Peru Marañón river obtained the personality in 2024, a decade after having met him personal.
In 2015, I spent two weeks with my husband and other world volunteers gathering research data with Land of land in the Amazon Loreto region.
Dr Richard BodmerThe principal researcher, invited graduate students and volunteers for field research, as he had done every year since 2009.
We helped count and categorize Dolphins of the Pink Rivergiant otters, caimans, pacaws and other species, while living on a 100 year old river boat Rubber arrow era.
After floating on the Marañón river, we moored Yarapaa river flowing in the Amazon near the confluence of Ucayali and Marañón. The confluence marks the start of the Amazon river.
This continuous Earthwatch project provides the scientific basis for conservation of biodiversity for the region.
Their objectives include the sustainable use of resources and community conservation, monitoring of climate change impacts, trade and recovery of endangered species.
Over the years, the results have been used by several Peruvian agencies to manage wildlife and monitor the subsistence hunting by the Kukama and other native groups.
We have barely seen others on the river, except when we have traveled to visit a village. It was not always so: scientists believe that the population of 1492 along the massive river system was 10 million people.
A Spanish expedition half a century later included a Dominican brother who wrote on “villages densely populated along the edge of the river, including one which extended for several kilometers”.
Carvajal Gaspar Described “large road networks, beautiful places and fortified palisades, carefully cultivated farms and painted pottery as well as many in Spain”.
Eighty percent of this indigenous population was decreed during the decades and centuries that have followed. Explorers in the 1700s presumed that the Amazon had never been populated by humans.
It is ironic but appropriate that the 900 -mile Marañón river has now been declared anyone. How and why is it largely due to a woman who grew up on the banks of the Marañón, husband Luz Canaquiri Murayari, of the Kukama community.
For years, Canada Murayari saw the contaminating oil the drinking water of their community. The Peruvian Energy Investment Agency and Mines, OsinergminRecognized more than 80 oil spills from the barges along the pipeline between 1997 and 2022.
Oil spills kill the sacred river species as well as contamination of their water and their food. Communities living near drilling or spill sites have high levels of lead in their blood. Their urine shows high levels of mercury, arsenic and cadmium of the consumption of river fish or cultivated vegetables near the spill sites.
A spill in 2000 enhanced Canaquiri Murayari to mobilize a group, the appellant Asociación de Mujeres Huayynakana Kamatahuara Kana (women’s association that works hard.) They gathered strikes, statements, meetings and round discussions.
“They don’t listen to us,” said Canaquiri Murayari.
Finally, she connected the Legal Defense Institute (IDL) In 2014. After another decade of legal argument, the Federal Court ruled for the Kukama.
For the first time in the history of Peru, a river obtained a legal personality. In theory, this allows him to exist, to flow without pollution and to “exercise his essential functions within the ecosystem”, among other rights.
Last month, Canaquiri Murayari received the Goldman Environmental Prize for his work. The price is awarded each year to basic environmental leaders on different continents.
For his part, Canada Murayari says that work is just beginning. The Kukama now have the possibility of questioning the activities which undermine the rights of the river.
Earthwatch research will likely help these challenges. Bodmer’s 15 years of research have generated intriguing and crucial results.
Jaguars and Pumas, for example, take almost 10 times the great terrestrial prey, as well as subsistence hunters; Thus, subsistence hunting can have a place in the jungle management policy.
The drought and the simultaneous heat dome caused a decrease in the number of primates, in particular the monkeys of the squirrel: a story of warning in climate change.
If everything goes well, these species and others can be managed in a lasting way for the earth, the Amazonians and this very important person: the Marañón river.