Julián's Choice: Of Jaguar-Shamans and the Sacrifices Made for Progreso in Peru's Extractive Frontier

In May 2010, Julián Miranda, an Indigenous Asháninka shaman, died hours after killing a jaguar-shaman. Despite knowing that it could kill him, he killed a jaguar-shaman to protect his cows, an investment to support the much-desired progreso (‘progress’) of his children and grandchildren through education. Julián's choice was one of personal sacrifice driven by the hardships he experienced in the degraded forests of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the Peruvian Amazon. My examination of his decision to kill the jaguar-shaman engages with the multi-disciplinary literature on how local peoples engage with the expanding extractive frontier in Latin America. The emphasis most literature places on social movements and – to a lesser extent – on the ontological characteristics of these conflicts needs to be counterbalanced by individual experiences like Julián's for a deeper understanding of the multiple local experiences of large-scale resource extraction and the different strategies through which people pursue their desired futures.

Multi-Temporal Surface Water Classification for Four Major Rivers from the Peruvian Amazon

We describe a new minimum extent, persistent surface water classification for reaches of four major rivers in the Peruvian Amazon (i.e., Amazon, Napo, Pastaza, Ucayali). These data were generated by the Peruvian Amazon Rural Livelihoods and Poverty (PARLAP) Project which aims to better understand the nexus between livelihoods (e.g., fishing, agriculture, forest use, trade), poverty, and conservation in the Peruvian Amazon over a 35,000 km river network. Previous surface water datasets do not adequately capture the temporal changes in the course of the rivers, nor discriminate between primary main channel and non-main channel (e.g., oxbow lakes) water. We generated the surface water classifications in Google Earth Engine from Landsat TM 5, 7 ETM+, and 8 OLI satellite imagery for time periods from circa 1989, 2000, and 2015 using a hierarchical logical binary classification predominantly based on a modified Normalized Difference Water Index (mNDWI) and shortwave infrared surface reflectance. We included surface reflectance in the blue band and brightness temperature to minimize misclassification. High accuracies were achieved for all time periods (>90%).

Smallholder agriculture results in stable forest cover in riverine Amazonia

Recent studies point to a rapid increase in small-scale deforestation in Amazonia. Where people live along the rivers of the basin, customary shifting cultivation creates a zone of secondary forest, orchards and crop fields around communities in what was once was old-growth terra firme forest. Visible from satellite imagery as a narrow but extensive band of forest disturbance along rivers, this zone is often considered as having been deforested. In this paper we assess forest disturbance and the dynamics of secondary forests around 275 communities along a 725 km transect on the Napo and Amazon rivers in the Peruvian Amazon. We used high-resolution satellite imagery to define the ‘working area’ around each community, based on the spatial distribution of forest/field patches and the visible boundary between old-growth and secondary forests. Land cover change was assessed between ca. 1989 and 2015 using CLASliteTM image classification. Statistical analyses using community and household-level data from the Peruvian Amazon Rural Livelihoods and Poverty (PARLAP) Project identified the predictors of the extent of forest disturbance and the dynamics of secondary forests around communities. Although shifting cultivation is the primary driver of old-growth forest loss, we find that secondary forest cover which replaces old-growth forests is stable through time, and that both the area and rate of expansion into old-growth forests are modest when compared to forest conversion in Peru for colonization and plantation development. Our findings challenge the notion that smallholder agriculture along rivers is an important threat to terra firme forests in Amazonia and point to the importance of protecting forests on community lands from loggers, colonists and other outsiders.