The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Chapter 6

  Roads to Ruin

  UNTIL THE MID-1960s, Chico Mendes and the other rubber tappers of the Amazon had only one foe: aviamento, the system of debt servitude. In those days, deforestation, desmatamento, was not perceived as a threat; it was not even a commonly used word. Through most of the river basin, rain forest covered the landscape from horizon to horizon. The only highways were the rivers. Where the dusty dirt road now runs from Xapuri to Rio Branco, the state capital—passing a landscape of scorched pasture—there was only a trail. In some places, the ten-story forest canopy closed over the trail like a vaulted green gallery.

  All that began to change as the military government consolidated its power after the 1964 coup. Its key goals were to gain control over the country’s vast, underpopulated frontier and to accelerate economic growth. The Amazon was crucial to both objectives, and an agency, INCRA, was created to oversee its occupation. The forests began to fall first along the Amazon’s southern flank, as new roads and government incentives brought waves of settlers and ranchers to the states of Mato Grosso, Goiás, Pará, and then Rondônia. As the cutting and burning intensified through the 1970s and 1980s, only Rondônia stood between the tide of destruction and the rich rubber forests of Acre. Nowhere was the influx of people more intense than in this state. Nowhere were the fires of the burning season hotter.

  And no one knew this better than a man who had just flown into Acre to film the extension of those same destructive roads into the forests that Chico Mendes had fought and died to preserve. On an evening in the dry season of 1989, Adrian Cowell sat down at an outdoor café in Rio Branco with a colleague and some friends. The fifty-five-year-old British filmmaker was finishing a documentary about the human invasion of the Amazon called The Decade of Destruction. Over the previous ten years, he and his cameraman, Vicente Rios, had shot millions of feet of film and flown hundreds of thousands of miles in their effort to chronicle the invasion of the Amazon orchestrated by Brazil’s generals and businessmen. Much of Cowell’s focus recently had been on the destruction in Rondônia, where a floodtide of migrants flowed north along BR-364, Acre’s only link with the developed part of Brazil, and destroyed a fourth of the state’s rain forests.

  Dozens of filmmaking teams have come and gone in the Amazon; they fly in for a couple of days, catch quick shots of the destruction, then fly out to the editing room. The result is always the same series of vignettes: a chain saw crew topples a tree; flames engulf a field of stumps and trunks; herds of cattle graze in the charred landscape. (When one American network news team wanted a rancher to coordinate the burning of his land with the arrival of its film crew in September 1989, even the Acre government was outraged.) Cowell was different. With a monomaniacal focus, he scraped together funding so that he could patiently film the struggles of the Amazonian peoples not just day after day, but year after year. As an old friend and colleague put it, “He thinks in time scales that are vaguely Chinese.” (In fact, Cowell was born in China, and Chinese was his first language.) Whatever it took to get the shot, he did. He bought an ultralight airplane so that he could swoop low over the red dirt roads and matchstick piles that once were forests.

  With Cowell was José Lutzenberger, a maverick Brazilian agronomist who had become one of the leaders of an international ecological movement called Gaia, which posits that all life on earth functions as a single organism: disrupt one component and you threaten the entire system. He and Cowell had flown in for thirty-six hours to get some footage of Lutzenberger out amid the red dust and rumbling logging trucks of the unpaved BR-364 highway. Cowell was hoping to capture on film Lutzenberger’s wrath at the destruction that would follow the paving of that stretch of highway between Rio Branco and Rondônia.

  Cowell was slim and deeply tanned, and his white hair and closely trimmed white beard glowed against his face. An exceedingly quiet man, he slowly came out of his shell as, over a few beers, he talked about how he came to join the fight for the rain forest. His passion for the Amazon and its peoples dated from 1957, when he spent seven months traveling with Brazil’s legendary Villas-Boas brothers, two explorers who became specialists at contacting hidden Indian tribes. He returned in 1969 with a government team and tramped through the wilds of Mato Grosso to film its efforts to contact the Krenakore, a tribe whose only previous encounters with the modern world had resulted in deaths on one side or the other.

  In Rondônia, Cowell and his cameraman had followed a team from the government’s office of Indian affairs, FUNAI, as it tried for two years to make contact with the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, a tribe that was blamed for kidnapping and murdering a rubber tapper. The tappers and other settlers had moved into land that was part of an Indian reserve. On an open patch of high ground, the FUNAI investigators strung pots, pans, machetes, and mirrors on lines so that they clanked hauntingly in the wind. Nothing happened for months, then a fusillade of yard-long arrows with sawtoothed heads thwocked into the ground around their huts. In a flitting, grainy, ghostly frame of celluloid, Cowell captured the first picture of one of the Indians—the bright blob of a face amid a swaying green mass of forest.

  As the Indians of Rondônia were steadily pushed back by the government-sponsored land rush, Cowell turned his cameras on the newcomers. Over a five-year period beginning in 1983, he chronicled the hopes and heartbreaks of a family that claimed one of the 250-acre plots offered by INCRA. The film shows how, at first, the family displays a brave pioneering spirit as the father and children hack at the forest with axes and machetes, then set fire to the mass of fallen branches and vines. Soot and dust rise as the father pokes holes in the dry soil between the smoldering corpses of the trees, then plants seeds in each hole. Over successive seasons, the land loses its fertility. The family is forced to move on, leaving a barren tract behind.

  By 1988, so many roads were being scratched across Rondônia that the state’s forests were broken by a spreading grid of open space that, from the air, looked like ferns flattened between the pages of a book—main roads bristling with smaller feeder roads. Clouds of smoke so darkened the sky during the burning season that airports were closed for weeks on end. Government policies that were designed to encourage the orderly immigration of small farmers from the south instead created a virtual blitz that incinerated millions of trees and left little to show for it. Rondônia represented everything that the rubber tappers of Acre, just up the highway, most feared.

  The conversation inevitably turned to Chico Mendes. Starting in 1986, Cowell had become one of his most trusted and influential friends from outside the Amazon. Without Cowell, Chico Mendes would likely have remained a small-time labor leader in the Amazonian backwater of Xapuri. But Cowell had recognized in Mendes’s struggle an idea that might just save some of the Amazon from the chain saws. The key was to give Mendes a bigger audience, an audience outside the forest. Cowell had filmed Mendes almost continually from 1986 until his murder. Lutzenberger had also befriended Mendes, and he had seen to it that Mendes got some grants when his money ran out. Cowell and Lutzenberger were both depressed about the slow pace of the trial of the murderers.

  As they talked into the night, Lutzenberger clipped articles out of a pile of newspapers with a Swiss Army knife. He enthusiastically described some new research that used computer models of the global circulation of clouds to show how moisture from the Amazon basin affects the weather from Argentina to France. “If you turn the globe and put the Amazon in the center, then you see its fantastic impact on places as far away as Europe,” said the scientist, who had a distinctly avian appearance—partly due to his long face and neck and his habit of flapping his arms excitedly when making a point. His thinning blond-gray hair was slicked straight back and cropped off abruptly, so it hung like the tassels of a curtain behind his ears. “There is westward movement of clouds from the Atlantic Ocean to the Andes. Water gets cycled between the clouds and the forest six to seven times during this trip. Once the moisture reaches the Andes, a tiny bit gets up and
over; some goes all the way south to Patagonia; the rest goes up north as far as Nova Scotia and thence over to Europe.”

  The solar energy that bears down on the Amazon and evaporates all that water is the equivalent of two or three million hydrogen bombs of heat a day, Lutzenberger said. “Suppose we destroy the rain forest? You don’t get in its place sand dunes as in the Sahara or naked rock; you get poor scrub or bare soil.” The thin vegetation contains little moisture, so “instead of the fantastic evaporation you see now, which keeps things cool, the soil will get real hot. Updrafts will destroy the clouds.” Where the rain forest helped sustain itself, the new hotter, drier landscape will tend to make things even hotter and drier. As a result, if enough forest is cut, the scales may be tipped sufficiently that the system no longer needs human assistance and destroys itself.

  Lutzenberger stopped for a moment to sip some more beer and ponder the full moon. “A complicated system can take a lot of abuse, but you get to a point where suddenly things fall apart,” he said. “It’s like pushing a long ruler toward the edge of a table. Nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens—then, suddenly, the ruler falls to the floor.”

  The assault on the Amazon that now raged in Rondônia and threatened Acre was a continuation of one of the most basic processes of civilization: the conquest of the wilderness. Wild regions of the earth have always been perceived by human beings as places to be tamed, settled, and then exploited. In his sensitive book The Wooing of Earth, the scientist René Dubos noted that “the word ‘wilderness’ occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.” Just as the word originally had negative connotations, so too did “jungle,” which was derived during Britain’s occupation of India from a Hindu word for “uncultivated land” or “wasteland.” In fact, biologists are loath to use the word “jungle” when referring to rain forests because of its popular association with the perilous Hollywood back lots that were the home of Tarzan and bloodthirsty headhunting tribes.

  It was not surprising that at some point Brazil—whose population was historically strung along the Atlantic coast, moving inland along only a few rivers—should see in the Amazon forests more than just the source of a few products. A century earlier, the same process of settlement had changed the face of the United States as the steadily advancing frontier ate through the continent’s forests. (The title “Timber Capital of the World” was briefly held by towns such as Bangor, Maine; Albany, New York; Williamsport, Pennsylvania; Saginaw, Michigan; Eureka, California; and Portland, Oregon.)

  The Amazon basin—undeveloped, open, virtually free for the taking—made up more than half of Brazil’s territory. When the junta gained power in 1964, the Amazon remained largely untamed. Getúlio Vargas’s call for a march to the west had remained mostly a slogan. The region had been in a steady decline since 1912, when the rubber boom collapsed. In 1960, there were only 200 miles of paved roads in the Amazon, and Belem and Manaus were still the only significant population centers. The snaking, slow rivers remained the only way to move substantial amounts of goods and people. Brazil had a population of 70 million, but the 2.5-million,-square-mile region defined as Classic Amazonia had only 2.5 million inhabitants. In other words, half of the nation’s land area had only 3.5 percent of the nation’s people.

  The military government soon recognized that the settlement of the Amazon could solve a number of problems. It seemed obvious that the region could serve as a social pressure valve, a repository for “surplus population”—the phrase used by planners to describe peasants who were being driven off the land in the developed south. They were being displaced by the spread of large-scale agriculture and the accumulation of vast land holdings by a few wealthy individuals and corporations. These displaced poor were now flooding into the cities or standing their ground and agitating for land reform. It was far simpler for the government to relocate them in some out-of-the-way place than to initiate any effort at land reform; that would entail splitting up the undeveloped property of Brazil’s elite and distributing it to small farmers.

  The Amazon could also help absorb “surplus population” from the overcrowded, permanently depressed northeast. Over the next two decades, some Brazilians would laughingly refer to the various schemes to help this desiccated region as the country’s “drought industry.” For the most part, the millions of dollars that were poured into resettlement and water projects and roads heading west into the Amazon benefited only construction contractors, real estate speculators, and corrupt government officials.

  Most significant, the development of the Amazon suited the generals’ military plans. The forests were an obstacle to their complete control over the land; moreover, Venezuela and Peru had already started programs to occupy their Amazonian territories. So the Brazilian junta, following established military doctrine, implemented its strategy of ocupar para não entregar, occupy so as not to surrender. One of the military’s so-called Permanent National Objectives, drawn up by theorists at Brazil’s leading war college, was the occupation of the hinterlands. A central architect of this strategy was General Golbery do Couto e Silva, a leading military planner who after the coup created the National Information Service, Brazil’s version of the CIA. (He was an important figure in Brazil’s military governments until General João Figueiredo began the process of abertura, opening, that led to a return of democratic rule in 1985.) The aim, Golbery said, was to “flood the Amazon forest with civilization.”

  In 1966, Golbery’s plan began to take effect. A law passed in October created SUDAM, the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon. This agency, run by a general, would oversee the planned occupation and distribute incentives for industrial and agricultural projects. In December, the junta inaugurated Operation Amazonia, a series of initiatives designed to promote investment in the Amazon and build roads toward the frontier. The two prongs of the plan encouraged investments in the Amazon by Brazil’s rich and migration to the Amazon by Brazil’s poor.

  The incentives for the wealthy were hard to resist: among them were a reprieve from corporate income taxes for ten to fifteen years; the widespread availability of subsidized loans; sharp cuts in import duties on pesticides and any equipment needed to develop Amazonian land; and enormous tax credits, which companies could use to write off 50 percent of their income tax liability from enterprises outside the Amazon as long as the savings were invested in approved projects inside the Amazon. Corporations large and small—from banks and meat packers to manufacturers of car parts, from Xerox Brazil to Brazilian Volkswagen—jumped at the easy money. Most of the businessmen in the Amazon were paulistas, people from the elite class of São Paulo, and even those who were not were considered paulistas by the peasants of the north.

  The military regime was particularly eager to push the development of cattle ranches. As one minister of the interior put it, “The steer is the great pioneer of this decade.” The chief goal was not to increase exports. (Indeed, Brazil has never been part of the famous “hamburger connection,” in which vast areas of rain forest are being cleared to make pasture to supply cheap beef to the American fast-food industry. That depredation has been largely confined to Central America.) The idea was to ensure plentiful supplies of inexpensive beef at a time when union wage hikes were curtailed to slow inflation. The availability of cheap meat was one of the few concessions the government made to appease the working class. Anyone who has ever been to a Brazilian churrascada, barbecue, where slab after slab of grilled meat is served until the guests reel and collapse in atherosclerotic ecstasy, understands the political significance of beef.

  Besides making economic sense, ranching appealed to the sensibility of a large fraction of Brazilian businessmen, whose families made their fortunes on land in the south before they had moved to the cities. There was an appeal, a certain cachet, to being a fazendeiro, a rancher. In the first ten years of the government’s program, three quarters of a billion dollars in tax rebates were doled out for
354 projects involving cattle ranching. But many of the fazendeiros were ruthless in their drive to acquire and develop the land. Attracted to Acre once the southern Amazonian states were overrun, they eventually hired pistoleiros to expel the rubber tappers from their forests and assassinate anyone who stood in the way of “progress”—including Chico Mendes.

  At first, the new Amazonian landowning class simply hired local labor to slash and burn the forest cover. But their methods were inefficient; even with chain saws with blades a yard long, the forest giants such as tarumã and tropical cedar sometimes took an hour or more to bring down. Later, more efficient methods of deforestation were introduced, the most dramatic being the correntão— big chain—technique, in which a length of massive anchor chain was pulled through a stand of forest by two enormous bulldozers, toppling the shallowly rooted trees in a deafening chaos of sound as if they were so many toothpicks.

  The cleared forests contained millions of tons of valuable hardwood, such as mahogany and cedar, yet the timber was almost always left to burn or rot. Economists now estimate that as much as $250 million worth of valuable timber was destroyed on SUDAM ranches alone. Herbicides were used on the smaller brush. Starting in the early 1970s, one of the most popular herbicides was Tordon, a potent defoliant sold by the Dow Chemical Company which had the same ingredients as Agent Orange—ingredients that Dow had in enormous quantities now that the Vietnam War was over.

  After the cutting came the burning; soon the bright sunshine of each dry season became dimmed by a perpetual haze of smoke. After the fires died out, workers would spread grass seed in the new pasture and then turn a few head of cattle out to graze.