The Forest Value: Historical Path of the Paiter Suruí People on the Use of Forest Resources in Sete de Setembro Indigenous Territory

Abstract

The Brazilian agricultural border expansion across the Amazon has triggered profound changes in the traditional people and communities’ lives and in their relationships with natural resources. Large infrastructure projects have been implemented in the Amazon under the heading of developmentalism promote unequal and unsustainable land uses, making indigenous populations and their territories vulnerable. In this paper we aim at analyzing transformations in the conception and use of forest resources by the Paiter Suruí indigenous people, in Sete de Setembro Indigenous Territory. The study was based on the documentary method and the analyses was carried out on the basis of Ecosocialism (LÖWY, 2013; 2014). The results point to a growing understanding, by the Paiter Suruí people, of the “standing” forest value for income generation, especially through the use of forest biomass for carbon sequestration; they also indicate the ethnic group introduction into the international debate on the environmental crisis and global warming.