Our human tribe

A famed photographer's exhibition about Amazonia prompts Jane Cacouris to consider the wider issues.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

Amazonia from the air.

Neil Palmer/CIAT, Wikimedia Commons.

'What drew me back to the Amazon? …it was to savour afresh the unparalleled beauty of this vast region. For me, it is a last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on earth.'

These are the words of world renowned Brazilian photographer, Sebastião Salgado, in the foreword of his book, Amazônia. Over a period of six years, Salgado travelled around the Brazilian Amazon photographing its sweeping landscapes: forests, rivers, mountains, as well as the people who live there. A photograph of a Yanomani tribe on the edge of a vast vista with a towering mountain shrouded in cloud in the distance is an extraordinary snapshot of his travels. Salgado documented the daily lives of a dozen indigenous tribes, capturing on camera their warm family bonds, traditional dances and rituals, the artistry of their body painting and means of survival – hunting and fishing. Although Salgado was unable to communicate by speaking to the tribes he visited, he describes vividly how the human emotions he shared with his hosts - to love, laugh, cry and to feel happy or angry – served as their common language. He says:

I felt at home in my own tribe, that of all humans, where myriad systems of logic and reason are interwoven with my own, with those of Homo Sapiens.

During a recent trip to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, I visited Salgado’s Amazônia exhibition at the Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) in the centre of the city. The photographs are awe inspiring, all in black and white. They depict lush rainforest vegetation, winding rivers and waterfalls. Beautiful people with dark eyes, mainly naked, dressed, feathered and painted according to their tribal traditions sit against a black canvas backdrop or are portrayed in their natural surroundings. Salgado’s talent lies in capturing the epic beauty of the region’s landscapes, but also the delicate detail of the individual faces of the people he photographs. Each person looked straight at the camera lens – and as I looked back at them, it was as if I could see a little of their soul and personality. To the right of each portrait is the name of the person, and a note about their role in the tribe; a reminder that each face is not just a stunning photograph, but a human being who is valued and respected.

But Salgado’s portrayal of the Amazon rainforest, often referred to as “the world’s lung,” is not simply remarkable visual artistry. It is a powerful reminder of a number of issues that we collectively face today as a global tribe of human beings.

For over 10,000 years, humans have enjoyed an inter-connectedness with our natural environment, tending and living off the land. And this is still the case with the Amazonian tribes who rely so tangibly on tapping into the rainforest’s renewable wealth and provision – its animals, fruit, nuts and medicinal plants. A growing body of evidence shows that globally, indigenous people are especially good at sustainably protecting their territories. This is no exception in the Amazon; the indigenous reserves legally ringfenced by the Brazilian government are the areas that are most pristine. The areas where tribes have been driven out have been damaged irretrievably.

With our human quest to develop, the past two hundred years has seen a slow positive global trajectory towards eliminating absolute poverty, reducing conflicts and improving human rights. Encouraging on paper. But this positive change has come at a huge cost to our environment. Ironically, the same expanding global economy which has driven improvements in development and social justice, is based on fossil fuels and high consumption of natural resources causing climate change, mass extinctions and pollution. The results of these changes are hitting the world’s poorest communities the hardest – those who have done the least to cause them. The delicate balance that has existed between humans and our natural environment for millennia is being thrown out of kilter.

COP27, the annual UN global climate conference took place in Egypt at the end of 2022 and the impact of the climate crisis on vulnerable countries was finally on the agenda. It is promising to see growing public support from across the world for action. More people than ever before – including Christians and churches – are speaking up for climate justice, campaigning, joining marches and praying for change. Christian NGOs and pressure groups, such as Tearfund, Christian Action, and World Vision to name a few, are often at the forefront of climate campaigns.

So why are Christians calling for climate action? First, it’s an issue of ownership. As campaigner Ruth Valerio explains: the Bible tells them that creation was made by Jesus, through Jesus and for Jesus. Therefore, this world that was made brimming with abundance and vitality has immense value to God. The world is not ours to do with as we please, it belongs to its creator who has entrusted it to humans to care for. Second, it’s an issue of justice. The outworking of climate breakdown, such as global temperatures rising, floods, drought and extreme weather events has a disproportionate impact on people in poverty and who are already vulnerable, affecting their livelihoods, health and security. Christians believe that we’re all made ’in the image of God’. This speaks powerfully of equality between each one of us within our global human tribe.

Therefore acting justly means responding to the needs of our global neighbours, not only our immediate communities. The Bible says ‘Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy’. Christians – especially those living in privileged countries with social safety nets and funds to invest in climate resilience – are asked to stand up for equality and justice, calling on those in positions of power to make decisions that protect those who are more vulnerable, as well as this Earth that belongs to God.

At COP27 these Christian groups joined with countries vulnerable to the impacts of climate change to call for justice in climate financing. It’s a simple but radical case of compensation; rich nations who have already used far more than their fair share of carbon to develop their economies should now pay for the unavoidable “loss and damage” experienced by those whose homes, livelihoods and even lives are being lost as a result of the climate crisis. The protection of the Amazon also remains a critical theme.

Addressing the COP27 conference, Brazilian President Elect Lula said,

There is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon.

Visiting the Amazon rainforest with my family in 2019 I was stunned, like Salgado, by its majesty and magnitude. Sleek, dark waters teeming with fish and crocodiles, trees with trunks that curved and curled, and the cacophony of sounds and song – amphibians, birds and beasts - that accompanied the sudden blackness of the night that fell like a curtain. This is creation as God meant it to be – in all its life and vitality. Can our vast human tribe, scattered and concentrated across the earth, who all laugh and cry and love under this single sky, unite and make the critical decisions needed to care for each other and our world? The protection of Amazonia is only one part of the solution, but it’s an integral part. So will we act? Before it’s too late and Salgado’s extraordinary photographs become simply a segment of history showing future generations the way it used to be?

Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”