The common view of fire often fails to recognize its beauty and how essential it is to our lives. In particular, to the lives of traditional peoples and communities in the Cerrado, Amazon and Pantanal.
Although these territories are often attacked through the criminal use of this sacred element, they are not the victims of fire itself. The perpetrator, as always, is agribusiness. It’s the illegal miners and loggers, the land grabbers and big business that seek to deforest their territories in order to turn them into commodities.
This was the message of the Knowledge Roundtable “The scars of fire and re-existence in territories”, held on 20 and 21 August and run by CESE, in partnership with the Agri is Fire Coalition (Articulação Agro é Fogo). The activity was supported by HEKS-Eper.
The meeting was divided into two parts and was aimed at discussing the threats of rights violations that connect the contexts of the Amazon, Pantanal and Cerrado, as well as their resistance, emphasizing the importance of the peoples in these territories and how their ways of life are fundamental to tackling the climate crisis, including through the traditional use of fire.