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TEDx Amazonia: Culture, Ecology, Amazonia, Part 2

Antonio Nobrega opens the event with a beautiful performance.

Nelida Silva dances to open day two of the conference.

Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference

Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians

Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers

Each day began with a beautiful dance, Saturday’s a wild modern piece by Brazilian dancer Antonio NÃ³brega and Sunday’s a traditional village dance from the Peruvian highlands by Nelida Silva. A baroque orchestra serenaded us at the start of the sixth and final bloc on Sunday afternoon, while Saturday’s four blocs ended with Bahian musician Lucas Santtana, who never called himself an anthropophagist, but the way he cannibalized musics from the rich treasure of Brazil as well as elsewhere certainly made him one.

Andre Abujamra

My favorite musical presenter was AndrÃ© Abujamra, a funny thoughtful musician who has made his name more outside of Brazil than inside, even though he’s played behind Tom ZÃ© and other iconic stars. He gave me a copy of his latest CD called “Mafaro” and it’s fantastic! He came up wearing a shoulder-covering sequined garment and waited for his cue that didn’t come. He finally said “fuck it” and launched into his bit a capella. The slides played and eventually the music came on too. It was a charming, funny piece. The very last speaker at the end was the American “Sound Chaser” Gordon Hempton who played bird songs from all over, including a one-minute trip around a 24-hour soundscape of the world’s natural areas. He’s a big noise pollution activist too, much to my happiness, and helped shift our thinking by calling the Earth a huge solar-powered jukebox. He even used maps to show how the more sun falls on an area, the louder it is in terms of birds and bugs.

It wasn’t all lecture, but a lot of it was. I went early, number six in the first bloc (the event was divided into six blocs of 8-10 presenters each, four blocs on Saturday from 10 a.m to 10:30 pm with 15-20 minute breaks as well as lunch and dinner, and two blocs on Sunday, ending much later than planned, around 4:30). I was given 10 minutes, which was the average length, though some folks got 15-18 minutes and others only 5-8 minutes. And we were expected to stick to it, though a lot of people, especially the Amazonians who spoke, took all the time they wanted and went way over their allocations (I only blew my limit by about 90 seconds).

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TEDx Amazonia: Quality of Life for All Species, Part 1

Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference
Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians
Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers

I was so annoyed that I improvised an opening lament/complaint about it when I gave my Talk in the first of six blocs over two days. The audience cheered in support.

It’s quite difficult to summarize the just-completed TEDx Amazonia. Brazilian organizers (mostly from Sao Paulo themselves) staged the event Nov. 6-7 at the Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel which sits about 45 minutes up the Rio Negro River from Manaus in the heart of the forest (the enormous expense of flying in all the speakers and fancy hi-tech equipment was covered by corporate sponsors Santander Bank and a variety of Brazilian media and marketing companies). Normally it’s a floating hotel that can be reached directly by river ferries of all types. Here’s a photo of the place when the waters are running high (this was also taken before the conference center and dining hall we used were added).

Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel prior to some of its recent additions, and long before the drought left it aground in the forest.

But we had quite a different experience, as detailed in my previous post. We were on what felt like an ocean liner that had run aground in a lost corner of the jungle, and was slowly disappearing into the sun-baked mud as the river evaporated around it. By the time we left the rains had started again, but it wasn’t clear how long it would before this historic drought would end.

So having a gathering of 50 speakers and 250 hand-picked audience members in the heart of the jungle to address the official theme of “Quality of Life for All Species” took on a different hue once we were here, facing the impressive and unanticipated (for me at least) drought. My first stab at dividing up the presenters into thematic clusters or types produced this list: artists (including musicians and dancers), game makers, scientists (biologists, a chemist, a couple of permaculturists), residents of the Amazon involved in local business and ecological activism, and economists (which for lack of a better place, I’d put myself too), and some straight-up business people representing their companies. At least 60% of the speakers were Brazilian, but we were also from the U.S., Finland, Peru, Mexico, England, Ecuador, Colombia, and the audience made it broader still.

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Drought in the Amazon!

From the plane: the meeting point of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes, which going east from here become the Amazon River.

Famously, the yellow muddy Rio Solimoes and the dark clear Rio Negro come together at this point where Manaus is, but the two waters don't mix much for a number of kilometers, proceeding side by side.

The skies of the Amazon are endlessly breathtaking, especially at sunsets.

I spent five days in the Amazon! I was invited to speak at TEDx Amazonia November 6, a locally produced TED event. I’m going to write about the conference and the talks in the next entry, but this first post will be about travelling there and being in the hotels and climbing a big AmapÃ¡ tree overlooking the Rio Negro (one of the two great tributaries that meet just east of Manaus to form the Amazon River proper). Somehow it hadn’t entered my consciousness that the Amazon basin was suffering its worst drought in recorded history, and the rivers of the greater basin are several meters lower than normal, to the point that vast areas of riverbed have been exposed to the air for the first time in many locals’ lives. We had to walk a lot to reach the boats that moved us from the hotel in Manaus to the surreal Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel, and the long distances we covered were across wide sandy beaches and across hundreds of meters of caked mud.

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