Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  A needle of pain in my thigh. I looked down to see a green dagger sticking out of my leg. Its spiny brothers pointed at me from nearby branches. I pulled it out, a two-inch thorn. The air’s suffusing odor of loamy decomposition suddenly took on new significance. It was the smell of the jungle breaking down and digesting anything that didn’t keep moving. The Amazon wasn’t just a lung. It was a stomach.

  The morning survey done, we came back to the service road and walked along it for a while, toward a meeting point where the truck would pick us up. Every curve revealed a narrow vista—another towering queen of a tree, wearing a leafy corona over an impossibly slender trunk. A patch of brilliant indigo half the size of my palm materialized in the air: a butterfly. Adam crouched over a snail at the edge of the woods. In the middle of the road, a thin cable of succulent green hung out of the sky. I held it, felt the elastic connection between my hand and the distant canopy—and then gave it a tug. It broke, length after length of vine spooling down on my shoulders.

  Gil was everywhere with the iPod Touch. Instead of selling it, he had fallen in love with the thing and had decided to keep it for himself. Now he roamed back and forth, taking videos.

  Gil had a special connection to this place. His grandfather’s family had lived here once, before it was a protected forest. They had made a settlement of their own, with about a dozen family members living off a piece of land that Gil’s grandfather considered particularly rich. In the early 1970s, though, the government had decided to protect the area by creating the Tapajós National Forest, and had expelled many of the people who lived there. Gil’s grandfather had been forced to sell his land.

  “It was a reasonable amount of money,” Gil told me. But it had been disastrous for the family. Instead of farming together, they found themselves looking for new and unfamiliar jobs. “Like truck driver, gold prospector, fisherman,” Gil said. One uncle had opened a brothel and eventually sank into drug trafficking and violence.

  Gil didn’t think that creating the national forest had been wrong—only that it had been created on the wrong model. “See, in those years, the policy was based in the USA’s Yellowstone,” he told me.

  He couldn’t have chosen a more relevant example. Yellowstone was the first national park in the world, and its creation, in 1872, marked the moment in which white Americans truly fell in love with the splendor of the land they had conquered. But for that love to grow, the ideal of wilderness as a source of rapture and recreation had to be separated out from the loathing we all felt for native Americans, whose presence in the West tended to distract from our John Muir-style reveries.

  Muir himself, the St. Francis of the American West and a prophet of wilderness preservation, admitted that he was barely tolerant of the native Americans he encountered. In 1869, he wrote that he would “prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks.” Muir’s reverence for what he saw as the natural order of things continues to fuel conservation today, but it didn’t extend so far as to include humans—of any color—as part of the environment. “Most Indians I have seen are not a whit more natural in their lives than we civilized whites,” he wrote. “The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild is unclean.”

  Native Americans were excluded from Yellowstone at its creation. Though people had been present in the area that was to become the park for thousands of years, native American practices of hunting and planned burning were anathema to a view of nature as sacrosanct from human involvement. If native Americans had been allowed to remain, they would have gotten in the way of all the nature white people wanted to appreciate. The creation of Yellowstone formalized the idea that human beings have no place in a protected wilderness—unless they are tourists.

  As a result, some of the places we consider most pristine, most wild, are in some ways deeply artificial. A popular park like Yellowstone is probably more controlled, more managed, than the Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl. And even parks less besieged by visitors than Yellowstone or Yosemite are premised on ideas and laws that define human beings as outside of nature.

  This artificial division between natural and unnatural pervades our understanding of the world. Industrialists may hope to dominate nature, and environmentalists to protect it—but both camps depend on the same dualism, on a conception of nature as something to which humanity has no fundamental link, and in which we have no inherent place. And it’s a harmful dualism, even if it takes the form of veneration. It keeps us from embracing a robust, engaged environmentalism that is based on something more than gauzy, prelapsarian yearnings.

  But we cling to the ideal of a separate and perfect nature as though to give it up would be the same as paving over the Garden of Eden. When I met with the writer and academic Paul Wapner, whose ideas I’m stealing here, he told me that a colleague had warned him not to publish his book on this subject, titled Living Through the End of Nature. His colleague thought it was a bad career move, and that anyone who argued that the concept of nature was no longer a useful one was giving away the farm.

  The farm has already been given away. We’re just so entranced by the concept of nature-as-purity that we won’t face facts. Our environment is not on the brink of something. It is over the brink—over several brinks—and has been for some time. It was more than twenty years ago that Bill McKibben pointed out the simple fact that there is no longer any nook or cranny of the globe untouched by human effects. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise, to stop pretending that we haven’t already entered the Anthropocene, a new geological age marked by massive species loss (already achieved) and climate change (in progress).

  But the dream of nature is so dear to us that to wake from it seems like a betrayal. The sense that we have not yet gone over that brink—not quite—is what motivates us to our ablutions, our donations, our recycling, our hope. But it is a great untruth. The task now, perhaps, is not to preserve the fantasy of a separate and pure nature, but to see how thoroughly we are part of the new nature that still lives. Only then can we preserve it, and us.

  We went to find the rest of the loggers. The truck dropped us at the edge of a large, muddy clearing with a dozen large, felled trees stacked around its periphery. The air was alive with the riot of engines and saws. The clearing was a temporary holding area for trees that had been felled in the surrounding forest. A man with a chainsaw went from log to log, sawing off the sloping protrusions of roots at their bases, while other workers, both men and women, measured and marked them. An angry, saber-toothed forklift picked logs up in twos or threes and dropped them into a pile. They landed with a deep thunk.

  After our peaceful stroll through the forest, the racket was overwhelming. To be honest, I think we were a little freaked out by how industrial it all was. I had expected a sustainable logging collective to involve a dozen nice folks and a good chainsaw. Instead, the nice folks had serious machinery and meant business. You could have taken pictures here that looked like every preservationist’s nightmare—a mayhem of logs and mud. Or you could have taken pictures of the jolly, hardworking crew, and of the communities they supported, and of the forest that, it was hoped, their logging was helping to protect.

  “The skidder is coming!” Gil said. “You can’t see this very often! Let’s go, let’s go!”

  We ran to the edge of the clearing and into the forest. A corridor of crushed vegetation led deeper into the jungle. Something had been through here. Trees were scraped and bruised where it had passed.

  From the forest, we heard the shriek and growl of an engine. It heaved into sight: the skidder. This was how logs were brought out from the inaccessible interior, where they had been felled. They were dragged out behind this narrow, streamlined tank, a low, blunt-nosed hedgehog of a machine that was now headed our way.

  Gil raised his iPod to record it. “We want to make sure not to be near it when it passes,” he said, in the staring voice of the awestruck. The skidder plunged toward us, a colonizing robot from another world, surprisingly fast, should
ering trees aside as it bore closer, nearly on top of us.

  And then we were running for our lives, screaming with joy and terror, leaping out of the way. It passed just a few yards from us, wheels grinding, and then it was gone. In its wake, a gigantic log slid coolly, massively, over the forest floor.

  “Fucking shit!” Gil screamed. He was waving the iPod in the air. “It wasn’t recording!” His disappointment took the form of an intense, quivering joy. Then we turned, and the machine was there again, back from the clearing, outbound for another log, bullheaded, inhuman, implacable.

  On our way out, we stopped at the patio—the storage area near the highway, where logs awaited transport. They were piled twenty or more to a stack, each log three feet in diameter. We drove over soft ground flooded with rainwater, winding our way through a dozen stacks, two dozen. Flying ants wavered against the mountainous piles of logs. The purple stylus of a dragonfly appeared and disappeared. The air was thick with wood and rot.

  Gil shook his head. “It’s hard to believe this won’t fuck up the forest, isn’t it?”

  Gil met us for breakfast at the hotel. As we planned our day over coffee and pastries, a muscular, middle-aged American man approached our table and started talking windsurfing with Gil. The American was wearing flip-flops and shorts, and had long, curly gray-blond hair and a deep, gravelly voice. A surfing buddy of Gil’s, I thought. The subculture of Amazonian beach bums—one that I hadn’t known existed two days earlier—was growing every day.

  Then he turned to me, a business card in his hand. It was Rick. The man from Michigan who owned his own rainforest. On two days’ notice, he had decided to come down to meet us in Brazil. He said there were a lot of misconceptions out there about the Amazon and about logging, and evidently he thought my presence in Santarém was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get his story out.

  I don’t know what I had expected Rick to look like—a doughy guy in a polo shirt and khakis?—but it wasn’t this. With his stony features and huge arms, he looked like a muscle-bound Gary Sinise. Or like someone who might choose to beat the crap out of the real Gary Sinise. He was accompanied by one of his few remaining local employees, a smart, understated young man whom Rick called Tang. They got some coffee and breakfast and joined us at our table.

  Rick lived wood. His company imported wood to the United States, processed it, and sold it as exotic flooring. The business had been driven by the cheap money of the housing bubble, he said. “People building ten-thousand-square-foot houses because they could, putting in exotic hardwood floors because they could.”

  He got down to the business of misconception-correcting. “On TV in America, they used to show some burnt, dying wasteland, and they’d have a logging truck driving through it,” he said. “The assumption is that loggers cleared it. That they just nuke the place. But that’s not the case.”

  Of all the trees growing in the rainforest, Rick told us, only five or six species were commercially viable. So logging in the Amazon had always been extremely selective. “If there were no cattle ranching, and no soy, the average person wouldn’t be able to tell that one single log had been cut around here. Because there’s no market for 94 percent of the forest.”

  Rick knew, though, that it was more complicated than that. “The worst thing loggers do is make roads,” he admitted. And that created access for commercial agriculture. We later spoke to one of Rick’s colleagues on this point. “Loggers don’t destroy the forest, but they open the door,” he said. “We are like high-class gangsters. We come into a museum, but we only steal the one multimillion-dollar painting. Then we leave the door open, and everyone else comes in after us, and they take everything. Even the lightbulbs.”

  Rick’s problem wasn’t with the fact of logging, but with how it was done. He couldn’t abide waste. Huge amounts of wood had been wasted to achieve economies of scale. “It was so cheap here for perfect logs. It was the same in Michigan a hundred years ago. You’d lose money if you touched anything but the filet,” he said, referring to the large, straight section at the bottom of the tree. The rest of the tree, from the lowest branch on up, was left to rot. “Billions and billions of board feet get wasted. I could build entire industries off the waste here, if I could just get access. It drives me crazy. I’ve been trying for years to see if I could get ahold of the tops left over by loggers—just their leftovers. And you can’t do it. It just rots. There are so many rules, it’s…” He grabbed his head. “It’s Brazil.” Sometimes entire forests were wasted. He had once visited a large bauxite mine nearby. Bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is derived, is big business now in the Amazon, and multinational companies cut down large tracts of forest to begin their open-pit mines.

  “They had these piles of logs,” Rick said. “They were prepping to bury them. It reminded me of pictures from Auschwitz. And can you get those logs? No.”

  He was so passionate about waste that he had started a Brazilian subsidiary based on it. The concept was to take leftover sawmill logs and use them to custom-build timber-frame houses, turning scrap into a luxury product. Rick nodded his head toward Tang, who had grown up nearby. “He’s been building boats since he was three years old. He’s one of the best timber framers in the world,” he said. “So the idea was to use all that local talent that’s here, and then use some resources that are being wasted. Not just turn the forest into a commodity.”

  He had called his local company Zero Impact Brazil. The lumberman was trying to turn over a new leaf. He admitted, though, that he had made most of his money on the commodity side: “For a while there, I was the largest buyer of forest products in Santarém.”

  Now that was all over. The housing boom had crashed, and the market for exotic flooring had gone with it. The entire timber industry had died back. Tang told us that over the last five years, two-thirds of the sawmills in the area had closed. Logging trucks had gotten scarce.

  I stared into my coffee cup. Let this be a lesson to you, I thought. Never wait to see a rainforest being logged out of existence, because one day you’ll wake up and it will be too late.

  “Yeah,” Rick said. “Lots of money got dumped in here from all over the world. Big investments. They come here with real big eyes.” And like so many others, they had gotten burned. “The typical business model in the Amazon,” he said, “is you go there with a lot of money—and you leave broke.”

  Now it was Rick’s turn. The timber frames weren’t selling. Zero Impact Brazil was surviving only by selling off its assets.

  We stood up to go, agreeing to talk again soon, to arrange a visit to Rick’s rainforest. We’d go down there and “goof around,” he said. He was insistent on that point—on the goofing around. Adam and I exchanged a glance. What did that mean, exactly?

  Rick also wanted to talk some more about the forest, about waste, about his company. “I wanna portray us as at least the guys who have got good intentions,” he said.

  Stoking a mild despondency about Brazil’s failure to keep up its end of the environmental-horror-story bargain, I turned for succor to the Catholic Church. Adam had uncovered an activist priest who promised to say inflammatory and pessimistic things about the Amazonian situation. He had made headlines overseas—the BBC called him “the Amazon’s most ardent protector”—and had a reputation as a fierce champion of the rainforest.

  Gil knew where to find him, of course. He knew everybody, perhaps because he spent his every spare moment on the tiny terrace of his house, greeting passersby, waving, hollering, gossiping. Walking around Santarém with him was like tagging along for a victory lap with a popular former mayor. Acquaintances and friends shouted from windows and sidewalks on every block.

  We went looking for Father Edilberto Sena not at his church but at the offices of his radio station, which says something about his approach to liberation theology. The station operated from a small, two-story building on a busy street up the hill from the river, and Sena used it to promote his activist causes, beginning with an e
ditorial broadcast every morning.

  From half a block away, Gil spotted him pulling into a parking spot, and we introduced ourselves on the sidewalk. He was a short man, youthfully sixtysomething, with a pugnacious smile and good English.

  As we walked toward the entrance of the radio station, two young women crossed our path. Sena stopped in his tracks and turned to us.

  “One problem of the Amazon…” he said. “Too many beautiful girls around.”

  Smiling, he laid a hand on his chest.

  “A poor priest suffers.”

  From a media relations point of view, this seemed like a questionable way for a priest to start in with a pair of visiting journalists. But it was part and parcel of Father Sena’s rebel persona, which he clearly held very dear. In his office, I asked him what he thought about the Brazilian government’s figures, which showed that deforestation had reached record lows.

  “Bullshit!” he cried, his face shining. He acknowledged that deforestation had diminished in 2010, but insisted that this wasn’t the whole story. “When you put it together with the deforestation of 2008, 2007…” He chopped his hand against the desk. “For the last eight years, we have a sum of 16 percent of the Amazonian forest destroyed.”

  I was feeling better already.

  Unfortunately, his figures were badly exaggerated. It had taken more like thirty years, not just eight, to destroy 16 percent of the Amazon. But that was beside the point. Deforestation was only part of the story, he said. “We ask, ‘Why are you, Mr. Government, continuing with huge projects of hydroelectrics in Amazonia?’ Government has a plan to build thirty-eight hydroelectrics in Amazonia.” There were even dams planned for the Tapajós. “I feel the contradiction from the government,” he said. “Saying they are fighting to stop deforestation, and at the same time they are planning to build hydroelectrics that will destroy rivers, forests, and the people.”