Quotes About Amazonia

Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces.

Perdóneme, señor Casement. Vivir tantos años en la Amazonia me ha vuelto un poco escéptico sobre la idea de progreso. En Iquitos, uno termina por no creer en nada de eso. Sobre todo, en que algún día la justicia vaya a hacer retroceder a la injusticia.

The most striking thing to me about human space flight and my own personal experience is that I've seen dramatic changes on Earth. We humans are rapidly changing the planet. I've watched Amazonia as the rainforest has been cut down. That's something I've seen out the window. I'm very worried about that.

That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.

Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance. By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple then as now was manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root that Brazilians roast, chop, fry, ferment, and grind into an amazing variety of foods.

it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Traditionally, archaeologists have regarded the wet tropics as unpromising. Because Amazonia has little stone or metal, "99 percent of material culture was perishable," Erickson told me. "Cane, chonta [palm wood], bones, basketry, wood—none of it survives these conditions. The whole culture, even if it was there for thousands of years, seems to be gone.

Indians might have bred the modern peach palm by hybridizing palms from several areas, including the Peruvian Amazon. Whatever the origin, people domesticated the species thousands of years ago and then spread it rapidly, first through Amazonia and then up into the Caribbean and Central America.

But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Indians are still making terra preta in this way, according to Hecht, the UCLA geographer. Hecht spent years with the Kayapó, in central Amazonia, watching them create "low-biomass" fires "cool enough to walk through" of pulled-up weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds, and termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant: "To live among the Kayapó is to live in a place where parts of the landscape smolder.

Women should all move to Amazonia, or at least vacation there four times a year. - Amazonia? - It's the girl world in my head, where I go when I'm annoyed with Carter, or just men in general. There are five shoe stores per capita, nothing has any calories, and all the books and movies end happy ever after. - I like Amazonia. When do we leave?

Another is pottery, which may have arisen from observations of the behavior of clay, a very widespread natural material, when dried or heated. Pottery appeared in Japan around 14,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent and China by around 10,000 years ago, and in Amazonia, Africa's Sahel zone, the U.S. Southeast, and Mexico thereafter.

Once the 'portals of the future close - in Amazonia, Siberia or the Arctic - we will find ourselves powerless to affect the outcome of this dreadful tale.