Photo Courtesy of Nasa.

Recently, I had the pleasure of a two hour phone call with the incredible Dolly Beaver, a native Peruvian who grew up in the jungles of the Amazon. Dolly now runs one the charities we work with there and leads educational eco-tours across Peru. Check out her site at http://www.perujungle.com/

When not in the Amazon myself, I try to arrange calls with as many people as I can who experience Amazon deforestation daily so that I have first hand accounts of all the changes, positive or negative. I wanted to include excerpts from my conversation with Dolly here since it’s calls like these that help us save more trees with tees.
Beth Doane

Oil in the Amazon

As told to Rain Tees founder Beth Doane by Dolly Beaver

“The biggest threat to the Amazon is the oil companies that come into South and Central America. These corporations destroy not just our nature and wildlife, but our human lives as well,” says Dolly.

She goes on to explain that sadly, in many Amazon countries, if oil is found on your land it belongs to the government and they have the right to take it from you.

She also explained that now there are “explorations” happening in Peru where they send teams to search for oil on native land.

“I have always said and witnessed so many times that after this oil “exploration” comes the exploitation,” Dolly states.

Once an oil company moves into the Amazon to extract oil, the water soon becomes so contaminated with pollution that when animals and people drink the water, and even as the soil absorbs the water, everything becomes so highly toxic that it’s deadly.

“Also, to clear the land in the Amazon to extract the oil, the oil companies first need to use the natives.  The natives know the forest and the companies need their vast knowledge and skills to navigate through it. The natives are also very hardworking and generally illiterate so they are very cheap to use as hard labor. This is one of the first steps in exploitation, as often the natives are treated unfairly, hardly paid and forced to work in poor conditions,” says Dolly.

“I remember watching as this happened in Bolivia and here as it happened in Peru. It also happened in Ecuador and Chevron is in a huge lawsuit over a 360 mile oil pipeline that leaked in the Ecuadorian Amazon, killing hundreds of thousands of plants and animals and even humans.”

“I can remember all the names of all the companies in Peru through the years that have come in and destroyed the land, one after the other. We are sick worried about it because we know the explorations are happening more and more often as issues in the middle east continue to rise and oil issues become so complex. Oil companies are eager to find more places to drill outside of the middle east,” she explains.

“I know right now the government has already granted land space for exploration where I lead my tours. These are very remote areas. Everyone in our villages is praying they don’t find anything, as they know it would mean they would lose their homes and their lives.”

Dolly continues, “This is important to me, to share with my people, because my main concern is to teach the natives what will happen when the oil companies take over. I have seen it all.”

“I think that because these issues are not happening to us in USA we forget that it’s still a part of us and it’s our companies that are doing this. Also, its us that profit from it even as we invest in these corporations and as we use oil products every day in our cars, in our plastics (….and I am adding that oil is even used in our clothing believe it or not!). You wouldn’t believe what we see,” she adds.

“This is not something someone is telling me. This is what I am seeing. This is my life. This is my history. It’s my goal to educate the world on what I see and to give women here in these villages the opportunity to make things sustainability in the Amazon so that they can have their own future. There is just so much work to do.”

“I am glad the art the children in the villages did is making such an impact. Most of them have never held crayons or written on paper. It was amazing to see them explore through art. It is therapy for them. Thanks again.”

Dolly Beaver

“We kill rain forests to grow cows and kill cows to grow people and then people end up dead from eating too many cows…”

-Beth Doane

Creating Rain Tees took an amazing amount of research into environmental issues, and so much of what I have learned has without a doubt changed my life profoundly. One thing I didn’t expect to find though was just how tragic meat consumption is for our planet and how agri-business is often doing more harm than good globally.

Through so many books, interviews, websites, news reports, and lots of long conversations with people who have studied the effects of meat consumption on our global health and economy for years, it became clear that a simple way to “save the earth” is to cut back on our intake of animal products.

My research is truly a never-ending cycle and I am comfortable saying this is exactly how it should be. The search for truth really is never ending and as our world is constantly changing and evolving so does our information and our access to it.

I have learned that despite these challenges, if we can learn as much as possible about what we are consuming and make educated changes based on this knowledge, we can then exercise our power as consumers to change the world by only consuming products that reflect our truth.