PUYO, Ecuador—People fighting oil wells, mines and other threats to their homelands did not come to this Amazonian city to lobby politicians at an environmental conference hosted by governments. They built the conference themselves.
The 12th Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, known as FOSPA, brought together Indigenous leaders, Afro-descendent communities, women, youth and other environmental defenders and social-movement members from across the Amazon and Andes for six days of debate in August about how to protect the region from the forces reshaping it.
At the opening of the 12th Pan-Amazonian Social Forum on Aug. 18, participants are offered chicha, a traditional Amazonian drink made from fermented corn, chonta or yucca. The first FOSPA forum was held in 2002 in Belém, Brazil, following the World Social Forum movement pressing back against globalization. The FOSPA conferences are held every two years, rotating in locations across Amazonian countries.
A central message of the gathering was that the Amazon basin is an interconnected living system that national borders have unnaturally divided—and that attacks on the forest cannot be separated from attacks on the people who defend it.
The ecological stakes could not be higher.
