by Paul Rosolie
I called Gowri barely able to contain my excitement. At the twenty-fifth hour we had been saved: the passport would take more than a week to reach Bangalore. In that time Gowri and I were inseparable, electrified by our new relationship and the knowledge that the time we had together was a rare stroke of luck, a gift from the universe.
The last week in India I had nowhere to stay, but after we had dinner with Gowri’s family, her parents were generous enough to put me up in their guest room. Gowri’s room, which she shared with her sister, was much the same as my own room at home, a museum of natural artifacts: butterflies, skulls, fossils, and leaf skeletons retrieved from years of adventures. She even kept a box of snake skins that she had collected, just like I did at home. Being in her home, I found she had a wonderful, wild, and very endearing family; it didn’t hurt that they cooked some of the best food I had ever eaten.
Each night we’d sneak up onto the roof with a few blankets and stay up all night. On the last night, wrapped in a sleeping bag together, I remember praying that time would stand still. But the Muslim call to prayer echoed over the city as morning crept into the east. Whispering, we came to the absurd conclusion that we had to try to stay together. I promised to one day show her the Amazon, and that we would travel the world together, but most important, I promised that I would be back to India soon. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that the likelihood of a seventeen-year-old girl from India and a twenty-one-year-old guy from America maintaining a relationship was slim. But each time I tried to be “realistic” and discuss what would inevitably happen as time and space separated us, she stared hope into me with wide, determined eyes that squashed the doubt I felt. There was no doubt in her. What could I do? When life throws a gorgeous, energetic, snake-catching, animal-loving girl into your arms, you don’t just walk away. I knew that if the relationship was allowed to fade, I would never experience this kind of connection again. And so, kissing the two freckles on the left side of her nose and crunching her in my arms, I promised her it would work.
I left India, spinning from the nascent relationship with Gowri and the cosmic injustice of being torn apart. Yet within I also heard the call that had been nagging me for months: get back to the Amazon. During the recent months the bliss of my ignorance had been obliterated by what I had learned of the world, learned of tigers. I desperately needed the unspoiled green solace of the Madre de Dios.
With a volunteer group planned far in advance, I had only five days in New Jersey before I repacked and headed for Peru.
12
The Beached-Whale Paradox
Until my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns.
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
I once made a decision so ludicrously rash it nearly killed me, and by all rights should have. It occurred during my first solo excursion and resulted from a confluence of events that blindsided the Las Piedras. It was soon after my return from India, when I was old enough to grasp the scope of what was unfolding around me but young enough to lose my mind as a result. The psychotic adventure it sparked would take my relationship with the Amazon to places I never dreamed possible. It started with some very bad news.
It occurred while my world was still an emotional blur after leaving Gowri. JJ met me at the airport and hugged me for a long time and told me I’d been away far too long. He also told me that he and Emma had sold the station. It was no longer ours. I tried to figure out what this meant for my future, but there was no way to know. All JJ could tell me was that the buyer was a larger organization from the United States, and the paperwork was being put together. He said this could be the last trip we would make to the station. The question of how my life in the Amazon would continue, or if it would continue, saturated my consciousness.
Working to suppress countless questions, I did my best to engage the volunteers we brought by spotting wildlife and explaining interesting facts about what we saw, and a few groups passed uneventfully. I tried to savor the station, the forest, and as always kept an eye out for signs of Lulu, but I did not feel at ease. I was twisted by the uncertainty of the future. It was even worse watching JJ suffer as Emma prepared to leave permanently for the United Kingdom with Joseph.
On a day in between visiting groups, JJ and I were bringing supplies up to the station. As always, as we rode, I scanned the vines and towering trees—the massive green walls that fortressed the entirety of the river—and soaked in the visuals of Las Piedras. Rounding a bend, I smelled smoke and turned to JJ. “Who’s burning stuff way out here?” I asked. From his expression, it was clear that he had not told me something.
The scene entered my mind like black poison. Interrupting the previously endless walls of green was a gaping hole in the jungle, where the forest had been completely burned to the ground. Smoke rose in twisting columns as the air shimmered above the inferno. Ash fell like snow onto the river. Everything was gone.
Suppressing tears, we surveyed the burned wreckage. Thousand-year-old trees lay slain and charred across the ground. Among them were the mangled remains of palms, vines, amputated buttresses, and other vegetation. Explosions shocked the air as large bamboo chambers burst, spitting ash and flame aloft. Hundreds of years of photosynthetic growth, thousands of species, millions of years of evolution, razed. JJ and I stood in devastated shock at the wreckage that had once been forest.
Yet the destruction was nothing more than a sample, just a finger of a much larger demon. The clearing was part of a new road that had stemmed from the trans-Amazonian highway, or BR-361, possibly the most environmentally devastating single project in the history of the world. It was announced in 1970 by the Brazilian government as a strategy to integrate the Amazon with the rest of the country. The plan was to slice a network of pioneer roads into the unbroken forest that would provide access to the vast mineral, timber, and agricultural resources there. The two-thousand-mile Rodovica Transmazônica was to be the backbone of the proposed web of transportation that would essentially serve to open up and tame the wild west of Brazil. Funded by the World Bank, it was part of Brazil’s Program of National Integration. In the 1970s, Amazonia dominated half the Brazilian territory and held only 4 percent of its population. The plan was to provide incentives to many of the poor living in the east to migrate west and settle the Amazon.
In a time when Third World countries were expected to follow the Western model of development, large swaths of jungle were considered undeveloped. In the 1970s organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were more than willing to provide the financial assistance that poor ex-colonies needed to pursue this model, and so $440 million was granted to the Brazilian National Highway Department.
Much like the United States at the time of its inception, Brazil’s population is concentrated mostly in the eastern region of the country, while the west remains a mostly untapped wilderness of Amazonia. The desire to push westward into the so-far inaccessible 60 percent of their country informed the Brazilian consciousness, and still does.
By 1975 the entire unpaved road had been bulldozed through, a laceration that ran across the entire southern face of the Amazon biome. As a result, dozens of uncontacted and semi-contacted indigenous tribes were suddenly in the path of development, and under assault from germs, development, and migrant farmers in a lawless wilderness. Farmers poured into the Amazon behind the heavy machinery, striking out in right angles from the road and settling vast tracts of jungle by turning them to ash. From the air, the scars can be seen today. Scientists call it the “fish-bone effect” when a single road is blazed and then many others spring from it. From above, the roads seem to draw a fish skeleton. Even as a child, after my visit to the Bronx Zoo, I knew that once a road is made, rainforests disappear. The relationship is unfailingly direct. The trans-Amazonian highway shot thousands of fish-bone roads into the jungle, opening up previously inviolate habitat to the degradation of hunting, farming, gold mining, etc. The mega-highway was a te
rrible blow to the Amazon, but because it remained unpaved, its effects remained only a fraction of what they could be.
At the start of the 1970s the world entered a period of significant discovery about the state of the environment, and a greening of international politics took place on a large scale. By the 1980s, under mounting pressure from an environmentally aware public, the U.S. government conducted a hearing on the environmental impacts of the World Bank’s loans to Third World countries—which an increasing number of people believed to be more destructive than good. In the past the World Bank had been considered something of a hero for helping Third World countries to “develop,” but it was becoming clear that giving vast sums of money to poor governments often further impoverished more than it empowered; millions of people were displaced and vast environmental damage was done by hydroelectric dams and highways.
For the World Bank’s then-president, Barber Conable, this pressure was real, and a sweeping reorganization of the bank took place. It became more strict in its lending and required more detailed environmental impact statements before approving loans. The bank stopped its funding of the Brazilian highway system in 1985, effectively halting all construction on the road, which would have linked Brazil to the Peruvian border near Puerto Maldonado and eventually run over the Andes to the Pacific Ocean, opening up the Amazon to the Asian timber market by a direct land route to the sea for the first time in history.
Furious, the Brazilian government tried obtaining further funds from the Inter-American Bank to pave the trans-Amazon highway. Environmentalists and the people of Amazonia in the state of Acre and other areas reacted with urgency, flying iconic local activist Chico Mendez to the United States, where he addressed the World Bank and American organizations, urging them to deny funding. The loan, thankfully, was never approved, though Mendez would later be assassinated in retaliation for his efforts to protect the forest and its people.
For decades the trans-Amazonian highway lay in disrepair, a tragedy for conservation and a failure of development. The unpaved road was overgrown and functional only in certain places. Each rainy season the torrential downpour would flood the land, causing massive erosion and further damage to the highway. Because of difficulty navigating, the road was expensive to travel on and the jungle began to reclaim what had been taken from it.
This scar across the continent was broken in only one place: the Madre de Dios River, where the only way to cross was to drive trucks and cars onto boat ferries, which was costly and slow. In order to complete the highway’s planned course from Brazil and over the Andes to the Pacific Ocean, the architects of the highway had planned a bridge that would cross the Madre de Dios River itself, directly across from Puerto Maldonado. When I first visited the region, there were two large concrete pillars standing in the river alone and unfinished, fossils of an extinct monster. Emma explained they had been built to support a bridge—and warned that its completion, and the paving of the road, if it ever happened, would mean the end of many things. She spoke of the past and future with stony eyes, weary with the desperate inner prayer that what she spoke of would never come to fruition. She knew full well that in conservation the victories are temporary; it is the losses that are final.
The burnt forest and crude road were just an hour downstream from the station. What had for all of history been deep and inaccessible jungle was now exposed, violated. What I saw robbed me of sleep for weeks, because I knew this was only the beginning. A road meant that settlers were coming. In years to come a town would sprout up, more and more forest would be burned, and hunters would penetrate for miles to either side of the scar in the forest. Then the logging would start.
When JJ and I returned to Puerto Maldonado, things only worsened. Like being in a nightmare that would not end, I stood on the high banks of the Madre de Dios River staring at the large orange cables and tension lines that were being stretched across the river. The bridge was under construction as the highway, the giant that had lain dormant for decades, was waking once again. Suddenly it felt like the Madre de Dios was a hostage tied to the tracks, awaiting the inevitable iron force that would tear it apart. “Progress,” they say, must march on.
Scientists all over the globe agree that we are in the midst of the seventh great extinction, a rapid, planetary die-off of millions of species, this time caused by humanity. The oceans are being overfished, the forests shaved, and wildlife exterminated. Many species of flora and fauna that sustain natural systems and, as a direct result, human life are vanishing before our eyes. Although I care about protecting wildlife and find it personally meaningful to be in places that have not been degraded by man, today the real battle for wilderness is the battle for functioning ecosystems and the stability they provide. Worldwide environmental destruction and resource depletion mean a grim future or no future at all for billions of lives, human and other. In the words of Jane Goodall, “We’ve just been stealing, stealing, stealing from our children and it’s shocking.”
For example, Lester Brown, in his book Plan B 3.0, observes that “Haiti, a country of 9.6 million people, was once largely covered with forests, but growing firewood demand and land clearing for farming have left forests standing on scarcely 4 percent of its land. First the trees go, and then the soil. Once a tropical paradise, Haiti is a case study of a country caught in an ecological/economic downward spiral from which it has not been able to escape. It is a failed state, a country sustained by international life-support systems of food aid and economic assistance.”
The same story is unfolding on a global scale, a case in point for Trent’s theory of the commons, and how we are destroying what sustains us and exterminating the other creatures we share our planet with. The Native American adage that “we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” is more relevant today than ever. Alternatively, if you prefer the hardened scientist’s perspective, Carl Sagan put it in its simplest terms when he wrote, “Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water.”
Despite the scope of this environmental crisis, mainstream news sources around the world virtually ignore developments related to the species and systems that sustain us. Day to day we bask in the shameless narcissism of our own species, viewing and reading superficial accounts of sports, politics, celebrities, economics, wars. Even in the context of religion the view is remarkably anthropocentric. Our religions seem devoid of any real focus on protecting what gives us life. In Christianity, the Ten Commandments direct various elements of human-to-human interaction but say nothing of stewardship and respect for nature and nonhuman beings. Across the board, in all the major religions, it seems that God skipped that topic.
I can remember when my only concept of the destruction of nature came through books and documentaries, or places like the Bronx Zoo. Often I would stay awake late in my room at night reading the work of the conservationists I admired. These were dispatches from people who had seen firsthand the world being picked apart, who had worked with imperiled species, seen the logging roads, the mines, the mountaintops blow. I had felt their urgency, and so had begun my own quest. I had left the eastern United States, where not a single scrap of original-growth forest exists amid the human landscape, and saw a similar east in Brazil’s Atlantic coast. In India I had been lucky to walk in the scant remaining forests and savannahs, mountains and backwaters, fantastic places where wildlife and humans were competing for space in an ever-transitioning world. And so I had seen with my own eyes the scope of destruction and what inevitable future lay ahead. I had seen the mountains removed by mines, rivers choked by garbage and razed by dams, forests cleared. Then, of course, there was the Madre de Dios, where so much of the land seemed to remain just as it had for millennia. There I had taken refuge in the sprawling majesty of the jungle. Yet the sum of this travel and study, and the ground-level perspective of the biosphere it had afforded, painted a bleak picture of things to come.
Th
ey say that ignorance is bliss, and it must be true, because the things I saw haunted me. There had been a time when the Madre de Dios, never mind the Amazon as a whole, had seemed too infinite to fall by the toiling of ants and men. There I had felt safe. Somewhere in my mind was the mistaken belief that if it had survived so long, it would continue to do so. I was not the first to make such a naive assumption.
After decades in Africa, author and artist Peter Beard wrote: “I could never have guessed what was going to happen. Kenya’s population was roughly five million, with about 100 tribes scattered throughout the endless “wild—deer—ness.” It was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game—so enormous it appeared inexhaustible. Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya’s population of over 30 million drains the country’s limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa. The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye. The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by commercialism, arrows become AK-47s, colonialism is replaced by the power, the prestige, and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is The End Of The Game.”
Beard’s words were written long before the 2010s, when the elephant slaughter really picked up, when 60 percent of Africa’s forest elephants were exterminated. Before China’s legalization of elephant ivory created international demand that sent poachers wielding rocket launchers to shoot down the pachyderms. Before they began using axes to chop off the faces of mothers to get at the tusks as they screamed, their young beside them. Before a highway through the Serengeti was an idea. Before humans ate Africa.
What is it about our species that allows us to watch sitcoms and argue over sports while cultures and creatures and those things meek and green and good are chopped, shot, and burned from the world for a buck? Why is it that we so revere compassionate, heroic characters in literature and theory but practice such arrant apathy?