‘Their cities are full of huge homes stuffed with piles of products, however they don’t share’

Davi Kopenawa in San Francisco © Pablo Levinas/Survival

Davi Kopenawa Yanomami is a shaman and a frontrunner of the Yanomami folks, often called “The Dalai Lama of the rainforest.” He has spent his life passionately and determinedly defending his folks and their land and talking out in opposition to the destruction of the Amazon. For this essential work, he, along with the Yanomami group Hutukara was awarded the Proper Livelihood Award 2019, often called the “Various Nobel Prize.”

Beneath is an extract from his guide, The Falling Sky, wherein Davi explains that the Yanomami have a really totally different perspective to materials possessions and manufactured items, which Davi calls “merchandise.”

The Yanomami suppose it’s grasping and silly to hoard a great deal of stuff: when you have one thing that another person wants, why not share?

We don’t recognize misers…I solely take into consideration merchandise at hand it out. If I possessed as a lot of it because the folks of the cities, I’d give it to everybody who requested, telling them: “It’s yours, take it and be happy! I solely make it in such nice portions to share it extensively!”

However the white individuals are different folks than us… they possess a large number of machines and factories. But that also isn’t sufficient for them. Their thought stays continually connected to their merchandise. They make it relentlessly and at all times want new items.

“An © FUNAI

…I worry that this euphoria of merchandise could have no finish and that they’ll entangle themselves with it to the purpose of chaos. They’re already continually killing one another for cash of their cities and preventing different folks for minerals and oil they take from the bottom.

However they don’t appear involved that they’re making us all perish with the epidemic fumes that escape from all these items. They don’t suppose that they’re spoiling the earth and the sky and that they’ll by no means be capable of recreate new ones.

Their cities are full of huge homes stuffed with piles of innumerable items, however their elders by no means give them to anybody. In the event that they have been actually nice males, shouldn’t they inform themselves that it could be smart to distribute all of them earlier than they make so many extra? However this by no means occurs!

…Quite the opposite, they’re used to greedily hoarding their items and conserving them locked up…They reside in fixed worry that it could possibly be stolen… they in all probability inform themselves: “I’m a part of the folks of merchandise and factories! I possess all these items alone! I’m so intelligent! I’m an essential man, a wealthy man!”

…The identical is true of their meals, which they continually pile up of their homes. If we ask for a few of it, they by no means settle for to offer something with out making us work laborious for it. As for us, we aren’t people who find themselves within the behavior of refusing meals to our guests! When our gardens abound with manioc and bananas, we smoke an ideal amount of sport and invite the folks of neighboring homes to a reahu feast in an effort to fulfill their starvation.

The white folks’s meals doesn’t have as excessive a price as they declare! Like ours, it solely disappears as quickly as it’s eaten to be remodeled into excrement! Their merchandise can be not as valuable as they are saying. It’s only their nice worry of missing it that makes them overwhelm its worth.

…We folks of the forest… possess few issues, and we’re happy with that. We don’t wish to retailer nice portions of commerce items in our houses. It will tangle up our minds. We’d turn into an excessive amount of just like the white folks. We’d continually be involved about merchandise: “Awé! I need this object! I additionally want this one, and that one, and likewise this different one!” It will haven’t any finish!

So conserving so little of it at our facet is sufficient for us. We don’t wish to tear the minerals out of the earth nor make their epidemic fumes fall again on us. We simply need the forest to stay silent and the sky to be clear in order that we will see the celebrities when evening falls.

The white folks have already got greater than sufficient metallic to make their merchandise and their machines; land to plant their meals; material to cowl themselves; automobiles and airplanes to maneuver in. But now they covet the metallic of our forest to make much more of these items although their factories’ foul breath is already spreading in every single place… its darkness might descend to our homes in order that the youngsters of our youngsters will cease seeing the solar.

This extract has been edited for size.