VILA DOS CRENTES, Brazil — Raimundo Teixeira de Souza came to this sweltering Amazon outpost 15 years ago, looking for land. He bought 20 acres, he said, but more powerful farmers, who roam this Wild West territory with rifles strapped to their backs, forced him to sell much of it for a pittance.
Then someone shot and killed Mr. de Souza’s 23-year-old stepson in the middle of a village road two years ago, residents said. No one has been arrested. In fact, the new police chief has no record that the crime was even investigated by his predecessor. It is hardly surprising, the chief said, considering that he has only four investigators to cover an area of rampant land-grabbing and deforestation the size of Austria.
“We are being massacred,” said Mr. de Souza, 44, who leads the local residents’ association. “We just want to work and raise our children.”
It has been this way for decades, residents say. Throughout this huge stretch of the Amazon, the state has been virtually nonexistent, whether in the form of police officers or clear records of land ownership, giving way to a brazen culture of illegal land seizures, often at the tip of a gun barrel.
But using a new law, Brazil’s government is trying to impose order on this often lawless territory, and in the process, possibly nip away at a broader global concern: deforestation and the threat of climate change that comes with it.
For the first time, the Brazilian government is formally establishing who owns tens of millions of acres across the Amazon, enabling it to track who is responsible for clearing forests for logging and cattle — and who should be held accountable when it is done illegally.
“The government will finally know whose land it is, and who is responsible for what goes on there,” said Thomas E. Lovejoy, the biodiversity chair for the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington.
This county in the state of Pará is the worst place for forest destruction in Brazil, and environmentalists say they hope that the new law, approved by Brazil’s Congress in June, will help the government finally enforce its official limits on clearing land.
But it is a huge and messy undertaking. Clear ownership records exist for less than 4 percent of the land in private hands throughout the Brazilian Amazon, government officials said. Here in Pará, officials have discovered false titles for about 320 million acres, almost double the amount of land that actually exists, according to federal officials.
And while small farmers like Mr. de Souza are pinning their hopes on the law, many larger-scale land holders say they have sacrificed too much blood and sweat for bureaucrats in Brasília, the capital, to force new rules upon them.
“Everything we have today was built from our own desire to work,” said Jorgiano Alves de Oliveira, 68, who raises cattle and grows cocoa on about 600 acres.
The problem began with the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, which invited settlers to occupy the Amazon but required them to clear forests to gain access to land and credit.
Growing criticism of Brazil’s Amazon policies pushed the civilian government of the 1980s to develop laws that, on paper at least, were among the world’s most protective of forests. But with scant presence of authorities to enforce them, the laws did little to stop the widespread grabbing of land.
“This chaos of legal insecurity was the most important basis for the perverse incentives in the Amazon to pillage rather than to preserve or to develop, and constant incitement to violence,” said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the former minister for strategic affairs who helped develop the new land law.
Under the law, which applies to more than 150 million acres, the government will award plots up to 250 acres free to settlers. Bigger plots will be sold at varying prices, with or without public auctions, depending on their size. Those larger than about 6,000 acres cannot be sold without an explicit act of Congress. So far, settlers have registered about 4 percent of the land singled out under the law, according to government officials.
Since the days of the dictatorship, this huge county in Pará State, known as São Félix do Xingu, has drawn hardy settlers and prospectors in search of cheap land, good soil, a rich array of minerals and rare Amazon fruits.
But notorious criminals have also found refuge. Leonardo Dias Mendonça ran a vast criminal enterprise from São Félix, which included a fleet of planes used to deliver weapons to the Colombian rebels in exchange for drugs, before being convicted in 2003.
Disputes in São Félix were traditionally settled with “a lot of death,” said Waldemir de Oliveira, the leader of the São Félix agricultural association. “It was the law of the strongest,” Mr. de Oliveira said. “Farmers put guards on the perimeter of their land and no one went in. Those that did were told to ‘Get out or die.’ ”
Mr. de Oliveira and other residents say the violence is diminishing but is still a major worry. In November, a local bar owner turned the tables on four men who came to kill him in broad daylight, killing all of them, said João Gross, an architect in the area.
In Vila dos Crentes, the loud roar of a generator nearly drowned out a recent meeting of residents gathered in a church. “We are beginning to understand that we have to get engaged in reforestation and stop deforestation,” Mr. de Souza said.
But those goals are clouded by the constant threat of violence. Residents said workers on a nearby farm had been carrying out a campaign of violence and intimidation to try to force them out, and even dumped a poisonous chemical from a plane over the area, killing fish and animals.
In May 2007, residents found Mr. de Souza’s stepson dead in the road, shot multiple times.
“No one should make enemies here,” said Eder Rodrigues de Oliveira, 26, who said he grew up with Mr. de Souza’s stepson. “Everyone here must be humble.”
At the closest police station, more than 100 miles away, Chief Álvaro Ikeda said killing was common here, touching a stack of files containing information about 11 suspected homicides under investigation.
Witnesses often are too afraid to come forward. “I cannot guarantee the witnesses’ life,” Chief Ikeda said. “I cannot even guarantee my own life.”
To that end, the police chief decided to live in the police station. He keeps a 12-gauge shotgun and an assault rifle at the ready.
“Here we do not let go of our guns,” he said.
Mery Galanternick contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.
THE hum of 102 rooftop air conditioners and a chorus of beeping electric carts provide the acoustic backdrop in Amazon.com’s 605,000-square-foot distribution facility on this city’s west side. But the center’s employees can almost always hear Terry Jones.
On a recent summer afternoon, Mr. Jones, an “inbound support associate” making $12 an hour, steered a hand-pushed cart through the packed aisles and shouted his location to everyone in earshot: “Cart coming through. Yup! Watch yourself, please!” Mr. Jones explained that he was just making his time at Amazon “joyful and fun” while complying with the company’s rigorous safety rules.
But his cries might double as a warning to the retail world: Amazon, the Web’s largest retailer, wants you to step aside.
Fifteen years after Jeffrey P. Bezos founded the company as an online bookstore, Amazon is set to cross a significant threshold. Sometime later this year, if current trends continue, worldwide sales of media products — the books, movies and music that Amazon started with — will be surpassed for the first time by sales of other merchandise on the site. (That transition already occurred this year in its North American business.)
In other words, in an increasingly digital age, Amazon is quickly becoming the world’s general store. Alongside the books and CDs and DVDs are diapers, Legos and power drills, not to mention replacement car clutches and more arcane items like the Jackalope Buck taxidermy mount ($69.97).
“Amazon has gone from ‘that bookstore’ in people’s mind to a general online retailer, and that is a great place to be,” said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, an eBay-backed company that helps stores like Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney sell online. Mr. Wingo envisions e-commerce growing to 15 percent of overall retail in the next decade from around 7 percent. “If Amazon grows their market share throughout that period, and honestly I don’t see anything stopping it, that is pretty scary,” he said.
Indeed, Amazon has been gobbling e-commerce market share since 2006, taking away customers from eBay in particular. But its advances are shaking up the entire retail world. Giants like Wal-Mart are warily replicating elements of its strategy, while small independent retailers in sporting goods and jewelry now worry their fate will be similar to that of small bookstores and independent video rental shops (remember those?).
Amazon’s expansion strategy has allowed it, almost alone among retailers, to thrive during the recession, even while its own media business has stagnated. Over the last year, shoppers have bought fewer books, CDs and DVDs, in many cases opting for cheaper digital downloads. In the quarter ending in June, for example, Amazon’s worldwide media sales grew only 1 percent, to $2.4 billion, highlighted by a slowdown in video games.
But during the same quarter, sales of other products, which the company lumps together on its balance sheet in a grouping dubbed “electronics and general merchandise,” grew by 35 percent, to $2.07 billion.
Its relentless ambition to sell more of everything is constantly on display these days. In July alone, Amazon introduced separate hubs on its site for outdoor sporting goods and cellphones and wireless plans. Then it capped the month by buying an emerging competitor, the online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos.com, in a stock exchange now worth more than $930 million.
Aside from using its stock and $3.1 billion in cash and marketable securities to make acquisitions, Amazon has fueled its growth as a general retailer by nudging loyal customers to buy a greater variety of products by offering free shipping and speedy delivery with clubs like the $79-a-year Amazon Prime.
It has also lured an increasing number of small sellers to list their own products on Amazon.com, and takes around a 15 percent cut of each sale. Such third-party transactions now account for 30 percent of all the sales on the site. And Amazon continues to expand its network of more than 25 distribution centers around the world, where it constantly hones the art of getting products to customers as quickly as possible.
Next week, Amazon will take yet another step in this strategy, expanding its private label business with a line of Amazon-branded audio-video cables and blank media discs. Amazon already offers hundreds of private label kitchen products and outdoor furniture, and uses these direct relationship with manufacturers to further undercut prices from the competition.
Amazon executives are nonchalant about the shift to general retailing, regarding the moment as preordained destiny ever since the company announced its ambition to offer the biggest selection of goods on earth, before going public in 1997. But they have reason to feel vindicated: after the dot-com bust, some analysts thought the company could go broke trying to stock such a wide array of merchandise.
“It means we are becoming increasingly important in the lives of our customers, which has been our mission from the beginning,” said Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s senior vice president of North American retail. “We had the chance to earn the trust of the customer beyond media, and we took it.”
INSIDE Amazon’s vast shipping centers, the company’s growing capability as a general retailer is nearly invisible. What is clear is that the normal rules of retail don’t apply here.
Instead of storing similar items next to each other — televisions with other electronics, shampoo with other personal care items — randomness abounds. In the warehouse where Terry Jones loudly roams the aisles, which the company somewhat randomly dubs Phoenix 3, “Star Wars” action figures are stocked next to sleeping bags; bagel chips sit next to the “Beatles: Rock Band” video game.
In one high-risk valuables area, monitored by overhead video cameras, a single Impulse Jack Rabbit sex toy is wedged between a Rosetta Stone Spanish CD and an iPod Nano.
In nearby Goodyear, Ariz., at an even larger distribution center known as Phoenix 5, Amazon stores and ships more unwieldy items. Samsung 54-inch plasma HDTVs are stacked three high on the floor, next to crates of Pampers. Across the aisle, a kayak ($879) sits alone on the floor, wrapped tightly in cardboard and plastic.
Amazon says it stores dissimilar products next to each other on purpose, to minimize the possibility that employees select the wrong item. That seems unlikely: every product, shelving unit, forklift, roller cart and employee badge in these shipping centers has a bar code. Each physical move is orchestrated by software that calculates the most efficient path from shelf to the shipping area, telling employees on their wireless bar code readers which aisle and palette to go to next.
“Imagine how many customers we serve and if they were all here now,” said Bert Wegner, Amazon’s director of North American fulfillment, gesturing over the open space in Phoenix 5. “We are doing the heavy lifting for all of them in a hyper-efficient manner.”
Amazon also benefits greatly from its advanced inventory management methods and ability to negotiate beneficial payment terms with vendors. The company sells such a large volume of merchandise, and can predict customer demand so accurately, that it generally sells products within 65 days, before it has to pay suppliers for them.
That arrangement, which analysts call “negative working capital,” is unusual outside of grocery stores and allows Amazon to avoid the huge capital charges associated with buying and storing such a broad line of inventory. It also boosts the company’s cash flow, which it has used to pay down its debt to $109 million at the end of June from a hefty $2 billion in 2000, and to add more product lines to its Web site.
Amazon’s profit and margins have always been slender; it earned only $645 million in 2008, up 36 percent from the year before, compared to Wal-Mart’s $13.4 billion, up 5 percent. But Wall Street is more enamored by the promise of the online retailer, valuing Amazon at around 60 times earnings and Wal-Mart at 15 times earnings.
“They don’t have to incur huge inventory carrying costs and can add product categories almost ad infinitum,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “Amazon has an almost magical business model in terms of inventory management.”
AMAZON’S incursion into general retail has rivals scurrying to regroup and stop its advance.
In August, Target, which allowed Amazon to run its Web site for the last decade, announced it would end the affiliation when its contract was up in 2011, following other one-time Amazon partners like Borders and Toys “R” Us. This month, Wal-Mart said it would allow other retailers to sell their products on Walmart.com, mimicking Amazon’s third-party marketplace and trying to match its vast selection. Analysts believe Sears, which owns Kmart, is preparing to allow outside sellers on its sites as well.
But the Amazon effect may be most deeply felt by small independent stores, which cannot hope to compete with Amazon’s selection and prices and recall in fear how the company hastened the fate of both independent booksellers and prominent electronics chains like Circuit City.
Like many small business owners, Ken Lombardi, the C.E.O. of his family’s 60-year-old Lombardi Sports in San Francisco, views Amazon as a source of some of his business troubles. Though his store has been hit hard by the recession and the expansion of a sporting goods chain, R.E.I., in the Bay Area, Mr. Lombardi says that it is Amazon that has helped depress profit margins and snagged sales for basics like silicone swim caps, undershirts and running shoes — which, he adds, Amazon can offer without California’s 8.25 percent sales tax.
“People used to come in to buy a pair of running shoes and we would sell them a shirt or a workout outfit. We’re losing that,” Mr. Lombardi, who was recently forced to lay off a quarter of his 75-member staff.
In response to the gathering storm, Mr. Lombardi has overhauled his store, shrinking space for lagging items like Crocs clogs — which are offered cheaply on Amazon. He has added space for newer, hotter-selling items like Sanuk sandals, which are for sale on Amazon at about the same price. He also recently commissioned a new Web site to replace the static old one, which had not changed much over the years
“All we can do is tell a story physically and let people touch and smell and feel the product, which they can’t do online,” Mr. Lombardi said, lamenting his store’s future. “I think we are doing everything we can.”
There may be other ways to beat Amazon at its own game. One strategy discussed by rivals and analysts is to focus on the high-end luxury brands in specific categories, like Ralph Lauren clothes, Chanel fragrances or Wilson Audio speakers. Those companies resist selling on Amazon, fearing the downward effect it has on prices.
In shoes, Nike is perhaps the best example. The shoe giant has steadfastly declined to allow Amazon and most other Web retailers to sell its sneakers, and only late last year allowed some shoes to be sold on Zappos.com, which unlike Amazon does not present itself as a discounter.
Now that Amazon has bought the shoe site, a person familiar with internal discussions at Nike, who was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly, said the company was rethinking its arrangement with Zappos. This may be some comfort to Ken Lombardi, who says Nike shoes are among his store’s top-selling products.
There are similar holdout brands in almost every product category, but Amazon says that number is steadily shrinking. As the number of shoppers using Amazon.com even for basic product research grows, “every year we are able to sign up more and more brands,” said Jon Witham, Amazon’s vice president of toys, sports and home improvement.
Whether Amazon can dominate its newest product categories is another question. In markets like consumer electronics, where Amazon increasingly prevails, products like HDTVs from different companies are usually made by the same Asian factories, with little technical difference between brands. Shoppers then look for the best price and most convenient delivery, which Amazon can offer.
But the dynamics are different in categories like outdoor sporting goods. Different companies offer drastically different products, and the right brand of bicycle or snowboard matters to enthusiasts. Shoppers might also prefer to seek the guidance of an experienced sales clerk.
“When Amazon was first launching outdoors sporting goods, we panicked,” said John Bresee, cofounder of Backcountry.com, a growing Utah Web retailer owned by Liberty Media. “We kept waiting to see this giant sucking sound as our sales went away. But it hasn’t happened.”
WITH a flash of humility, a trait that Amazon executives try to cultivate in public, Jeff Wilke, the vice president, concedes that “there are going to be niches that no matter how hard we try, we will never be great at.”
Touring those massive distribution centers in Arizona, it does not appear that Amazon is thinking small. At Phoenix 5, the company is putting the finishing touches on 300,000 extra square feet, which will make the facility one of its largest in the country.
Mr. Wegner of Amazon promises — or is it a threat? — that the new space will be ready for the holiday shopping season.
This story has been updated since publication in TIME magazine.
Cayla Kluver was 14 when she wrote her first novel. It's a fantasy novel called Legacy, and it's about a certain Princess Alera of Hytanica who's being forced to marry the handsome but obnoxious Lord Steldor when she's really interested in the handsome but mysterious Narian, who hails from Hytanica's bitter enemy, Cokyri.
When she was 15, Kluver and her mom, who live in Wisconsin, formed their own publishing company to publish Legacy. Sales were modest, but the book attracted some rave reader reviews on Amazon.com At 16, when most authors are years away from getting their first big break, Kluver is getting her second: this August, Amazon is going to relaunch Legacy on a grand scale.
The whole story is practically a fantasy: Amazon plucked Kluver out of obscurity to be the first author in its Amazon Encore program, which takes worthy but overlooked books and republishes them for a wider audience. But there's something odd about it too. If Amazon is a bookstore, it's supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right? (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)
Except it isn't just a bookstore. As numerous publishing journalists and bloggers have pointed out, Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it's hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there's Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.
No question, Amazon is the most forward-thinking company in the book business. If there's a Steve Jobs of books, it's Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos. His vision is defining the way books will be bought and sold and written and read in the digital world — which is to say, the world. The question is whether there will be room in it for anyone besides Amazon.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, holding the new big-screen Kindle DX.
If you're a reader, you probably consider Amazon your friend. And it is. It recommends books to you and gets them to your door for cheap. But try shifting your point of view to that of a publisher and Amazon starts looking a bit scarier.
The Amazonians are really good at selling books online, and publishers love them for it. But because Amazon is so much better than anybody else at selling books online — last year, it owned 43% of that market, according to the bibliographic-information company R.R. Bowker — it has a lot of power at the negotiating table. All retailers get discounts from their wholesalers, but some publishers think the discounts Amazon asks for are getting too deep. "They're fast approaching the point where we just can't afford to do business with them," says a well-known New York book editor, who asked not to be identified. "It'll be interesting to see what happens then."
Publishing is a genteel business, and publishers aren't used to playing hardball. Amazon is, and it does. "I think it's fair to say there's some tension," says Jim Milliot, business and news director at Publishers Weekly. "They're the dominant online retailer. Publishers really aren't in the position to argue. Or to fight back." Last year, in a widely publicized scuffle, Amazon disabled its "Buy now with 1-click" button for some books published by Hachette's U.K. division after the companies disagreed about sales terms.
The whole digital revolution just makes things more complicated. For example: How much should an e-book cost? Right now, Amazon prices most of its Kindle editions at $9.99, which is quite a bit less than the cost of your average hardcover book. "In the digital-books world, a number of the costs are removed, so we believe they should be priced lower," says Russell Grandinetti, vice president of books for Amazon. "Our approach to digital books is that we will allow that to continue."
For now, Amazon takes a loss on these books, since it buys them from publishers at the price of a regular hardcover. The company considers it an investment in getting the Kindle established as a platform. But eventually — soon — it's going to want publishers to start sharing the pain. This may seem a nitpicky issue, but once e-books become a significant part of the market, the price of a Kindle edition could mean the difference between the red and the black for some publishers. "That's the detonation point," says Dennis Johnson, publisher of the prominent small press Melville House. "Because nobody can make a book that sells for $9.99." Yes, you save on printing and shipping, he says, but that's only a small fraction of what it costs to make a book. (See the top 10 gadgets of 2008.)
Don't get them wrong: publishers are thrilled that Amazon is putting all these resources into the Kindle. Any new retail channel for books is a godsend. They're just concerned that the precedent being set is unworkable. "Amazon picked a cost in the beginning that they believed the consumer would like, and of course, the consumer likes it," says Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster. "Who wouldn't like a price that was significantly lower than the price the hardcover is? And we think it's too low." (Grandinetti sticks to his guns: "We believe our approach to digital books allows authors, publishers and retailers to run profitable businesses yet still pass on the savings that digital books allow to readers," he says. Right or wrong, nobody can stay on message like an Amazon exec.)
Such are the conundrums raised by a company that has attained the radical verticality that Amazon has: when it comes to e-books, Amazon doesn't just sell them; it practically owns the entire medium. Of course, they'll all have to make nice eventually, since Amazon needs publishers to survive and thrive. Or does it?
Here's an interesting factoid: last year, for the first time in history, more books were self-published in the U.S. than were published the regular way. Amazon has invested heavily in publisher-free publishing, and it's paying off handsomely. The sector has seen two straight years of triple-digit growth, and on the cultural side, the stigma associated with "vanity" publishing is wearing away.
Or if Amazon can't make a deal with the publishers, it can always just become a publisher. That's where Princess Alera of Hytanica makes her royal entrance. Last year, speaking to Publishers Weekly, Bezos pooh-poohed the idea of Amazon publishing books: "I'm not sure we have any skills per se to be a content originator," he said. "Why would we be better at it? It's a well-served industry." That it may be. But as Amazon Encore demonstrates, Amazon does have one very important skill: it gathers better data on how readers buy books than anybody else. "We're lucky enough to have a passionate customer base who comes to our store and tells us about books that they like," Grandinetti says. "Even great books can be overlooked." When they are, Amazon is the first to know about it.
If Amazon Encore pans out, what's to stop authors from signing directly with bookstores and cutting publishers out of the loop completely? U2 and Madonna don't have deals with record labels anymore; they did their deals with a concert promoter, LiveNation. That stuff that the labels used to do — production, promotion, distribution — it's just not that hard to DIY now or buy off the shelf. It's the same with publishing. Amazon could become the LiveNation of the book world, a literary ecosystem unto itself: agent, editor, publisher, printer and bookstore. It probably will.
The Sky Isn't Falling
But it's a big leap from there to concluding that publishers are going to perish or that Amazon wants them to. It's true that Amazon plays hardball with them, but that's partly because the online-book world — unlike the real-life Amazon — isn't particularly biodiverse yet. If publishers aren't in a position to check Amazon directly, the market is, or it will be. There will be some painful scenes while we wait for that to happen, but already Google — a company that never met a loss leader it didn't like — has announced its intention to start selling e-books before the end of the year. Simon & Schuster has just announced a plan to sell digital copies of its books through the e-book website Scribd.com. The price? Twenty percent off the harcover price, which comes to a good deal more than $9.99. "Within the next six to nine months, there will be many new devices, some new platforms and formats and a number of big companies entering this field that don't currently have a presence," says Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Lunch, an e-newsletter for book-world insiders. (See 25 must-have travel gadgets.)
As for Amazon the publisher, it's hard to imagine it competing seriously with conventional publishers. Its DNA is just too alien. When Amazon uses its customer base to crowd-source editorial selection, it's doing something radically different from what regular publishers do. "This is a very different method of discovering books than the more classic publishing process," Grandinetti explains. "The robustness of Amazon customer data is a different view into what people are looking for in a book."
He's right. A different editorial method will engage a very different set of literary values. Imagine a world where publishing has two centers rather than one: a conventional literary center, governed by mainstream publishing — with its big names and fancy prizes and high-end art direction — and a new one where books rise to fame and prominence YouTube-style, in the rough and tumble of the great Web 2.0 mosh pit. The two centers will affect each other gravitationally and swap authors back and forth between them, but they're not likely to eat each other. With any luck, they'll energize each other.
Which is why the future of books won't be purely Amazonian. It's not an either/or future. It's both/and. It will have publishers and self-publishers and books and Kindles and probably other devices in it too. The rise of a new model doesn't require the death of the old one. In fairy-tale terms, Princess Alera won't have to choose between the politically expedient Steldor and the mysteriously alluring Narian. She can have them both and live happily ever after. Or if not happily, at least she'll have plenty to read.
XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.
But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.
“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.
“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.
“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”
To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”
Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”
Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.
Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.
Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.
But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.
Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.
“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”
At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.
Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.
The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.
About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.
That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.
Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.
Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.
The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.
It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.
A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.
But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.
“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”
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