MATA VIRGEM

4km–>

“For sale… Damn, I wish I had some money!” Gil said, watching the sign go by. “Shit, I love forests! ”

We were driving to Rick’s rainforest. At long last, we were going to find out what he meant by goofing around. Adam and I each had our own worst‑case scenario, and they both involved kidnapping.

Two kilometers in, and the fields and overgrowth on the right became a thick secondary forest–the dense growth that floods into a previously disturbed area. Because secondary forest lacks the shady canopy of untouched, primary forest, it often grows with a thicket‑like abandon absent in primary forest.

Or as Gil put it, “Shit, look at this fucking forest! That’s a serious forest. ”

Rick’s land was taken care of by a young man named Antonio, who had been born and raised on an adjacent small farm. Antonio’s family home was a long, single‑story cabin made with rough‑hewn planks of itauba wood. It sat on a low rise bordered by trees. Children scurried and played in the yard. There were chickens, and a well, and an outdoor kitchen where Antonio cut fruit for us with a machete. It seemed vaguely like paradise. Only if you had been here thirty years could you understand that this was a landscape in the throes of change.

It was Antonio’s father, Raimundo, who had established the farm in the 1970s, as part of a wave of settlers encouraged by the Brazilian government, which was high on the idea of developing the supposedly unproductive land of the Amazon. New arrivals could get a 100‑hectare (250‑acre) plot for almost nothing.

“It was beautiful then,” Raimundo said, sitting in the front yard of what I might have otherwise called his still rather beautiful homestead. “The forest was vast, full with everything,” he said. “Game and all living beings. In those days everything was easier.”

Like Nestor, Raimundo was now suffering the effects of the most recent wave of deforestation, and he echoed Nestor’s complaints about the large soy farms. But Raimundo didn’t hate the soy farmers. He had been offered a trunkload of cash, and had turned it down, and that was that. “We feel good, because everything they do, it’s for Brazil,” he said. “But what can I say? We feel the heat, because of the cleared land.”

“Once it’s cleared, it will never be the same again,” Antonio said. “We know for a fact that place will never be what it was before.”

And it wasn’t over yet. We asked Raimundo what he thought the area would be like when his son reached his age.

“If they don’t come up with a law for a man to protect the forest he lives in, there will be nothing left,” he said. “Nothing left.” Perhaps because it was so poorly enforced, he was unaware that such a law already existed.

Rick’s cabin was back in the forest, perhaps ten minutes by foot from Antonio’s house. The path led through the woods, along a wooden walkway that passed over a shady, clear‑running creek, and finally to a sandy clearing. The cabin was a simple structure, no more than a few bare rooms made of planks cut by chainsaw. We slung our hammocks on the narrow porch.

A wasp was harrying Adam. As he tried to squirm and jump away, it became enraged and stung him on the cheek. “What did I do wrong?” he asked himself. Then, looking at the encroaching jungle all around, he drew the lesson. “The forest is my enemy,” he said.

We dumped our bags in the cabin and gathered in a troop facing Rick, our commander. “Are you ready for your jungle adventure?” he growled.

Rick had himself never made it to the depths of his own forest–because of how large the property was, he said. But Tang suggested it was because Rick just kept going around and around on the same trail.

“Have you seen the lake?” Tang asked.

“No,” Rick said.

“Have you seen the field?” Tang asked.

“No.” Rick smiled ruefully. “I’ve probably only seen fifty hectares of the place.”

The highlight of our walk through Rick’s rainforest was a magnificent tauari tree. Its base spread out along the ground in huge triangular fins that embraced cavernous spaces perhaps twenty feet tall. It wasn’t a tree so much as a group of searching, wooden walls that had come together to build a minaret.

Rick stared up at it. “As you can see here, this thing is like an art piece,” he said. “Thousands of trees like this have been cut. Millions, probably. Tauari is a commercial species. Most of it went to France. For some reason they love it. Europeans love tauari.”

With his fist, he pounded on one of the giant, fin‑like roots. It made a deep, thudding reverberation.

It was a spectacular tree, mystifying in its beauty. And yet, standing under it there in the jungle, I saw that I would have to stop fighting a realization that had been dogging me the whole trip: a rainforest, however fascinating, is still just a forest.

This is not as vapid an observation as it sounds. The legend of the jungle is so powerful, and so laden with the importance of biodiversity and the lungs‑of‑the‑planet thing, that we forget that an Amazonian rainforest has an awful lot in common with a regular North American forest. To wit: it is a forest. Yet the Amazon of our dreams persists–a place overgrown with mythology and legend, with humid stories of explorers and murky tales of pre‑contact tribes. You almost expect it to be made of jade.

This is true even when the mythology is negative. Werner Herzog, in a wonderful interview during the making of his movie Fitzcarraldo, proclaimed that the jungle was full of “misery,” that the birds cried out not in song but in pain, that the Amazon rainforest was a world of obscenity and horror. But in this, Herzog was being no less mawkish than Kathleen Turner in her breathy search for a giant emerald in Romancing the Stone –not to mention Michael Jackson in his Earth Song. Then there’s James Cameron’s Avatar, the ultimate expression of jungle‑as‑magical‑place, driven by a story so painfully condescending to its forest‑dwellers that he could get away with it only in science fiction.

In these cinematic Amazons, sunlight must always filter seductively, a leopard or a giant spider–or a fetching blue alien with breasts–must be around every bend, and every step on the path must be won with a machete slashed through the succulent fronds of something greener‑than‑green. Poison darts fly unceasingly from blowguns, leeches latch instantly onto legs and bellies. And piranhas, of course–always piranhas–wait for the dip of an unwise toe in the river. It’s not just a jungle. It’s Eden with some danger thrown in.

Maybe other parts of the Amazon are like that, but around here, it was primarily a forest. It had trees, and leaves, and dirt, and animals. And in this case, it had an owner. Most important, it also had a swimming hole. Finally, Adam and I understood what Rick had meant by goofing around. He had meant there was a rope swing.

The swimming hole was down the path beyond the cabin, where a stream–a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Amazon–eddied into a wide pool surrounded by trees. A small wooden swimming dock had been built out into the water.

The Americans had brought their swimming trunks, the Brazilians their briefs. There were the requisite jokes about piranhas, and we dove in. Rick climbed the slanted trunk of a collapsed tree, holding the rope swing in one hand. He surveyed his kingdom–and then jumped, carving a magnificent arc, his mane of gray‑blond curls trailing behind him, a late‑career Tarzan in board shorts.

If anything, his arc was a little too magnificent. It brought him over the platform of the swimming dock, and for a moment I thought he was going to break his neck. Instead, the Michigan‑born Lord of the Jungle watched with a bemused grimace as the dock passed underneath him, and then he swung back, still seizing tight to his vine, his feet dragging through the creek, and at last he let go, collapsing ingloriously into the water.

We were on an island in an ocean of soy. Out at the property line, Rick’s forest fell away into a huge, flat expanse of dry earth. We had gone to take a look.

It wasn’t yet planting season. Heat wavered over the crumbled dirt. A trio of silos stood in the distance. Gil danced back and forth taking video with his iPod Touch. Rick pointed out the line of green running alongside the field. It was the border of his forest. He had owned it for ten years.

“This huge, thousand‑acre soybean field here, at one time was all forest,” he said. “One year I came through here with some people, and there was a huge pile of logs, still burning. They just cut that piece out.”

It wasn’t just the small farmers who had felt the pressure to sell, but anyone who owned uncut forest in the Santarém area. When I asked Steven Alexander–another American who owns a tract of uncut forest in the area–whether anybody had offered to buy his land, he laughed.

“I had a line of people trying every day to buy it!” he said.

A gentle, white‑bearded man in his early seventies, Alexander had been living in the area for thirty years, working for a health and education NGO, and later as a forest guide. He had bought his land back when it was cheap. Now it, too, was an island, and he took a dim view of the Amazon’s long‑term prospects.

“My guess is that it will become much like North America or Europe,” he said.

“Really?” I asked. “The Amazon will look like France?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Over a period of time, a hundred years, two hundred, I don’t think we can expect to see anything more than preserves…Everything around that will go.” The Amazon rainforest would remain as a mere archipelago, islands of protected forest scattered across the river basin.

“It seems to be the way of the world now, doesn’t it?” Alexander said. He smiled gently. “More and more people, more roads, more development, less forest. That seems to be the trend.”

Cargill, Greenpeace, and the Nature Conservancy all agreed that the soy moratorium was a success. But it had left some business unfinished. For one thing, there was the question of the Cargill terminal’s dubious legality. And what about the small farmers who, having sold out, found themselves profoundly impoverished? Both of these concerns had been fundamental to activists’ case against the soy industry. Greenpeace had produced a short film–titled In the Name of Progress: How Soya Is Destroying the Amazon Rainforest –that highlighted those two issues in stark, accusatory terms. But once the moratorium was signed, they were dropped.

This, more than anything else, explains the rift between an international NGO like Greenpeace and an impudent local activist like Father Sena. In his view, Greenpeace and the Nature Conservancy had secured a weak agreement. The decrease in deforestation, he thought, was due to the global economic slowdown, not the moratorium. And even if the moratorium was stopping soy farmers from cutting down forest themselves, what about the small farmers they displaced? They were much harder to track. Meanwhile, nothing was being done to mitigate the damage that had already been done–and the Cargill terminal was still allowed to exist.

“Greenpeace forgot about us,” Sena said. “They used our movement.” They had made heroes of themselves, declared victory, and moved on.

When Adam later tracked down Andre Muggiati, a forest campaigner at Greenpeace Amazon, he nearly admitted as much. “Edilberto is still a good friend,” he said of Sena. But he said that, for Sena, “the only solution for the problems would be to put Cargill out, to send all the soy farmers back to the south. That is not reasonable. We always knew that at some point we would have to sit at the table with Cargill to get an agreement. If you ask the impossible, you never get to a solution.” Activism could only do so much. “Capitalism and free initiative are legal in Brazil,” he said. “You can’t come to Cargill and say, ‘Go away.’ You cannot go to the soy farmers and say, ‘Return the land to the peasants.’”

Who could disagree with Muggiati? But however sensible, his words could have come out of Cargill’s own mouth, and so hint at some uncomfortable parallels between the agribusiness giant and the environmental NGOs that opposed it. Both sides had operated with a degree of realpolitik about the possibility for justice in the wake of the soy boom. Both had maneuvered through legal gray areas to advance their cause. Of course, Greenpeace had no hand in overturning the way of life that had sustained the small farmers of Pará. But it did use them as poster children in its campaign, only to discard them once a realistic political goal had been reached. And the goal it achieved–if indeed it was truly achieved–was to protect the forest, not to address the social ills that had gone along with the soy boom. It’s also difficult not to find some irony in a guy from Greenpeace invoking realism and the rule of law–when a good deal of that organization’s public activism depends on idealism and on the targeted flouting of the law.

Father Sena–militant priest, spitfire idealist, girl‑watcher–ended up on the outside. When negotiations for the soy moratorium began, Sena’s Amazon Defense Front had been part of them. But the ADF wanted too much: a ten‑year moratorium, extending two years retroactively, instead of the more realistic, yearly‑renewable arrangement that was ultimately agreed upon. Sena told us that he had walked away. “We said, ‘Forget it. You can cheat people from the United States, but you cannot cheat us.’” That left Pará’s soy moratorium to be designed by Cargill (of Minnesota) and the Nature Conservancy (of Virginia) and Greenpeace (founded in Vancouver) and a grab bag of other NGOs and agribusiness giants, most of them from the northern hemisphere.

The soy moratorium may prove a great success story in the end. It may even herald a way forward for the control of deforestation. But it lacks exactly what the Ambé’s sustainable logging project hopes to establish: local players who have a stake in the forest’s preservation. In the case of Ambé, the very people benefiting from the forest’s exploitation have a profound incentive to do it sustainably. But the soy moratorium’s several constituencies are different. One–Cargill and its competitors–is at best indifferent to the rainforest. Another–the soy farmers–would cut it down if they could get away with it. Yet another–the mostly foreign‑based NGOs–can only hope to build their moral imperatives into the machinery of agribusiness and development, through political maneuvering and legal cajoling.

Finally, there’s whoever is still left in and around the forest–the people who, for whatever reason, didn’t sell and haven’t cleared all their land. And who’s to say how long it will be worth their while to hold on to it?

In the evening we ate dinner in Antonio’s yard and then retired to Rick’s cabin in the rainforest. From the clearing, I watched bats transit the moon as it rose over the jungle. Howler monkeys groaned in the distance. Nearby, a troop of frogs set up a ceaseless knocking rhythm, anchoring an aural tapestry of peeping and piping and cricketing, cicada‑like sounds that glimmered in the darkness. Adam thrashed around with a flashlight in his mouth, dosing himself with choking clouds of bug spray.

At the edge of the clearing, Tang produced a guitar and began strumming, singing a plaintive tune into the dark.

“What is that, Tangy?” asked Rick. “That something from your home village?”

“It’s Dire Straits,” Tang said.

Gil had passed out in his hammock, a lumpy pod hanging between two trees in the dark. We walked out past Antonio’s house, past a pair of drowsy cattle, to where the soy fields began. Tang lay on the road, his arms behind his head, and Rick and Adam and I stared at the night sky. Our original hope had been to see the distant glow of fires in the south. In the days of the free‑for‑all, Rick told us, it had been possible to see the night sky aflame with apocalyptic color, the radiant flush of a forest casting off its earthly bonds. The awestruck way he spoke reminded me of Hilton Kelley’s description of refinery flares in Port Arthur. There is a kind of destruction that has beauty in its weapon.

Tonight, though, there were no horizons of orange and red. It wasn’t really burning season, if they even bothered to have a good burning season these days. And so we were left with silent flickers of lightning in the far heat, and the stars. The last time I had seen the stars so well had been on the Kaisei, listening to the Pirate King digress on Orion, on the Pleiades, on Cetus.

A large bat flapped out of the night and passed over our heads. “Here they come–agh!” Adam cried, ducking for cover. Even in the middle of a soy field, the forest was out to get him.

The bat followed its erratic flight path out over the soy field behind us. I looked at the field, how it stretched out of sight in the dark. Just how did they clear this stuff?

Years ago, Rick told us, a rancher down the highway had bought a large piece of forest and wanted to clear it. “He hired five hundred guys, bought five hundred chainsaws, and just went at the forest,” he said. “In one season, I don’t know how many thousand hectares he cleared, just brrrrcchh! ”

Rick had said he wanted to be portrayed as one of the guys that have got good intentions. And I thought his enthusiasm for the rainforest was genuine. But the fact that he had been a major exporter of wood from Santarém also meant that his business almost certainly had been built on illegally logged wood. As recently as the mid‑2000s, 60 to 80 percent of the wood coming out of the Amazon had been logged illegally. And although Rick didn’t like to get specific, more than once he had made vague references to the frenzy of the old days, of the crazy things he’d seen in the Brazilian logging industry. He knew the business he had made his fortune in. When he talked about preserving his seven hundred hectares of rainforest, he sounded like a man trying to prove to himself what kind of person he was.

The soy field just in front of us, I realized, was about the size of a single hectare. In general, I have no sense for what an acre is, much less a hectare. But I had looked it up, and here was one in front of me: a piece of land about the length of a soccer field on each side.

“Isn’t that a huge piece of land?” Rick said. “And then there’s seven hundred of those back there in that forest.” Rick’s piece of rainforest suddenly seemed incredibly massive–an entire world.

“I still have a hard time even believing that I own that piece of property…This shouldn’t even belong to a human being!” He laughed. “To have that kind of ability or power or whatever it is, or…”

“It’s not like owning a car, or a house,” I said. “It’s like owning a little universe that you’re inside.”

He nodded. “And it’s been there since, oh, you know. It’s evolved for millions of years…And what gives me the right to just be born and all of a sudden it’s mine? I’m like a speck on the Earth. I’ve only been here for like, just a grain of sand in time, and all of a sudden I’ve got this ability to just erase something that took…”

Rick shook his head and looked at the darkness on the other side of the hectare, where his rainforest began.

“All of a sudden I’m here,” he said. “And it’s like, I’m the guy holding the bag.”

Six