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

by Andrew Blackwell

  Sena had brought the same defiant spirit to the fight against soy farming in the area. The organization he founded, called the Amazon Defense Front, had partnered with Greenpeace to protest the Cargill terminal. But the collaboration didn’t last.

  “Greenpeace was a very important ally from 2004 to 2006,” he said. “Then we stopped…Our styles were different. We went to the street, to make protest. Greenpeace went jumping on the roof of Cargill.” He laughed. “And filming, and showing to Europe and to the world that Greenpeace was here!”

  There were philosophical differences, too. “I am not an environmentalist!” he said, waving his finger in the air. “I am an Amazonianist. Because the Amazon is more than the environment. It is also the people.”

  He smiled the smile of a firebrand. “Greenpeace has money. But it doesn’t help much when you don’t have a holistic viewpoint. They defend the forest. They defend the animals. They forget that the environment includes the people that live here. That’s the difference. We defend our people.”

  It was the Ambé approach, applied to environmental politics. Without taking people into account—in your activism, in your national parks—something essential was missing. And Sena didn’t just mean indigenous people. He also included the small farmers who had been displaced by soy, and more than twenty million other people spread across the Amazon basin, whether in the countryside or in big cities like Manaus. They were all critical stakeholders.

  But there was at least one group that didn’t count.

  “Before 2000, we didn’t know the plant of soy,” Sena told us. But by 2001, soy farmers from Mato Grosso had started showing up. “They went with money and bought this land,” he said emphatically. “They didn’t come to live here. They came to cultivate here.”

  Newly arrived from the south, the soy farmers had not integrated well, not least because their mechanized farms offered few jobs for the people of Pará. The locals took to calling the soy farmers soyeros, a play on the Portuguese word for dirty.

  “Soyeros don’t like it when we call them that,” Father Sena said. “But they are dirty. They didn’t come here to join us, but just to suck the possibilities of this land.”

  Call it the Sena Doctrine. People are an indispensable part of the environment—unless they’re dirty bastards.

  We trundled down BR-163 in Mango’s car again, to about kilometer 45, where we met Nestor, a small-time farmer who had survived the soy fever and kept his farm. Nestor sold us beers and, together with his son, took us on a walking tour of his manioc fields. “There were many people living here who owned small farms,” he said. But in the first five years of the decade, buyers from the south had swarmed in, bidding up land prices. Most people had taken the money. “They sold the land, and the tractors came and finished with it all.” A nearby village called Paca had been wiped completely off the map to make way for soybeans. Even the Pentecostal church in the village had sold out and moved. “They sold it all,” said Nestor’s son, laughing. “They brought down the church to plant soybeans. You can’t even tell there was a church there.”

  Nestor blamed the local politicians who he said had brought Cargill in: “The government brought these people to bring progress. And maybe it did. But it also brought bad things…People saw the money and thought it would never end. One person would sell, and that would inspire the next person to do the same.”

  It sounded like a frenzy, I said. Gil translated, using the word locura, for “madness.” Nestor and his son nodded vigorously. “Era,” they said. It was. Along this stretch of highway, Nestor told us, only he and his brother had kept their plots of land intact. Everyone else had sold at least part.

  The frenzy had changed the local environment, in ways both subtle and obvious. We met multiple farmers who complained about the chemicals that neighboring soy farms used on their crop, and about how the soy monoculture had increased the burden of pests on small farms nearby. “There are a lot of diseases in their fields,” one man said of the soy farmers. “I plant rice and I get nothing. If I plant beans, the insects eat it all. We can’t harvest anything.” He claimed that the soy farmers were able to thrive only because of all the fertilizers they used.

  He said, too, that such large, open tracts of land changed the winds and the temperature around them, and that the simple absence of shade made life harder. Where once they had walked great distances in a day’s work, the wide expanses of the soy farms meant less protection from the punishing Brazilian sun—and thus less walking.

  We asked Nestor why he hadn’t sold. Buyers had been offering big money. He said that wasn’t important. He didn’t like money.

  “If you don’t like money,” I said, “then we won’t bother paying for the beers.”

  He laughed. “We like a little money.”

  Now the ones who had sold their land and moved to Santarém regretted it, he said. They wanted to come back. Another small farmer down the road told us the same. “Many think that when they move to town, the money they got will never run out,” he said. “They go to town, buy a house, a TV set, a refrigerator. But they never got an education, so they can’t get a job. When the money runs out and they have no means to work, they regret selling the land.”

  We never stopped hearing about the families who regretted selling—from Nestor, from other farmers, from Father Sena. Here, people worried less about soy’s effects on the forest than about its effects on their society, about the ways it had impoverished the people who had sold their farms.

  “Now they are after a small plot of land and can’t find one,” Nestor said. “Their daughters became prostitutes. Their sons became glue-sniffers.”

  Gil said it was the same as when his grandfather had been bought out of his home in the Tapajós National Forest. “They ran out of money right away. It happened to most of my uncles.”

  Another interesting thing about Nestor was that his farm was on fire.

  Much of our conversation took place in the middle of a smoldering field, similar to the one in which I would later melt the soles of my boots, staring at those ghostly, tree-shaped piles of ash. The fire was the reason we had stopped to talk to Nestor in the first place. I was here to see some deforestation, dammit, and if a field of slashed-and-burning trees wasn’t deforestation, then I didn’t know what deforestation was.

  Turns out I didn’t. In the Amazon, deforestation is a dispiritingly messy subject to unpack. Even Adam found the topic surprisingly opaque once he got down to the nitty-gritty of it for me. The main theme of any in-depth article about deforestation in Brazil, he once told me, ought to be how frustrating it is just trying to figure out what counts.

  Take Nestor’s case. You would think a charred stump is a charred stump, but not so. Nestor was just rotating his crops. Slash and burn has a scary ring to it, but around here slashing and burning is often part of a farmer’s yearly routine. The piece of land Nestor was burning had already been cultivated multiple times. He would grow a crop of manioc—a root vegetable known elsewhere as cassava or yuca—and then leave the field to become overgrown with trees and brush while it lay fallow.

  Now, several years later, he was going to cultivate it again. To prepare it, he had cut down the new growth, let it dry for a few weeks, and was burning it off. From a carbon point of view, his footprint was neutral: the CO2 going into the air on the day we visited was CO2 that had been sucked out of the air by this vegetation over the course of the past five years or so. True, there was a carbon debt—and habitat loss—from the original establishment of his farm, but that had been decades ago.

  The real argument is over what drives new deforestation. And it’s not as simple as who’s holding the chainsaw. A person cutting down trees might be there because of government incentives to encourage the settlement of “undeveloped” areas. A soy farmer may only have come north because land was too expensive in his home state—or because an American buyer like Cargill has set up shop in Pará. All sorts of things can prompt deforestation at a distance
. A soy farmer using previously cultivated land could argue that he isn’t destroying the Amazon. But what if the small farmer who sold him that land goes off to clear new land somewhere else? To whom do you attribute the destruction?

  Even if you can answer that question, you are then confronted with the situation that once an area of rainforest is settled, the settlers themselves become the de facto caretakers of whatever is left. Landowners in Brazil are subject to a unique forest law that obligates them to leave 80 percent of their land in native forest. Even giant soy farms aren’t allowed to clear more than 20 percent of their land. (The farming lobby is trying to change this law.) If the law were effective, it would mean that anyone who cut down twenty hectares of jungle would end up being responsible for protecting another eighty.

  It’s hard to imagine a muddier picture. Decades ago, when Nestor first set up his farm, he might accurately have been characterized as the face of deforestation—sucking the possibilities of the land, as Father Sena would say. But now Nestor was a local stakeholder whose livelihood as a farmer depended on resisting the waves of development that followed him. His permanence on the land had earned him a place under the Sena Doctrine. But wouldn’t that happen to anyone who stayed long enough?

  Come back in thirty years. Maybe there will be a proud soyero making a stand, refusing to sell his farm for the construction of a mega-mall next to the Tapajós National Forest, and we’ll call him a defender of the Amazon.

  “I don’t know what you do around here after dark,” Rick said. “I don’t drink. I guess if you drink, if you like to party, you can go to a bar and visit with people.”

  Adam and I had bumped into him in the park across from our hotel and invited him to eat dinner with us. At an outdoor restaurant across from the waterfront, we sat on plastic patio furniture and ate steak and chicken, and Rick pressed on us once again the need to visit his forest. “We can swim, we can goof around,” he said.

  Rick had first come to Brazil twenty-five years earlier, seized by the idea of importing wood directly from Brazilian suppliers. In an era before e-mail or widespread fax machines, finding those suppliers had meant coming down in person. So that’s what he did, wandering from city to city through the Amazon, knocking on sawmill doors, even though he spoke no Portuguese. (Twenty-five years later, he still didn’t.)

  It hadn’t taken long for the sawmill operators to figure out that, although he “looked like a hippie,” as he put it, Rick wasn’t there to protest, or to chain himself to a tree. He wanted to buy trees.

  It made him his fortune. He became a major exporter of wood from Santarém. He told us that for several years in the 1990s, he was the biggest customer of Cemex—at the time, the largest logging company in Santarém. The world’s appetite for exotic lumber had been one of the forces sending tendrils of destruction into the rainforest, and Rick had cut out the middlemen, and fed it.

  Yet he seemed less a businessman than a searcher of some kind. Whether it was the experience of seeing his business die back, or something else, he had been humbled.

  He showed us a photograph of the river on his phone. Underneath the distant sliver of a kitesurfing kite, a tiny figure rode the surface of the water.

  “That’s me,” he said.

  He put his phone away. “You know how some people say that when you’re surfing, you connect with the water, or whatever?” he asked. “I can kind of relate to that now. When you’re kitesurfing, you’re really in touch with the environment. You’ve got the water, and the waves, and also the wind. You finally relax, and stop trying to control it. You stop fearing it.”

  He laughed at himself. He was a gruff chisel of a man. Adam and I sat and listened. Over our shoulders, the Amazon and the Tapajós mixed and flowed, invisible in the dark.

  “I don’t know what you’d call that,” Rick said. “Something like a religious experience.”

  We went to find the soyeros, those dirty bastards from the south.

  “I found out land was cheap in Pará,” said Luiz. “It was the only place I could afford it. So we came here to buy a plot of land and own it. That’s why we’re here.”

  Luiz was a short man in his early sixties, with watery eyes and an uncertain gait. He was a soy farmer, with three hundred hectares under the plow, just up the highway from Nestor’s land. He was also, to my eye, drunk.

  “Would you have moved here if the Cargill port wasn’t here?” Adam asked.

  Luiz frowned and shook his head as Gil translated. “What would I do here?” He had come for the same reason as the other soy farmers. He had realized that while the price of soy would be the same in Pará as in Mato Grosso, the cost of transport would be much less.

  “We only came here because of Cargill,” he said. “Not that Cargill went to Mato Grosso and called us. But we watch the news.”

  We walked along the edge of his field, deep and crumbly with muddy earth, to the barn where he kept his combine. Luiz plunged his forearm into a sack of grain and pulled out a handful of dry soybeans, his balance wavering as he held it up for us to see. “Soybeans are dollars,” he said.

  Luiz could see me staring at the combine, a tall, old machine with green sides. He swung up the ladder to the driver’s perch, and soon the machine rumbled to life, its rows of harvesting blades gnashing and turning. He turned it off and I climbed up to the steering wheel. I peered out at the soy field in front of me, and imagined rumbling through it on the combine at harvest time.

  Things hadn’t worked out perfectly for the soyeros. The value of Luiz’s land had crashed by 60 percent since he’d bought it. Even worse, when he’d bought it, he hadn’t known he wouldn’t be able to clear off all the trees.

  “The environmentalists” He spat the word. Ambientalistas. “They came with these laws, and it was forbidden to clear more than 20 percent of the area.” He had been forced to lease additional land in order to grow a large-enough crop. It made no sense to him. This was rich, flat land. It ought to be cultivated. And the forest on his land wasn’t even virgin forest, he said. There were no good hardwoods left on it, no monkeys, no fruit. The law ought to be that if you’re going to protect a forest, it’s a real forest.

  But that wasn’t how it worked. “For the environmentalists, the farmers of Pará are criminals, some sort of thug,” he said, and laughed. “They’d be more hurt to see a smashed tree than a dead farmer.”

  It wasn’t just the environmentalists either. Although religious, Luiz had stopped going to church. “I stopped going because I would feel angry,” he said. He knew what people like Father Sena called him. He just didn’t understand why. “The priests attack us, but we’re not criminals. We’re not harming anyone’s lives.”

  We left. In the car, speeding back toward Santarém, Mango laughed. He couldn’t believe Luiz hadn’t known why people hated the soyeros around here.

  I’ll tell you why they hate you, Mango said. It’s because you’re cutting down the forest, you asshole!

  First there is a toucan on a branch, minding its business. The sound of synthesizers. Then a magnificent tree, rising skyward behind the toucan. There are shafts of sunlight. Look how they filter down, extra Amazon-y.

  Then, grinding through the vegetation—a bulldozer. It crashes toward us, a mechanized demon in the Garden of Eden. Closer and closer it comes, filling the screen. The image fades, and now we see the results: a wasteland of burning stumps and blackened earth. The sky is orange with smoke and flame. It’s the image Rick complained about: that loggers just nuke the place.

  And then, among the devastation, a lonely figure. Head downcast, clothes scorched and torn, he wanders the destroyed forest. Who is this desolate stranger, this angel of grief lost in a nightmare of deforestation?

  It’s Michael Jackson. Obviously. And he is here to ask penetrating questions about the environment: “What about sunrise?” he sings. “What about rain? What about all the things that you said we were to gain?”

  Sales of Earth Song were a little weak in the
United States, but in Britain it was Michael’s most successful song ever, hitting No. 1 for six weeks over the 1995-96 holiday season. And it has the best environmental music video of all time, meaning it’s totally wretched.

  Soon we see sad-faced African bushpeople staring woefully at a murdered elephant; and sad-faced Amazonians in traditional undress, watching helplessly as trees fall in the rainforest. There are also some sad-faced Croatians thrown in for good measure. It was the nineties, after all.

  Michael falls to his knees, pounding the earth with his fists. Then the Amazonians, the Africans, and the Croatians fall to their knees and begin pawing at the ground. Soon, everyone is grinding their fingers through the soil, shaking fistfuls of dirt at the sky.

  A mighty wind begins to blow. (They actually show the planet from space, engulfed by the mighty wind.) Michael is now in full Christ mode, standing with arms outstretched, holding on to two twisted tree trunks to keep from being blown away by the righteous hurricane he has summoned. And then—wait for it—time begins to run backward. In Africa, the elephant resprouts its tusks and hops up, newly unmurdered. Michael Jackson and the downtrodden peoples of the Earth are undoing all the damage. All hell unbreaks loose. “Where did we go wrong?” he screams. “Someone tell me why!” The meaningless lyrics are paired with images of meaningless fantasy. Smokestacks suck their own filth out of the sky. In the Amazon, two local lumberjacks look on in astonishment as their work is undone, a massive tree lifting magically into the air and rejoining its stump. We cut to a close-up of a logger’s awestruck face and see—

  It’s Gil.

  We paused the video. On the screen, video-Gil stared up at the magic un-logged tree. Next to the computer, real-life Gil stood with a gleeful I-told-you-so look on his face.

  “AAAGGHH!” he screamed.

  All week, he had been spinning his story about having been in a Michael Jackson video, but we had never considered the possibility that it was actually true. Finally I had called his bluff—and there he was, on YouTube, intercut with the King of Pop’s righteous convulsions. The young Gil Serique, son of the Tapajós, with more than ten million views.