Social media gives us access to a plethora of communiqué & usually filtered in favour of channeled interests. In my case that means globally imperiled species, avian or otherwise. Some of the material is well-researched & written well-enough to impart a telling message. Agenda-driven bias, unadulterated drivel, financial slant, predilections & prejudice make up the balance.
Too much nasty tends to fog our intellectual frailties & therein lies the rub. We become immune to plight particularly if the issue is indirect or geographically removed. Notwithstanding, ours is a connected web of truths.
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| Extinction symbol |
Fox's 3D computer-animated musical, Rio, a favourite in most homes, tells the story of the world's last male Blue Macaw & his subsequent introduction to a Rio-based lady friend. It's a nice enough story and he & she fall in love and so on. Only the Blue Macaw or more accurately Spix's (or Little Blue) Macaw is, in fact, critically endangered and quite possibly extinct in the wild. The animated message is clear enough even though the constructive aspects are eventually lost in translation if not trumped by the entertainment value of the ensuing adventure. That raises some concerns.
Take the 2014 FIFA World Cup™, for example, or more specifically its official mascot, Fuleco. Fuleco the armadillo loves to sing & dance which is fair enough. He's Brazilian after-all & apart from his raunchy act with scantily-clad women, an animated joy for children. Fuleco represents the Three-banded Armadillo, quintessentially Brazilian as are Fuleco's samba- exhortations it seems.
The Three-banded Armadillo is a son of the Caatinga (White Forest) woodlands, also the natural habitat for Spix's Macaw. The Caatinga, in turn, is one of six (6) eco-regions (ie: in Brazil) & covers 850,000 km² or approximately 10% of the country. This area is poorly represented in Brazil's Conservation Network. Only 1% of the Caatinga is formally protected with a further 6% declared a 'Sustainable Use Conservation Area'. Endemism levels vary from about 10% in birds to 60%, give or take, for fish. The Caatinga is also home to 15 000 000 of the poorest peoples in Brazil who are still largely dependent on forest & agricultural activity for income. Unfettered access has & continues to contribute to the unsustainable exploitation of the natural resources.
By the time fieldwork was initiated to locate Spix's Macaw, some thirty years ago, it was too late. At that time just 15 or so captive Spix's were formally recorded. Only a single male bird was located in the wild. In the mid-nineties His Excellency Sheikh Saud bin Muhammed bin Ali Al-Thani of Qatar bought most of the remaining captive collections & under his exacting standards the subsequent breeding program proved successful. In 2012 the Brazilian government established NEST which now formally houses the Spix's formerly homed in various conservation organisations, elsewhere. Descended from the original 7 wild-caught birds some 90-odd captive Spix's are extant today. The Spix's, if not free at last, are at least home at last.
The Three-banded Armadillo or the colloquial tatu-bola, 'ball armadillo', hence the FIFA Fuleco connection, has suffered a precipitous decline in the last decade so much so that's it's currently listed on IUCN's red list. In 2012 the Caatinga Association launched a national campaign to propose the tatu-bola as the official 2014 FIFA World Cup™ mascot. The campaign highlighted not only the plight of tatu-bola, represented by Fuleco, the most popular World Cup mascot of all time, but also of the Caatinga itself.
What of Brazil's people? The media reports a collective dislike for FIFA and more specifically, nation-wide protests, some violent, against the subsequent spend to comply with the associated staging-requirements. Given the unprecedented social unrest, particularly during last year's preparatory 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, most would agree that Brazil's peoples haven't wholly embraced the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ with open arms.
Those same Brazilians (9 in 10) insist that the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ should be, at the very least, environmentally friendly; the Copa Verde - the greenest World Cup ever. Although 6 of the stadiums are LEED-certified [Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design] ie: a best-in-class green building certification program; the long-term sustainability remains elusive. Brazil's investment in stadiums undeniably advances ecological technologies but does very little to ensure social justice & this, more than anything else, negates the Copa Verde as a simple contradiction in terms. Dispossession of land, particularly from its first peoples ie: Brazil's indigenous tribes, of which 1400-odd tribes are believed to have become extinct since 1500, is the lasting legacy. The farce that is indigenous land destroyed to build ecologically-certified stadiums is trite. Equally farcical, defying logic really, are FIFA's subsequent efforts to promote the environment through it's Green Goal program - largely premised on zero-emissions. The event's carbon-footprint, as a whole, is not inconsequential..
Where then does that leave Spix's Macaw & our tatu-bola? Nowhere really.
First-off, there is very little influence on national policy specific to the Caatinga, if any, as a result of the perceived successes arising from the 2014 FIFA World Cup™, Fuleco's domestic popularity or from FIFA's not-for-profit coffers. There are no irrevocable offers tabled from which the Caatinga's peoples will derive any meaningful financial benefit & certainly not from FIFA or from Brasilia. By implication the unsustainable harvest of indigenous habitat will continue unabated. Although the perpetual question posed of FIFA on whether the organisation owes the world anything other than a successful football tournament remains moot, we noted the social apathy of the indigenous people, particularly in Cuiabá. It's a sad indictment of the authorities & for us, at least, the abiding legacy. The most optimistic assessment of the social impact on these people is arbitrary at best & grossly unjust, at worst. We concede that 'FIFA will not take the stadiums home in their suitcases..'. Notwithstanding the political nuances, unprecedented allegations of corruption & the stew that is Brazil's social web and history, FIFA will, however, depart in mid-July & they will take with them the untried opportunity to make a real investment in the social & environmental fabric of a country considered globally incomparable in biodiversity. This is the abiding travesty. In fact it's a poke in the collective eye of green-grass football-fans, anywhere.
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