“The Amazon has often been described as the world’s lung, but it is like a heart pumping humidity. This 135 million hectare corridor, half of which belongs to indigenous communities, could be the world’s most important ecosystem right along the Equator,” says Martin von Hildebrand, the Colombian-Irish ethnologist, environmentalist and official. A major figure in the study, advocacy and delivery of land ownership and democratic rights to communities, he chairs the Gaia Amazones Foundation and is secretary general of the Amazon Co-operation Treaty Organisation. This organisation brings together eight Amazon states to protect its ecosystem and indispensable connectivity for water, people and animals through a corridor linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Andes mountains.

Throughout the region, these systems are under threat from legal deforestation, intensive beef farming, mining, road construction and hydroelectric power plants; and from a $280 billion illegal business in trafficking drugs, wildlife and people, logging, gold mining and land grabbing. Peace deals between the government and the Farc rebel movements exposed the regions as transit zones.

Von Hildebrand and his son Francisco spoke to the Casement Summer School in Dún Laoghaire last weekend to honour Roger Casement’s 1910 report........

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