“I want to warn the white people

before they wind up tearing

the sky’s roots out of the ground.”
Davi Kopenawa— 1 —

“A gradual return to the ancient cosmologies

and their anxieties, as we suddenly notice
that they were not all that ill founded.”
Bruno Latour— 2 —

The Rain
— 1 —
Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert,
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami
Shaman, trans. Nicholas Elliott and
Alison Dundy (Cambridge: Harvard

Tree
University Press, 2013), p. 455.
All shamanic citations in this text

Bruce Albert
are taken from this book.

— 2 —
Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes
of Existence: An Anthropology of the
Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter Anthropologist and Honorary Research Director at the Institut
66 67
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Joseca, Maa hi (The Rain Tree), 2004,
2013), p. 455. de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Montevideo, Uruguay See also pages 120–135 pencil and felt-tip pen on paper
 There are approximately 400 million people
—indigenous and other local communities—living
in forested areas today, mainly in the tropics—the
Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Indonesia—but
also in the northern boreal regions. These forests
Venezuela
provide their livelihood and enable them to maintain
their original way of life. It is estimated that up to
80 percent of the world’s primary forests lie within
their traditional territories, making these people the
stewards of a substantial part of the world’s last
remaining intact or well-preserved forest ecosystems.
These areas comprise approximately one third
of the forests still in existence, and as spaces
of sociodiversity, biodiversity, and climate regulation
—all which are inseparably linked—they are of vital
importance to the planet.— 3 —
The Yanomami, hunter-gatherers
and swidden horticulturalists,— 4 — inhabit an area
of 179,500 square kilometers, straddling the border Brazil

between Venezuela and Brazil, an area that represents

nearly 1.5 percent of the world’s remaining tropical
forest.— 5 — With a population of approximately
36,000,— 6 — these “inhabitants of the forest” Brasília

(urihi thëri thë pë) make up one of the most

emblematic indigenous groups in the Amazon.
Today, it is more important than ever to listen to what
they have to say and
Yanomami territory
to take into account the
knowledge they have
— 3 — 0 500 1000
See UICN, “Raising the Profile of to offer. That is what Human trees from original times with lesser powers and poorly executed songs
Primary Forests Including Intact
Forest Landscapes,” https://www. this text humbly invites kilometers The daily task of the Yanomami who are regarded as still being too close to the
iucn.org/theme/forests/our-work/ the reader to do. shamans or “spirit people” (xapiri thë pë) is to undifferentiated substrate of the forest floor.
slowing-global-deforestation-rate-
and-primary-forests/raising-profile- summon up a myriad of image-beings (xapiri pë) In contrast, there are certain types of exceptional
primary-forests-including-intact-
forest-landscapes; and Stephen T.
with whom they identify, one after the other, either trees that are singled out, and these are attributed
Garnett et al., “A Spatial Overview of in their dream journeys or during trances induced shamanic image-beings whose powers are equal
the Global Importance of Indigenous
Lands for Conservation,” Nature Watoriki, a Yanomami village by a plant-based substance called yãkoana, whose to their majestic appearance or to the importance
Sustainability 1, no. 7 (July 2018): in the Brazilian Amazon
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-
active ingredient, 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, of the qualities for which they are valued.
0100-6. Thanks to Fabrice Dubertret is a powerful psychotropic agent. These image- This is the case for the great ipê
for these sources, IHEAL-CREDA,
LandMark’s Operations Team – beings from the “first time” are the original (mythical) masihanari kohi (Tabebuia capitata), which has very
www.landmarkmap.org.
humanoid forms of the existing plant and animal hard wood and spectacular flowers, and whose spirit
— 4 — beings that now live in the forest, as well as of restores vigor to the critically ill. This is also the case
Swidden agriculture, also known as
shifting cultivation, is a method of a number of diverse cosmo-ecological entities. for the Angelim amargoso yoroko axihi (Vataireopsis
rotational farming in which land is
cleared—often by burning (thus the
Since the Yanomami are a hunting people, there surinamensis) with its urticant bark, and for the
somewhat pejorative term slash-and- is naturally a predominance of animal spirits yãkoana hi tree (Virola Theiodora) whose resin provides
burn agriculture)—cultivated for a
period of time, and then left fallow. (Yarori pë) among these mythical beings, but there the precious hallucinogenic yãkoana powder taken
— 5 — is also an abundance of plant spirits. by the shamans. Other trees, such as the giant cashew
The Biosphere Reserve in Venezuela There is, to begin with, a host of plant oruxi hi (Anacardium giganteum), the cedrorana ãpuru
(83,000 km2) and the Yanomami
Indigenous Territory in Brazil xapiri pë, the multitudinous generic spirits of trees uhi (Cedrelinga cateniformis), the kapok wari mahi
(95,000 km2) in relation to the
12.5 million km2 of tropical (huu tihiri pë), lianas (thothoxiri pë), roots (nasikiri pë), (Ceiba pentandra), the jatoba ãroko hi (Hymenaea
forest worldwide (1.436 percent). and foliage (yaa hanari pë) who, at the beginning parvifolia), and the amaranth komatima hi (Peltogyne
François-Michel Le Tourneau,
personal communication. of a shamanic initiation, come down and dance in the gracilipes) are sources for the warrior spirits that are
— 6 — chests of the novices in order to sweep the site called up during shamanic cures to fight off the evil
“Yanomami,” Povos Indígenas no Brasil, of their future “spirit house” clean. However, these disease-causing beings (në wãri pë). All of these are
www.pib.socioambiental.org/en/
Povo:Yanomami. plant entities form a sort of anonymous infantry among the biggest trees to be found in the Amazon:

68 Bruce Albert The Rain Tree Joseca, Storm over the Forest, 2005,
pencil and felt-tip pen on paper 69
 “Many xapiri bravely come down
in answer to our call to attack the evil beings
of the forest and avenge us! Aside from all those
I mentioned, there are also … [t]he spirits of the
ãroko hi, ãpuru uhi, komatima hi, and oruxi hi trees
bump into them and knock them over. Those
of the wari mahi tree thrash them. With their skulls
split and their bodies covered in wounds, the
stunned evil beings eventually stumble. Then
the xapiri pë can force them to let go of their prey.”  biology is challenging many of our established ideas
The breath of the forest
The Yanomami use the term urihi a
to refer both to the vegetation of the forest and to
the terrestrial land that supports it. It is also the name
of their territory—“the forest of human beings”
(yanomae thë pë urihipë)—and of the world “the great
forest-land” (urihi a pree). Urihi a is thus, according
to the title of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “ethno science
fiction” novel The Word for World is Forest (1972),
the name of the world.— 7 —
This “world-forest” thus accommodates
a complex mosaic of societies whose various subject-
individuals may be human or nonhuman, including
plants, animals, and—from our point of view—the
invisible (evil entities, shamanic spirits, specters)
and the inanimate (earth, wind, water, stone).
It is a pluriverse of interconnected communities,
a sort of meta-organism endowed, like all of the
subject-individuals who form it, with a primordial
humanoid shamanic image-essence (Urihinari a) and,
above all, with a sort of enduring telluric pneuma,
“the breath of the forest-earth.”
“The forest belongs to Omama;
this is why it has a very long breath of life, which
we call urihi wixia. This is what keeps up its
breathing. On the contrary, humans’ breath of life
is very short. We do not live long; we usually die
very fast. If it is not destroyed, the forest never
dies. It is not like humans’ bodies. It does not rot
and disappear. It always becomes new again. The
plants that feed us
can grow because of
— 7 — the forest’s breathing.
See Déborah Danowski and Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro, Há mundo por vir ?
… This breath of life
Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins (São comes from the center
Paulo: Cultura e Barbárie Editora,
Florianópolis/Instituto Socioambiental, of this earth we walk
2014), p. 100, n. 116. The novelist
Ursula K. Le Guin was the daughter of
on, which is the back
renowned American anthropologists of the old sky Hutukara a.
Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. The
latter wrote Ishi in Two Worlds: A It spreads all over its
Biography of the Last Wild Indian in surface and even in its
North America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1961). rivers and streams.”  hot. This breath lives on because the earth’s back
70
Yanomami hunter watching the canopy,
Watoriki, 2002
Still from the film Chasseurs et chamans
by Raymond Depardon, 2002
This humid breath of the forest
is a generative exhalation that ensures its “fertility
value” (në rope a), that is, the ability to grow, which
is inherent in its trees and their fruits, as well as in the
plants cultivated in the gardens that the Yanomami
set up in it. It thus sustains all of the food supplies
needed by the humans and by the game on which
they depend.
“The forest’s value of growth lives
in the part of the soil at the surface. A damp breath
of life comes out of it, which we call wahari a.
This cold exhalation comes from the darkness
of the underworld, from its great river Motu uri u
and from Xiwãripo, the chaos being. It belongs
to the spirit of the forest, Urihinari a. Its coolness
mostly spreads during the night, for during the day
it returns into the soil as soon as the sun becomes
Bruce Albert
Group shamanic session led by Davi Kopenawa
in the village of Watoriki, 2002
is covered in leaves and protected by trees.
We say that the forest is the earth’s skin. … This
cool moisture from the ground is a liquid like
sperm. It fertilizes trees by penetrating into their
roots and seeds. This is what makes them grow
and flower. If it dries up, the earth loses its smell
of growth and gets barren.”
As in many ancient as well as modern
systems of knowledge (for example, the Gaia
hypothesis developed by James Lovelock), that
of the Yanomami shamans—which is both ancient and
modern—has literally made the plant-based breathing
of the Earth “the name of life.” Didn’t Isaac Newton
himself suggest something similar in his time?
“Thus this Earth resembles a great animal or rather
an inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereall breath
for its daily refreshment and vital ferment and
transpires again with gross exhalation.”— 8 —
The suffering of trees
The “forest-land” is also an entity
endowed with sensitivity in the same way as the
beings that populate it, both human and nonhuman.
As a result, its trees feel pain when their trunks are
attacked with axes or by fire. The shamans are able
to hear their laments when they dry up or fall down,
mortally wounded.
“The forest is alive, this is where
its beauty comes from. Doesn’t it always seem new
and damp? … If the forest were dead, we would
be as dead as it is! But it is truly alive. The white
people may not hear it complain, yet it feels pain
just like humans do. Its tall trees moan as they fall
The Rain Tree
and it cries in pain when it is burned down. Finally,
it only dies when all its trees have been cut down
and burned and all that remains are their charred
trunks lying on the dried-out ground. Then nothing
grows back there, except a little grass.”
Attributing a certain sensitivity
to plants is not, however, as “symbolic” as one might
be tempted to think. Contemporary research in plant
about plants, leading to the increased blurring
of boundaries between plant and animal life. The many
recent findings on sensorimotricity and information
processing in plants have given rise to a new field
of scientific research: plant neurobiology.— 9 —
In addition, new technologies are now allowing
researchers to detect acoustic emissions from trees
(and plants) during periods of stress, such as when
they are cut or deprived of water.— 10 —
If the napë pë (foreigners/enemies:
us, the supposedly “civilized”) did not prey so
insatiably on the forest, it would last forever because
it continuously regenerates itself out of its own humus.
Today, however, it is dying. It is being chopped or burned
down, leaving the ground to become, little by little,
the scorched, bare, dry earth that Ohinari a, the spirit
of famine, will come to inhabit. He will then, day after
day, blow his hallucinogenic powder into the nostrils
of the humans in order to weaken them and devour
them one by one. Even in places far from the Yanomami
forest, trees are ailing because of the “xawara epidemic
smoke” from factories and machinery:
“What the white people call the
whole world is being tainted because of the
factories that make all their merchandise, their
machines, and their motors. Though the sky and
the earth are vast, their fumes eventually spread
in every direction, and all are affected: humans,
game, and the forest. It is true. Even the trees are
sick from it. Having become ghost, they lose their
leaves, they dry up and break all by themselves.”
— 8 —
Quoted from an unpublished
fragment in Emanuele Coccia,
The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics
— 10 —
of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019),
See Alexey Ponomarenko et al.,
“Ultrasonic Emissions Reveal Individual
p. 57. See chapters 7 and 8.
Cavitation Bubbles in Water-Stressed
— 9 — Wood,” Journal of the Royal Society
See Stefano Mancuso and Interface 11, no. 99 (October 2014):
Alessandra Viola, Brilliant https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0480;
Green: The Surprising History and and Itzhak Khait et al., “The Sounds
of Plants. Plants Emit Remotely
Science of Plant Intelligence,
trans. Joan Benham Detectable Ultrasounds That Can
(Washington, DC: Reveal Plant Stress,” BioRxiv (2018):
Island Press, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1101/507590.
71

72
Davi Kopenawa, Maa hi (The Rain Tree),
undated, felt-tip pen on paper
The latest research on the metabolism
of trees shows us once again that we should give
more credit to these shamanic observations than
we are accustomed to. The fact that the concentration
of atmospheric CO2 has been rising steadily and
rapidly since the nineteenth century does not seem
to have led, as one might have hoped, to higher growth
for trees. On the contrary, it has led to a gradual
saturation of their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide
and to accelerate their aging process.— 11 —
Trees, water, and winds
The lushness of the vegetation
as a whole is, according to the Yanomami shamans,
the basis of the capillary network of streams that
flow in branches endlessly throughout the forest.
The giant trees, in particular, attract the rain, while
their imposing canopies ensure a permanent supply
of water below. Trees thus thrive on their ability to call
the rains and are responsible for the forest’s organic
self-humidification system.
“As soon as you cut down tall trees
such as the wari mahi kapok trees and the hawari hi
Brazil nut trees, the forest’s soil becomes hard and
hot. It is these big trees that make the rainwater
come and keep it in the ground. The trees that the
white people plant, the mango trees, the coconut
trees, the orange trees, and the cashew trees, they
do not know how to call the rain. They grow poorly,
scattered around the city in a ghost state. This is why
there is only water in the forest when it is healthy.”   Are More Efficient Water Users Due
While our meteorological sciences
traditionally accord a very minor role to plants, the
Bruce Albert The Rain Tree
Yanomami shamans clearly consider the water
regime—as well as that of the wind—to be subject
to the dominating influence of the forest and to be
dependent on its existence as a whole. It is the forest
that creates rainfall, in their view, and not the other
way around. Once again, this inverted perspective,
which puts trees at the center of climate issues, now
has its scientific version. A lot of research is being
done on cloud formation and the atmospheric water
cycle, and, as a result, the relationship between
climatology, ecology, and botany is changing.— 12 —
“As soon as its soil lies bare, the
Mothokari sun being burns all its watercourses.
He dries them out with his burning tongue before
swallowing up all their fish and caimans. Then
when his feet come close to the ground, the earth
starts to bake and increasingly hardens. The
mountain rocks become so hot they split and
shatter. No tree can sprout out of the soil anymore,
for there is not enough dampness left to keep
seeds and roots cool.
The waters return
to the underworld and — 12 —
the dry earth crumbles. See Davide Castelvecchi, “Cloud-
Seeding Surprise Could Improve
The wind being, who Climate Predictions,” Nature (May 25,
2016), https://doi.org/10.1038/
follows us in the forest nature.2016.19971; and Gabriel
Popkin, “Forests Emerge as a Major
Overlooked Climate Factor,” Quanta
Magazine (October 9, 2018), https://
www.quantamagazine.org/forests-
— 11 — emerge-as-a-major-overlooked-
See Claudie Giguère-Croteau et al., climate-factor-20181009. On the
“North America’s Oldest Boreal Trees Amazon, see Jonathon S. Wright
et al., “Rainforest-Initiated Wet
to Increased [CO2], But Do Not Grow Season Onset over the Southern
Faster,” PNAS. Proceedings of the Amazon,” PNAS. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 116, National Academy of Sciences 114,
no. 7 (February 12, 2019): https://doi. no. 32, (August 8, 2017), https://doi.
org/10.1073/pnas.1816686116. org/10.1073/pnas.1621516114.
Amazon rainforest,
Brazil
73
 to cool us like a fan, also flees. We stop seeing
his daughters and nieces playing in the treetops.
A stifling heat settles everywhere. The fallen
leaves and flowers stiffen on the ground. The cool
smell of the soil is consumed and vanishes.
No plant will grow any longer, no matter what you
do. The forest’s Në roperi image of growth is angry
and escapes far away.”
This observation concerning the special
relationship between trees and rain is so critical to
Yanomami knowledge of the forest that it is embodied
in the cosmological figure of Maa hi, the great rain tree.
On the outer limits of the Earth, in the east, where
it comes very close to the edge of the sky, stands a giant
tree in the cold and the mud of the night. Its leaves are
filled with water and it “weeps” torrential never-ending
tears of rain. The flowering of this aquiferous tree
initiates the rainy season and the swelling of rivers.
To stop the flow and bring back the dry season,
the shamans have to work at removing its foliage.
“Our elders know it well, and my
father-in-law told me it stands at the borders
of the earth and sky. It is gigantic and its leaves are
endlessly dripping with dampness. Everything
around it is cold and dark. The ground is covered
in mud. It is the home of the titiri night beings and
the horemari earthworm beings. When the Maa hi
tree blooms, it begins to rain in the forest and the
rivers rise. To stop it from dripping, the napore
cacique and howler monkey spirits must vigorously
shake its branches and make its flowers fall. Then
the macaw spirits must cut its branches with the
help of the tapir spirit, who comes with them in his
big pirogue. When this happens, the rain tree wraps
itself in heat and the cicadas start to make their
voices heard there. The xapiri who are the sons-in-
law of the Omoari dry season being go after their
father-in-law and call him back into the forest
through a hiimuu invitation dialogue.”
Dreaming the forest
Until recently, all of the shamanic
formulations mentioned concerning the forest and its
trees would have been referred to condescendingly as
“primitive beliefs” or, at best, “exotic metaphors.” Today,
however, they have a different tone. Without wishing
to hypostatize the intuitive farsightedness or even
“prescience” of the knowledge that the forest peoples
have to offer, we should nevertheless give credit to
their considerable amount of experience and their
observations with regard to the fundamental ecological
relationships at work in the tropical forest
74
—relationships that our anthropocentric narcissism
has obstinately overlooked until now.
Considering trees as legal entities,— 13 —
recognizing that they have sensitivity and the ability
to communicate or to influence the climate is no longer
just a matter of allegorical conception, but a topic
of groundbreaking legal and scientific debate. Similarly,
in the current state of impending disaster for our
industrial world, the shamans’ revolt against the
devastation of the forest land due to our obsessive desire
to commodify everything, together with their prophetic
warning against “the falling sky” take on an “ecological
literalness” that is increasingly disturbing.— 14 —
The voices of these shamans help us understand, first
of all, that if we wish to preserve the forests as well as life
on the planet we must give up our utilitarian vision
of “nature” as something separate from humanity that
we have to “master and possess” until nothing is left but
a desert … and a few remnants treated as museum pieces.
They also show us that our anthropocentric (and even
zoocentric) hierarchy of living things must be turned “right
side up”— 15 — in order to give plants—to whom we owe
nothing less than the atmosphere—the attention and
importance they have deserved ever since the origin of life.
It is this intellectual effort that
the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa benevolently
encourages us to make when he says: “I think you
should dream of the forest-land because it has a heart
and breathes.” The dream-adventure that he invites
us to undertake is of the “feverish” kind—the kind from
which Antonin Artaud sought to “derive … new
laws.”— 16 — If we fail to learn from the inverted
ontological perspective of this shamanic way
of thinking, then the ecological cataclysm that our world
forces upon the indigenous peoples and the forests
in which they live could well presage the one that
we are on the brink of bringing upon ourselves, this time
on a global scale. 
Montevideo, January 2019
Translated from French by Jennifer Kaku
— 15 —
In reference to Karl Marx in Das
Kapital, postface of the second
— 13 — German edition (January 1873),
See Christopher D. Stone, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward
Should Trees Have Standing? Aveling (Mineola, NY: Dover
Law, Morality, and the Environment, Publications, Inc., 2011), p. 25.
third edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010). — 16 —
Antonin Artaud, “Manifesto
— 14 — in Clear Language,” in Selected
See Danowski and Viveiros Writings, ed. Susan Sontag
de Castro, Há mundo por vir ?, (Berkeley: University of California
p. 101, n. 117. Press, 1988), p. 109.
Joseca, Mari hi (Guarea Guidonia), home to the cacique birds
Bruce Albert The Rain Tree ayokora (Cacicus cela), and ixaro (Cacicus haemorrhous),
and Mountains and Palm Trees, 2002–2010, pencil and felt-tip pen on paper 75