The Role Of Environmentalism In The Amazon Rainforest

As the public realized the gradual aggregation of global warming and its peripheral impacts on our surroundings, people’s awareness aroused a new progression, the environmental movement. It can be traced back as far as 1739 when Benjamin Franklin and other Philadelphia residents cited “the public rights”, petitioned the Pennsylvania Assembly to stop waste dumping and remove tanneries from Philadelphia’s commercial district (New World Encyclopedia,“Environmentalism”). Later the movement developed into two different approaches toward the same problem. Environmentalism is the most controversial one. Environmentalism, on one hand, is a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment
Karipuna, the people who Salge has interviewed, is an Indigenous community in the state of Rondônia in Brazil with 58 members remaining, living in an officially protected area in the hear of the Amazon rainforest. Surrounded by numerous cattle farms and destroyed rainforest, they have become more and more vulnerable to constant death threats. With that being said, the Karipuna has constantly received death threats and blackmails from the logging industry. A colossal size of forest about the size of 1000 soccer fields that originally belonged to their territory, was taken down in the first half of 2017. However, they kept striving and advocating to protect their ancestral land, the precious rainforest of Amazon that produced about 20 percent of the oxygen on earth each year (The Amazon Rainforest, The Amazon Rainforest), regardless of the difficulties they are facing. As Salge has stated, “the voices of the Karipuna must be heard … We need to make sure the world knows Adriano and the Karipuna’s story. We need to stand with the guardians of the Amazon.” (Salge,
It is worth keeping in mind the definitions and differences of and between environmentalism, environmental science, terrorism, and ecoterrorism. For instance, environmentalism is the advocacy of the preservation restoration, or improvement of the natural environment (Merriam-Webster.com, “Environmentalism”). On the other hand, environmental science is the study of the effects of natural and unnatural processes, and of interactions of the physical components of the planet on the environment (Environmental Science, “What is Environmental Science?”). As it is defined, terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion (Merriam-Webster.com, “terrorism”), and similarly, ecoterrorism is the terrorism aimed at preventing environmental destruction and hence usually targeting major polluters (Collins English Dictionary,