A documentation of the people and places that are being impacted by major hydroelectric development in Brazil's Amazon Rainforest.
The Amazon Rainforest is a place etched into our collective imagination. It is the lungs of the world, the primordial jungle, the greatest river, a vast endless ecosystem and bastion of our tribal origins.
I have always seen the Amazon through a romantic lens, a place that remained preserved, where escape from civilization was still possible.
When I first heard about the Belo Monte Dam the naivety of my romanticism became apparent. The reality that this place that so powerfully existed in my imagination would not be preserved angered me. Although I had never been there, the Amazon was dear to me.
Plans for the Belo Monte Dam Complex began in 1975, under the apex of military of dictatorship in Brazil. The dam would be built within the Xingu River basin, in the state of Para, home to Brazil’s first indigenous reserve. In 1989 the Kayapo, a warrior tribe who feared for the health of the river that sustained them mounted a massive public campaign in opposition of its construction. International financiers soon pulled their support, and the project was shelved.
In 2007, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced the Accelerated Growth Program (PAC), the largest investment package to spur economic growth in Brazil in the past 40 years. A cornerstone of the program is the industrialization of the Amazon, which includes the construction of over 60 major Hydroelectric projects in the next 15 years with Belo Monte at the forefront. The energy generated from these projects will fuel mining initiatives within the Amazon rainforest and power cities thousands of miles away. Now nearing completion, Belo Monte will be the third largest dam in the world, and is expected to displace between 20,000-40,000 people. On the neighbouring Tapajos River, the Munduruku tribe are fighting to prevent a similar fate; the next mega-dam is already planned.
Hydroelectric dams are touted as clean and renewable sources of energy, but the real impact of large dams is often anything but. Hundreds of square miles of land are flooded and complex river ecosystems permanently transformed. In the Amazon, new infrastructure and population growth opens the forests to increased logging, mining, and agriculture. Flooded forests create methane factories that rival coal power plants in greenhouse gas emissions. The end result is the erosion of the Amazon Rainforest and the sacrifice of cultures and communities who depend on the river and forest ecosystems for their way of life.
The Amazon rainforest is important to us all. Not simply because it provides us we the air we breath, and not only for the cultural significance of the people who live there, but for what it represents - the wonder of the natural world and our primordial connection to it. Â