If Gainesville lost land at the rate the Amazon rainforest was being deforested, it would be gone in just 15 days. Despite a decrease in deforestation rates, the rainforest is still being destroyed at a rate of 5,000 acres a day, according to Maira Irigaray, who is from the Xingu River region of Brazil.

Irigaray spoke on Wednesday about indigenous rights and environmental damages in Xingu’s Hydrography Basin. But why should we care about this area, she rhetorically asked.

“The answer is very simple,” Irigaray said. “Xingu is inside the Amazon rainforest, and as people used to say, the Amazon is the link of the world. So we will have to find another way of breathing soon because the index of deforestation is so high right now.”

Out of the 51 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest, 28 million are legally protected. Seventeen million hectares of that land is in Irigaray’s home state of Mato Grosso. Out of that 17 million, six million hectares in Mato Grosso are already destroyed, she said. It has been estimated that 31-43 percent of all Amazon deforestation has taken place in Mato Grosso.

Part of the problem is that while Brazil has good law to protect the land, that law is often not enforced or followed.

“In the Brazilian law, we have beautiful law that takes care of the environment and indigenous rights and I believe our law sometimes is even better than the law here,” she said. “It’s beautiful – on paper. We’re pretty good at making laws and we are pretty good at breaking the laws also.”

One of the reasons Irigaray came to the United States is to see how the laws are properly enforced here.

“In my country, this doesn’t happen,” she said. “We have the laws, and nobody respects them… So today, the biggest challenge with indigenous tribes is not the creation of laws, but the enforcement of laws. That’s what doesn’t happen.”

Law-breaking deforestation and problems with the river are just a couple of the problems that the Xingu River Basin is facing going forward, Irigaray said.

The area is home to over 10,000 Indians whose lives are being dramatically affected by the problems in the Xingu River. Since problems in the river flow downstream, pesticides are affecting the indigenous peoples’ food supply.

“That’s how they live. We eat pizza, they eat fish,” Irigaray said. “Imagine if all the pizzas are gone in the planet. It would be bad.”