavante

Location, Land, and Climate

The Xavante once lived in northern Brazil, between the Tocantines and Aragaia rivers. They moved away from advancing settlers in the early nineteenth century to lands they now occupy west of the Rio das Mortes.

After Brazil's capital moved to Brasilia and the military government began "opening up" the interior in earnest, many indigenous peoples who had been protected by remoteness suffered. The Xavante did, too, but they also acquired a reputation for ferocity because they fought to defend their lands when the frontier caught up with them.

wodaabe

Location, Land, and Climate

Wodaabe are nomads, migrating through much of the Sahel from northern Cameroon to Chad, Niger, and northeast Nigeria. The last nomads in the area, the Wodaabe number between 160,000 and 200,000. Other around them - the Hausa, Fulani, and Tuaeg - regard the Wodaabe as wild people. The Wodaabe refer to the Fulani with equal disdain as Wodaabe who lost their way.

Why Rainforest Crunch?

"Why should a human rights group build markets for tropical forest products?" This often-asked question relates specifically to why Cultural Survival does it, but it also gets into how we do it and what we are accomplishing.

Tropical rain forests are the earth's oldest, most productive, most diverse ecosystems. They cover less than 2 percent of the globe yet support nearly half of all species - as many as 25 million kinds of plants and animals. Some 2,000 forest tribes and more than 200 million people live in tropical rain forests.

Who Do We Think We Are?

Those concerned about the fate of the planet have used the now-famous photo of the earth taken by the first U.S. astronauts to mobilize constituencies for both conservation and peace. Its image of unity has proven powerful, helping us think, in practical terms, about global interdependence in relation to fragile ecosystems. The problem is that no people appear in the view, not does it give any evidence of the effect of state boundaries on politics and peoples' imaginations.

weyewa

Location, Land, and Climate

The Weyewa live on Sumba, one of the islands of eastern Indonesia. On the outer are of the Lesser Sundas, Sumba is 75 miles long and 200 miles wide. Grassy plateaus dominate central Sumba, the southern coast has small, scattered mountain area, the northern coast is a dry lowland, and the western part is a plateaus surrounded by hills. The soil is thin and poor for farming. The soil is thin and poor for farming. The 85,000 Weyewa, one of several ethnic groups on Sumba, are located on the western side of the island.

Veddhas Say No to Colonization Plan

When the following article came to Cultural Survival Trust of Sri Lanka, it was the first contact between our organizations. The Sir Lanka group is not affiliated with Cultural Survival, yet as the excerpt from their letter to us on the next page shows, we have much in common.

Tropical Rainforest Destruction: A Human-Rights Fact Sheet

The Losses * Inappropriate logging and farming have so devasted the rain forest on the Philippine island of Ormoc that it no longer functions as a natural flood barrier. In November 1991, a flash flood left over 3,000 dead and 20,000 homeless. * During the three years after golf was discovered on Yanomami territory in Brazil, 50,000 gold hunters flooded the land, killed and raped yanomami people, poisoned their water with mercury for gold-mining, and brought diseases to which they had to no natural immunity. One Yanomami died daily until the miners were expelled in 1990.

The Peoples of "Millennium"

Cultural Survival has issued "At the Threshold" to accompany the 1992 premier of "Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World." We believe the 10-part TV series, hosted by Cultural Survival founder and board president David Maybury-Lewis, will convey a basic Cultural Survival message to millions of people in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and other developed countries. "What I hope the viewer will take away from "Millennium," says Maybury-Lewis, "is a sense of possibility, a sense that all peoples, including ourselves, make choices in the ways we live."

Saving a Refuge

In late 1991, 7,000 Gwich'in, working alongside environmentalists and conservationists, won a long battle over the future of 125 miles of pristine Alaskan coast. Waged in Washington, D.C., and small villages of Alaska, the classic David and Goliath fight pit the Gwich'in and their allies against the financial and political power of oil companies and Alaska's political establishment.

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