The Flying Rivers and the Thousand-Headed Monster

Abstract

This text is based on episode 19 of Conectad(o)s, a Facebook Live broadcast by Fundación Ficamazonía. The virtual dialogue between Germán Poveda and Rodrigo Botero, moderated by Margarita Pacheco and edited for Revista ÉOLO by Édinson Muñoz, addresses the atmospheric water vapor currents that sustain life across various regions of the continent. Amid the global health and climate crisis, the experts emphasize the role played by forests and the atmosphere — as vital as the winds that carry airborne water, interconnecting and providing, on a large scale, the humidity and rainfall for Andean, Amazonian, Orinoco basin, maritime, insular, and coastal ecosystems. The text calls for accelerating actions to protect and conserve the hydrological function of the Flying Rivers, ensuring the balance of ecosystems highly threatened by various forms of pollution and ecological degradation. The co-authors seek to help curb ongoing deforestation, defending a common good of humanity — the invisible Flying Rivers. Episode 19 of Conectad(o)s thus forms the basis for the central article of Issue 19 of Revista Ambiental ÉOLO. Its co-authors call on us to work together as a society, with the immediate goal of halting and reversing deforestation from a complementary and unprecedented perspective: the preservation of atmospheric water; they demand respect for the mega-biodiversity and the ancestral cultures that inhabit and protect the Amazon biome. The attached list of thirty virtual programs produced and broadcast by Ficamazonía during the March-to-December 2020 lockdown provides access to a wide range of local, national, and international voices warning about the urgent need to conserve and restore the Amazon rainforest.