Sound Familiar Kids?

Last week, I watched a documentary with my students called "Environmental Refugees of the Blue Planet". It is about people who have been forced to move because of environmental (read human caused) disasters. It looked at three different areas of the world - Alberta, the Maldives and Brazil. The Brazil story really had an affect on me. It talked about how these people were living off the land in the jungle and were approached by some people with money who wanted to buy their land. They had no concept of money, or the value of land, so they sold their land to this company for a very low price and moved to the city, where they are now living in favellas (read Brazillian slums). Some people refused to sell their land and are living in the middle of a huge eculyptus monoculture. The company is using the eculyptus for paper pulp for our toilet paper etc.

Anyways, as with any monoculture, the company uses pesticides, so all of the termites have attacked the gardens of the people who stayed. Essentially it was so difficult to live there, that the people who stayed were forced to sell their land at an even cheaper price and become charcoal makers. Their self sufficient life has been forced to be inefficient and disease prone because of this huge corporation (which of course is very good friends with government officials.

This story made me very angry and I was trying to summarize it for my students. "So imagine, guys, what it would feel like to have people come and tell you that you had to sell your land because the government needed it. And then realizing that you got a poor price for it and essentially being forced to live in an area with extreme poverty while everyone else gets rich off the land that you used to own." Then I stopped myself and looked around at the very native faces around me. "Does this sound familiar to you guys?" They looked at me with blank faces. Later I continued discussing it with one of my brighter students (Who I hope will turn into a social activist someday) and made the parallels of that story to his own ancestors history. I don't know if he actually got it as their brains turn off at recess but it sure gave me something to think about.