Sacrificing Cultures on the Climate Change Altar

This story by Elisabeth Rosenthal in Saturday's New York Times unintentionally highlights an issue that receives scant attention in the media. Which is the bigger, more immediate problem: land use (such as deforestation) or climate change? If you want to make things even more complicated, throw in natural climatic events, such as drought. Rosenthal tries admirably to suss all this out in her front page piece about a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon forest that can't feed itself anymore. But she ends up writing a mishmash of a story by swinging back and forth between what's really killing the tribe (deforestation and encroaching ranches and farms) and the similarly tenuous existence of other indigenous cultures around the world (attributed to climate change). This posted comment to the Times story perfactly captures my frustration with the story. Until about five years ago (give or take a few years), there was a ...