These Amazonian communities don’t count on Brazil or UN conferences to protect them. They defend themselves.
COP30 is part and parcel of the political and economic powers that have caused the crisis. It’s high time to declare: We don’t need them.
By Peter Gelderloos ,
November 21, 2025
A cabruca in Terra Vista during the chocolate harvest.Teia dos Povos
A crowd of protesters — largely Indigenous Amazonian people — marched into a restricted area of the 30th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) this month in Belém, Brazil, declaring that their forests are not for sale.
“We want our lands free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers,” one Tupinamba community leader proclaimed.
Global carbon emissions continue to rise, and deforestation is moving full speed ahead across Brazil. Even amid all the pollution and destruction, however, there are still some causes for hope, but one has to look outside the heavily guarded doors of COP30, which took place from November 10 to 21, to find them.
The lands of the Ka’apor people are an island of green in a sea of scorched earth and monocrop plantations. They live in eastern Amazonia, most of which is already deforested. One reason they still have a home — and a thriving ecosystem — is because they haven’t relied on governments or private investors to protect their territory.
“Things function the same way as when this was an empire, only the names have changed. It’s the same structure.”
Since 2013, they have kept the loggers out and restored 80 percent of their deforested lands by turning to direct action, closing logging access roads, burning bridges, torching hundreds of logging trucks, and temporarily capturing hundreds of loggers, stripping them and tying them up before expelling them from the territory. Their territorial defense has included kicking out the FUNAI, the Brazilian government agency responsible for protecting Indigenous peoples, which they accuse of complicity with loggers. The Ka’apor are also eliminating influences from the state — for example, through the abolition of the single-chief system of governance imposed by FUNAI in favor of their traditional Tuxa ta Pame, a more decentralized council system.
A crowd of protesters — largely Indigenous Amazonian people — marched into a restricted area of the 30th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) this month in Belém, Brazil, declaring that their forests are not for sale.
“We want our lands free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers,” one Tupinamba community leader proclaimed.
Global carbon emissions continue to rise, and deforestation is moving full speed ahead across Brazil. Even amid all the pollution and destruction, however, there are still some causes for hope, but one has to look outside the heavily guarded doors of COP30, which took place from November 10 to 21, to find them.
The lands of the Ka’apor people are an island of green in a sea of scorched earth and monocrop plantations. They live in eastern Amazonia, most of which is already deforested. One reason they still have a home — and a thriving ecosystem — is because they haven’t relied on governments or private investors to protect their territory.
“Things function the same way as when this was an empire, only the names have changed. It’s the same structure.”
Since 2013, they have kept the loggers out and restored 80 percent of their deforested lands by turning to direct action, closing logging access roads, burning bridges, torching hundreds of logging trucks, and temporarily capturing hundreds of loggers, stripping them and tying them up before expelling them from the territory. Their territorial defense has included kicking out the FUNAI, the Brazilian government agency responsible for protecting Indigenous peoples, which they accuse of complicity with loggers. The Ka’apor are also eliminating influences from the state — for example, through the abolition of the single-chief system of governance imposed by FUNAI in favor of their traditional Tuxa ta Pame, a more decentralized council system.
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A key part of their strategy has been the creation of protection areas around the perimeters of their forest. “The families move here to where the loggers were entering and they stay here,” explains Marakaja, a community leader who withheld his legal name as a defense against repression. “We’ll keep supporting them going forward. We’ll keep closing access roads, creating protection areas, that’s how we do it.”
The Ka’apor resistance has not come without a price. Between 2008 and 2022, at least 11 members of their community have been brutally assassinated, with no one held accountable. The originator of the strategy of protection areas, Sarapo, died of apparent poisoning in May 2022. Hours after a settler living in the area brought him a fish as a present, Sarapo began vomiting blood and he died shortly thereafter. His community commemorates his death every year, and continues to use his strategy for self-defense.
Community leader Jerá Guarani speaks with visitors in the recovered Guarani community of Kalipety.Kasa Invisível archive
It’s a similar situation in the Atlantic Forest, home to the Guarani and other Indigenous peoples. Jerá Guarani, who is part of the council of Kalipety, a community south of São Paulo, told Truthout her community had to protest, block roads, and retake their lands by force because the government wasn’t honoring its own laws. Recounting a mobilization that took place in 2013, when Jerá’s community took inspiration from the Movimento Passo Livre — a movement advocating for free fares for public transportation — Jerá said her community began using blockades to “directly take back our land.” During that mobilization “our movement became something much more widespread, decentralized, and not patriarchal,” she told Truthout.
The climate conference, though, is far from the front lines in the Amazon, and it has proven a perfect stage for the FUNAI to wash its image. Indigenous empowerment is a principal theme at the COP30, and the FUNAI is hosting media-focused events with Indigenous representatives from around the world throughout the conference. And yet, on the ground, numerous Indigenous communities speak of FUNAI as something between an active obstacle and an unhelpful, bureaucratic burden.
COP30 vs. the Front Lines
In Kalipety and other communities, the Guarani are putting their newly regained land to good use. This means bringing back traditional practices of agrofloresta, or forest gardening. Mixing field and forest, they grow bananas, corn, beans, and many other crops together with trees that help anchor and replenish the soil and provide habitat for other species.
Instead of siloing themselves into single-issue activism, the Guarani and Ka’apor peoples address multiple overlapping concerns: helping bring Indigenous people out of material poverty while revitalizing their culture, strengthening local ecosystems as well as the resilience of human and other populations in the face of climate or economic disaster, and drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and back into the soil and the forests.
Even amid all the pollution and destruction, however, there are still some causes for hope, but one has to look outside the heavily guarded doors of COP30.
The UN itself bemoans the fact that Indigenous people “safeguard 80 per cent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity – yet receive less than one per cent of international climate funding.” This discrepancy undermines the fundamental assumptions of the UN approach, which is predominantly reliant on investment as a tool for change. Consider how much Indigenous peoples around the world do with so little money. Contrast that with green energy, which is a hub of public and private investment. The green energy boom is the impetus for a devastating wave of land theft and new mining projects, which disproportionately harm Indigenous communities and the rural poor. And while recovery of Indigenous lands and traditions has clear, positive impact on the environment, green energy has actually increased fossil fuel production.
Indigenous communities do need resources, though investment bankers and governments might not be the best allies to turn to. “If you wait for the government to do something, you’ll still be sitting around when you die,” Gah Te Iracema, a Kaingang community leader from the south of Brazil, told Truthout at COP30. The community she helps lead began using direct action three years ago to take back their lands. “Things function the same way as when this was an empire, only the names have changed. It’s the same structure,” she said.
The inflicted poverty of colonization is a major obstacle to restoring land and ancestral techniques. How, for example, can a community practice traditional food and construction techniques when the plants they once relied on have been exterminated by centuries of an economy based on mining and monocrop plantations?
Communities Develop Their Own Solutions
Teia dos Povos, the Web of the Peoples, is a growing network of anticapitalist communities that are addressing that problem through practices of solidarity and mutual aid across a growing network of autonomous communities that include land occupations by the urban and peri-urban poor, Indigenous communities, and quilombos.
In communities thriving across Brazil, human food systems work with the ecology, not in competition.
Terra Vista is one such community. Located on an abandoned chocolate plantation that had monocropped the land to death, several hundred families occupied the terrain in 1992 and held it over the course of two contentious years of conflict and several violent evictions by the police. Terra Vista is now home to more than 300 people, according to community members. When they took the land back, only grass grew there. Now, it’s a vibrant forest. Snubbing the failure of capitalist agriculture, they grow chocolate, but unlike the failed plantation system, they follow Indigenous methods, planting the diminutive chocolate trees in the understory with banana or açaí. Then they plant taller trees like jacarandá, jucá, and brazilwood. This system, called cabruca, protects the soil and creates a richer habitat. It also provides the community with other sources of food, fuel, dyes, and construction material.
It’s a similar situation in the Atlantic Forest, home to the Guarani and other Indigenous peoples. Jerá Guarani, who is part of the council of Kalipety, a community south of São Paulo, told Truthout her community had to protest, block roads, and retake their lands by force because the government wasn’t honoring its own laws. Recounting a mobilization that took place in 2013, when Jerá’s community took inspiration from the Movimento Passo Livre — a movement advocating for free fares for public transportation — Jerá said her community began using blockades to “directly take back our land.” During that mobilization “our movement became something much more widespread, decentralized, and not patriarchal,” she told Truthout.
The climate conference, though, is far from the front lines in the Amazon, and it has proven a perfect stage for the FUNAI to wash its image. Indigenous empowerment is a principal theme at the COP30, and the FUNAI is hosting media-focused events with Indigenous representatives from around the world throughout the conference. And yet, on the ground, numerous Indigenous communities speak of FUNAI as something between an active obstacle and an unhelpful, bureaucratic burden.
COP30 vs. the Front Lines
In Kalipety and other communities, the Guarani are putting their newly regained land to good use. This means bringing back traditional practices of agrofloresta, or forest gardening. Mixing field and forest, they grow bananas, corn, beans, and many other crops together with trees that help anchor and replenish the soil and provide habitat for other species.
Instead of siloing themselves into single-issue activism, the Guarani and Ka’apor peoples address multiple overlapping concerns: helping bring Indigenous people out of material poverty while revitalizing their culture, strengthening local ecosystems as well as the resilience of human and other populations in the face of climate or economic disaster, and drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and back into the soil and the forests.
Even amid all the pollution and destruction, however, there are still some causes for hope, but one has to look outside the heavily guarded doors of COP30.
The UN itself bemoans the fact that Indigenous people “safeguard 80 per cent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity – yet receive less than one per cent of international climate funding.” This discrepancy undermines the fundamental assumptions of the UN approach, which is predominantly reliant on investment as a tool for change. Consider how much Indigenous peoples around the world do with so little money. Contrast that with green energy, which is a hub of public and private investment. The green energy boom is the impetus for a devastating wave of land theft and new mining projects, which disproportionately harm Indigenous communities and the rural poor. And while recovery of Indigenous lands and traditions has clear, positive impact on the environment, green energy has actually increased fossil fuel production.
Indigenous communities do need resources, though investment bankers and governments might not be the best allies to turn to. “If you wait for the government to do something, you’ll still be sitting around when you die,” Gah Te Iracema, a Kaingang community leader from the south of Brazil, told Truthout at COP30. The community she helps lead began using direct action three years ago to take back their lands. “Things function the same way as when this was an empire, only the names have changed. It’s the same structure,” she said.
The inflicted poverty of colonization is a major obstacle to restoring land and ancestral techniques. How, for example, can a community practice traditional food and construction techniques when the plants they once relied on have been exterminated by centuries of an economy based on mining and monocrop plantations?
Communities Develop Their Own Solutions
Teia dos Povos, the Web of the Peoples, is a growing network of anticapitalist communities that are addressing that problem through practices of solidarity and mutual aid across a growing network of autonomous communities that include land occupations by the urban and peri-urban poor, Indigenous communities, and quilombos.
In communities thriving across Brazil, human food systems work with the ecology, not in competition.
Terra Vista is one such community. Located on an abandoned chocolate plantation that had monocropped the land to death, several hundred families occupied the terrain in 1992 and held it over the course of two contentious years of conflict and several violent evictions by the police. Terra Vista is now home to more than 300 people, according to community members. When they took the land back, only grass grew there. Now, it’s a vibrant forest. Snubbing the failure of capitalist agriculture, they grow chocolate, but unlike the failed plantation system, they follow Indigenous methods, planting the diminutive chocolate trees in the understory with banana or açaí. Then they plant taller trees like jacarandá, jucá, and brazilwood. This system, called cabruca, protects the soil and creates a richer habitat. It also provides the community with other sources of food, fuel, dyes, and construction material.
A cabruca in Terra Vista during the chocolate harvest.Teia dos Povos
A cabruca in Terra Vista during the chocolate harvest.Teia dos Povos
A cabruca in Terra Vista during the chocolate harvest.Teia dos Povos
Aside from their own chocolate factory and the schools that many children and youth in the broader region attend, Terra Vista is a laboratory for spreading food autonomy across the continent. Bruno, a longtime organizer with Teia dos Povos who asked to remain anonymous due to the risk of repression he faces, hosted me in his small apartment. He had been lugging 100 kilos of traditional seeds to Mato Grosso do Sul, over 2,000 kilometers away, to help several new communities jump start their own food systems.
Terra Vista produced 1,000 kilos of corn seed just last year, for the community’s own reserves and to help other communities. Now it is preparing fields for squash and bean seeds. Terra Vista rescues traditional seed varieties from extinction and breeds new seeds suited to different climates and soil types. Bruno showed me a patch where they’re growing milho branco, a type of white corn sacred to the Guarani Kaiowá. They call it avati moroti, father of the seeds. For traditional Guarani Kaiowá agriculture, white corn must be planted before anything else, but many communities haven’t had access to the seeds for 40 years or more.
Such a transformative, multifaceted approach to something as vital and complex as food seems impossible within COP30, where industry lobbyists and government officials who have never grown food nor been displaced from their land are the ones planning the agenda and deciding which proposals to push.
A decentralized, grassroots approach adapts well to major cities, where housing is often the point of entry for movements to achieve an ecological autonomy. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third-largest metropolitan area, an estimated 100,000 people have won themselves communal housing through direct action, according to housing organizers in the city. Occupying vacant buildings in the center or vacant terrains in the periphery, residents provide themselves not only with free housing, but with living spaces that include distribution projects for clothing and other resources, free classes, film screenings, and event spaces. On the urban margins, community members have built entire neighborhoods through practices of direct action, solidarity, and mutual aid. In both settings, wherever the inhabitants can find the space, one can expect to see gardens, chickens, and composting projects, improving the access of the urban poor to nutritious food and also reminding everyone involved that ecosystemic relationships also exist in the cities.
Belo Horizonte’s housing movement empowers the Black, Indigenous, and formerly houseless people who play a vital role within it. One squatted apartment block in Belo Horizonte’s center, a Ocupação Maria do Arraial, is named after the Black community leader who was evicted in the late 19th century to build the governor’s mansion for the state of Minas Gerais. As I’ve written elsewhere, this kind of intergenerational memory, of intentional connection to lineages of struggle, sharpens our analysis and our resolve by connecting us to vast bodies of collective experience.
Rejecting COP30’s False Solutions and Embracing Real Solutions
All of these movements become more inspiring when we reflect on what would happen if social movements around the planet rejected the climate conferences and green capitalism, and instead dedicated all their passion and resources to building and connecting grassroots, ecosystemic projects. Everything from construction to agriculture could change radically.
Concrete production is responsible for 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but in these grassroots movements, existing buildings are maintained and new homes are built with recycled or natural materials. Capitalist agriculture is responsible for around 30 percent of global emissions, along with a host of related problems like deforestation, depletion and contamination of soil and water, and abusive labor conditions. However, in communities thriving across Brazil, human food systems work with the ecology, not in competition. They take carbon out of the atmosphere, restore the soil and the ecosystem, bring forests back, and create food autonomy, turning agriculture into a source of dignity and resilience.
With a dramatic shift toward localized production, the transportation sector (13.7 percent of global emissions) would need far less fuel. With cultures of art and entertainment no longer based on buying commodities, and with building techniques and life rhythms specifically adapted to our local climates, the energy and manufacturing sectors (29.7 and 12.7 percent of global emissions, respectively) could also stand a major reduction.
Finally, if we ripped up most of the asphalt needed by car culture and turned the monocrop plantations of genetically modified pine and eucalyptus back into real forests, in a matter of years we could transition to a society not with lower emissions, but a society with negative emissions, in which no one wanted for food, housing, health care, or dignity.
These movements show that we don’t have to wait another 30 years, powerless in the face of institutions that make big promises but are only successful at finding new ways to profit. We can take back the spaces we live in, transform them, and once again become reliable stewards of the ecosystems we depend on for survival.
COP30 is part and parcel of the political and economic powers that have caused the crisis. It’s high time to declare: We don’t need them.
Aside from their own chocolate factory and the schools that many children and youth in the broader region attend, Terra Vista is a laboratory for spreading food autonomy across the continent. Bruno, a longtime organizer with Teia dos Povos who asked to remain anonymous due to the risk of repression he faces, hosted me in his small apartment. He had been lugging 100 kilos of traditional seeds to Mato Grosso do Sul, over 2,000 kilometers away, to help several new communities jump start their own food systems.
Terra Vista produced 1,000 kilos of corn seed just last year, for the community’s own reserves and to help other communities. Now it is preparing fields for squash and bean seeds. Terra Vista rescues traditional seed varieties from extinction and breeds new seeds suited to different climates and soil types. Bruno showed me a patch where they’re growing milho branco, a type of white corn sacred to the Guarani Kaiowá. They call it avati moroti, father of the seeds. For traditional Guarani Kaiowá agriculture, white corn must be planted before anything else, but many communities haven’t had access to the seeds for 40 years or more.
Such a transformative, multifaceted approach to something as vital and complex as food seems impossible within COP30, where industry lobbyists and government officials who have never grown food nor been displaced from their land are the ones planning the agenda and deciding which proposals to push.
A decentralized, grassroots approach adapts well to major cities, where housing is often the point of entry for movements to achieve an ecological autonomy. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third-largest metropolitan area, an estimated 100,000 people have won themselves communal housing through direct action, according to housing organizers in the city. Occupying vacant buildings in the center or vacant terrains in the periphery, residents provide themselves not only with free housing, but with living spaces that include distribution projects for clothing and other resources, free classes, film screenings, and event spaces. On the urban margins, community members have built entire neighborhoods through practices of direct action, solidarity, and mutual aid. In both settings, wherever the inhabitants can find the space, one can expect to see gardens, chickens, and composting projects, improving the access of the urban poor to nutritious food and also reminding everyone involved that ecosystemic relationships also exist in the cities.
Belo Horizonte’s housing movement empowers the Black, Indigenous, and formerly houseless people who play a vital role within it. One squatted apartment block in Belo Horizonte’s center, a Ocupação Maria do Arraial, is named after the Black community leader who was evicted in the late 19th century to build the governor’s mansion for the state of Minas Gerais. As I’ve written elsewhere, this kind of intergenerational memory, of intentional connection to lineages of struggle, sharpens our analysis and our resolve by connecting us to vast bodies of collective experience.
Rejecting COP30’s False Solutions and Embracing Real Solutions
All of these movements become more inspiring when we reflect on what would happen if social movements around the planet rejected the climate conferences and green capitalism, and instead dedicated all their passion and resources to building and connecting grassroots, ecosystemic projects. Everything from construction to agriculture could change radically.
Concrete production is responsible for 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but in these grassroots movements, existing buildings are maintained and new homes are built with recycled or natural materials. Capitalist agriculture is responsible for around 30 percent of global emissions, along with a host of related problems like deforestation, depletion and contamination of soil and water, and abusive labor conditions. However, in communities thriving across Brazil, human food systems work with the ecology, not in competition. They take carbon out of the atmosphere, restore the soil and the ecosystem, bring forests back, and create food autonomy, turning agriculture into a source of dignity and resilience.
With a dramatic shift toward localized production, the transportation sector (13.7 percent of global emissions) would need far less fuel. With cultures of art and entertainment no longer based on buying commodities, and with building techniques and life rhythms specifically adapted to our local climates, the energy and manufacturing sectors (29.7 and 12.7 percent of global emissions, respectively) could also stand a major reduction.
Finally, if we ripped up most of the asphalt needed by car culture and turned the monocrop plantations of genetically modified pine and eucalyptus back into real forests, in a matter of years we could transition to a society not with lower emissions, but a society with negative emissions, in which no one wanted for food, housing, health care, or dignity.
These movements show that we don’t have to wait another 30 years, powerless in the face of institutions that make big promises but are only successful at finding new ways to profit. We can take back the spaces we live in, transform them, and once again become reliable stewards of the ecosystems we depend on for survival.
COP30 is part and parcel of the political and economic powers that have caused the crisis. It’s high time to declare: We don’t need them.
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Peter Gelderloos
Peter Gelderloos is an independent researcher, writer, and social movement participant. He is the author of The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Nonviolence, and other titles. He is currently a guest fellow at the IFK-Linz.
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