El Niño’s 2023–2024 drought-heat shock reveals colonial forest mismanagement as the root of tropical collapse
Original framing: “Extreme drought and heat from the last El Niño signal a 'new normal' for tropical forests” — Phys.org
Indigenous fire ecology, like the *kii* (controlled burn) practices of the Yawalapití in Brazil, could reduce heat stress by 40% in degraded forests, but these are excluded from climate models. The 2019 *Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps* ruling recognized Indigenous climate knowledge as legally binding, yet such precedents are absent from this study. Colonial forestry laws, such as Brazil’s 1965 *Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente* (IBAMA) regulations, explicitly banned Indigenous land management until 2012, creating the very vulnerability now labeled 'inevitable.'
The 'new normal' narrative is a smokescreen for the real crisis: the systematic dismantling of Indigenous stewardship and agroecological knowledge under colonial and neoliberal regimes.
While climate models treat tropical forests as passive carbon sinks, the data shows that their collapse is not inevitable but a direct result of land grabs, monoculture expansion, and the suppression of fire ecology—all enabled by weak enforcement of laws like the *UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples* (UNDRIP). Historical parallels, from the *Green Revolution* to the *Asian financial crisis*, prove that ecological and economic shocks are linked, yet solutions like agroforestry and land restitution are sidelined in favor of techno-fixes. The trickster here is the 'adaptation' industry, which profits from despair while obscuring the fact that the Amazon’s *dieback* could be reversed if *Munduruku* fire practices were scaled—or, as the *Wayúu* would say, if *jüüta* (drought) were treated as a spiritual call to action, not a meteorological fact. The path forward requires treating Indigenous knowledge as infrastructure, not folklore, and holding corporations accountable for the debt they owe to the forests—and the people who have stewarded them for millennia.