Soon the social fabric was in tatters. At the international airport, bandits raided planes. Vendors peddled phony medications, and the police connived as the drug trade boomed. Even for the wealthy, life was difficult. Those with cars found that it took them three hours to drive across chaotic Lagos, so they carried potties in their cars. It is said that murderers found it easy to kill one of Nigeria’s heads of state because every morning at the same time, eight A.M., his car got stuck in traffic. Faced with all their country’s problems, Nigerians wrote books with titles such as Crippled Giant, We Are All Guilty, Another Hope Betrayed, Nigeria: A Republic in Ruins, The Trouble with Nigeria, and Always a Loser — A Novel about Nigeria.
As the new millennium began, the world’s sixth largest oil producer was now its thirteenth poorest nation. Nigerians were living worse than their grandparents had.
IN 1979 a new disease appeared that smashed the lives of rich and poor around the world, but especially the poor.
Doctors in the developed world first observed its symptoms in their gay male patients. Some of them were falling ill from what normally were quickly cured infections. The patients’ bodies simply couldn’t cope, and if a drug could wipe out one infection, another soon showed up. Patients often shrank to skin and bones and lost their minds, and in a year or two they died.
The new disease of course was AIDS — acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Searchers later found the cause of AIDS. When a deadly virus known as HIV invades the bloodstream (mainly during sex, during birth, or on a tainted needle), it enters certain cells whose job it is to guard us from the germs that cause disease. The virus turns these T-cells into factories that, far from fighting germs, turn out many copies of the lethal virus. After years the viruses cause full-blown AIDS.
Although the origin of HIV is still unknown, it almost certainly began in Africa. The first proven AIDS death occurred in the Congo in 1959. One current view is that before invading humans the virus was widespread in animals, maybe chimpanzees. From them (some think) it jumped to humans, but this may have happened long ago, and only in remote and isolated places. In recent times, however, when roads were built and commerce spread, infected villagers from such places may have come in contact with the people of the towns and cities. Perhaps in this way rare HIV infections became a full-fledged epidemic.
From Africa the virus spread around the world, with many people helping it to multiply. Here is an example from the early 1980s, when AIDS was still quite rare. AIDS investigators learned about an infected airline flight attendant, a homosexual man. They pointed out to him that he put all his sexual partners in danger. Nevertheless, he kept on having unprotected sex with perhaps 250 partners every year, in many cities, until his early death.
AIDS was above all a disease of the poor. At the start of the 2000s, about 36 million humans carried HIV or had advanced to full-blown AIDS. Of these, however, 70 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest region on the globe. One person out of four was infected, and life expectancy had dropped by twenty years. In Nigeria, which was suffering enough already from government incompetence, 2.5 million people were infected. Colleges in Zambia were graduating 300 new teachers each year, but meanwhile AIDS was killing twice that many teachers.
Many other victims were in Asia, which holds three-fifths of the world’s poor. In the 1990s Asia had the steepest-rising curve of HIV infections. As they did in Africa, poverty and ignorance and governmental unconcern all played a role in spreading HIV and AIDS. For example, in a town in China many people earned some extra money by selling their blood. Apparently, one of them was HIV-positive. Unsupervised technicians mixed the blood of all these donors and extracted from it substances they needed. Then they reinjected all the donors with the no-longer-needed blood. In no time, everyone was positive for HIV.
GROWTH AND GLOBALIZATION helped many to prosper, but they also pushed the world toward sameness. This is how it happened. Throughout the world, the goods produced by booming nations entered local markets, and there they shaped a new consumer culture beside the local ones, or in their places. Before globalization, one found in Japan foods that were Japanese, such as sushi. (These are cakes of cold rice, flavored with vinegar and garnished with raw or cooked fish, egg, or vegetables.) But when McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken arrived, the Japanese acquired the fast-food habit and, to some extent, abandoned sushi.
In France in 1999 police arrested the leader of an anti-globalization crusade when he trashed a McDonald’s restaurant. He proclaimed before the trial that “the French people…are with us in this fight against junk food and globalization.” In fact, McDonald’s then had about 900 restaurants in France and was adding 30 to 40 new ones every year. The French, who gave the world the words gourmet and haute cuisine, were abandoning their gastronomic glory. (The judge sentenced the McDonald’s trasher to ninety days in jail.)
Isolated regions of the world had once had languages and cultures known to no one else. (Keep in mind that languages and cultures overlap, since sometimes only certain words can express certain ideas.) Peoples of these isolated places had unique creation stories, foods and customs, folk arts, epic tales, and songs.
But all of these were doomed. Investors, tourists, missionaries, tax officials, radios, and asphalt reached the solitary hamlets, bringing in new tongues, new ways. The younger villagers adapted, often gladly. Soon no one but the oldsters spoke the former language, knew the former ways, or even cared about the loss. When the old folk passed away, their language and their culture also died.
The peoples in a zone of east Peru used to speak at least 100 languages, perhaps 150. But by the beginning of the 2000s, these tongues had mostly disappeared. This is how the change took place in Pampa Hermosa, a group of thatch-roofed huts beside a lake. Its people spoke a tongue called Chamicuro and knew nothing of the outside world. They had no telephones, no radios, no roads. But missionaries came and told them they must speak and write in Spanish. And radios, run on batteries, arrived, bringing Spanish talk and Spanish songs from far away. And so the younger people learned a new language and new ways. Finally, Natalia Sangama, very old, found herself the last person on earth who knew her native tongue. “I dream in Chamicuro,” she said, “but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone. Some things cannot be said in Spanish. It’s lonely being last.”
In a Chinese mountain valley, below a snow-capped sacred peak, are the Naxi (nah-shee) people, a quarter million of them. For a thousand years they had their own religion and a picture-writing system. Costumed priests called dongba danced, led the sacrifices to the wind, and chanted from their scriptures, which taught the Naxi people everything they knew. In the 1950s China’s communist regime suppressed the dongba. Later on, the ancient rites revived, but then they disappeared again as younger Naxi turned to modern things.
In 1981, a group of ten surviving dongba, all of them old men, began a labor of culture rescue. They wanted to produce a 100-volume publication of their scriptures, with pictographs, phonetic spellings, and literal translations in Chinese. They completed this great task. But it turned out that to grasp the meaning of the ancient stories it’s not enough to know the literal meanings of the pictographs. They’re complex, intuitive, and full of symbols. Only dongba understand the stories. By the year 2000 only three of them were still alive.
The English language has encouraged culture deaths. We know how English spread throughout the world. In earlier centuries, the British stamped the English language firmly on the British Isles, Australia, and North America, and they also used it in their other colonies. (India has sixteen major tongues, but even now, when India has been independent half a century, its educated people often interact in English.) In later times, the English language conquered global business, movies, television, airports, and computer-speak. Other languages gave way, and with them — here’s the point — other cultures, other points of view.
The death of independent cultures has been happening almost everywhere. When villagers started he
aring city voices on their radios, when missionaries spread the word of God, when cell phones reached the jungles, when television brought the World Cup matches to the Arctic Circle, when terrorists who hated western ways wore jeans and running shoes, when billions used the World Wide Web, when the French ate fries ’n’ burgers, then what was only local vanished. Cultures crumbled, disappeared.
When many cultures die and only one replaces them, the world becomes a duller place.
IN THE FINAL decades of the 1900s, thoughtful people worried that earth’s multiplying humans might use up resources vital to existence. How long, they asked, could so many humans shelter, feed, and clothe themselves?
In 1972, a multinational team of experts published a report they called The Limits to Growth. They warned that humans must stop using up their water, timber, land, and fuel. Unless they did, humanity would reach the “limits of the earth,” then wither and collapse. In some parts of the world, they claimed, this already was happening. The price of food was out of reach for many, and they were starving.
About a year after The Limits to Growth gave this warning, the danger that the earth might reach its limits began to look more real. As we saw above (regarding Nigeria), the world went through a crisis over oil. Many countries, especially the wealthy ones, relied on large amounts of oil to fuel their generators, cars, and air conditioners, and as raw material for plastics, soap, and fertilizer. Ample oil still lay below the ground, but the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries knew that demand was strong and the oil wouldn’t last forever. Step by step OPEC raised the worldwide price of oil tenfold.
The sharply higher prices were a shock. They hit the wealthy nations hard and the poor ones even harder. (For them, any rise in the cost of a basic need like fuel was catastrophic.) As it happened, though, the higher prices didn’t last. Customers reduced their use of oil, and as demand declined, OPEC’s prices fell.
Of course, the crisis caused by oil was artificial. It had not confirmed that we were near “the limits of the earth.” Just the same, it did remind the world that earth’s supplies of things we need do have their limits. Some day, maybe soon, these things could disappear.
And we were increasingly aware that what we needed wasn’t only land and air and water. We also needed other species — animals and plants — that enhanced our lives. To some extent at least they had a right to live. Our growing numbers and (much more) our reckless passion to consume were threats to them. Just as earth might fail us humans, we were failing earth.
Amazonia was a growing worry. The Amazon jungle reaches across the shoulders of South America. It stretches from the tree line of the Andes on the west almost to the Atlantic Ocean. The forest belongs in part to other countries, but mostly to Brazil.
A thousand rivers journey through the forest. From the air the forest is a bright green carpet, crossed with lines of blue. In the rainy months the rivers swell and make the forest one enormous, island-dotted lake. These rivers, ten of which are bigger than the Mississippi, join to form the Amazon, the biggest river in the world. Along with all its feeders, it moves a fifth of all the world’s fresh water.
The three main groups involved in Amazonia’s story in the 1960s scarcely knew each other. Most of those who ruled Brazil were wealthy whites whose fortunes had been made in rubber, timber, gems, and coffee. They lived in cities on the coast, along with other whites and also Indians, blacks, and the multiracial “Caboclos.” The second group were the Caboclos on the edges of the endless forest, far away from cities. Nearly all of them were wretched peasants who lived (and live today) in one-room huts on bluffs above the rivers. They fished, and raised cassava in their gardens.
Deep inside the forest were the Indians, who had lived there many thousand years. Diseases of the whites were spreading through the jungle, killing many of them, and developers, who wanted gold and timber, slaughtered others. (They sometimes flew above a village, dropped some “gifts,” and when the Indians had gathered, bombed them.)
To Brazil’s white rulers on the coast, a thousand miles away, it was obvious that the forest had to go. Never mind that it had given greatly to Brazil and the world: rubber, timber, cassava, and drugs for cancer and malaria, or that it had much more to give. No, the time had come to master it.
To get electric power they built dams across some rivers, and to make the jungle easier to reach they pushed roads through it. One of these stretched 1,500 miles. State and federal governments encouraged global timber firms to cut the trees, and mining companies to dig up metal ores. Worst of all, perhaps, they told impoverished Caboclo peasants (in the zones around the vast forest) that Amazonia was theirs to occupy and farm.
At a thousand places, men with saws and matches poured into the virgin forest. Some had come to saw and sell the trees, and some to mine the gold, but most intended simply to clear some land and farm it. Perhaps they knew, perhaps they didn’t, that the jungle soil is thin and acid, and depends on rotted leaves and branches to enrich it. Once the trees are gone, the cycle breaks, and the soil turns barren. Little grows or ever will. The trees will not return.
Typically, the settlers cleared some trees by cutting them or setting fires. They raised beans and corn and cassava until the soil was poor, then cattle till the land was absolutely bare. They transformed giant swathes of forest into wasteland, and they did this fast. As photos taken from the air reveal, in the 1970s and ’80s alone burn-and-clearers ruined 10 percent of all the forest. They kept on burning in the years that followed, and in 1995 alone they razed an area the size of Belgium. Where the forest burned, nothing could be seen but smoke. The smoke blew east to Africa and south to Antarctica.
The loss of land and trees was not the only problem that the burning caused. Trees are sticks of carbon. They pull the carbon from the air around them, and if they burn, their stored-up carbon joins the air as carbon dioxide gas. Amazonia’s many million burning trees added carbon dioxide to the air, and once the trees were burned, of course, nothing was left to reabsorb it. In addition to all the other carbon dioxide that we humans add to air (by simply breathing and by burning fuels), the burning forest added more. It helped to make the atmosphere of earth act like a greenhouse. The gases in the sky (mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor) trap the heat of earth as the panes of glass in a greenhouse trap the heat of the sun. (We’ll have more to say below about the “greenhouse” problem.)
Far from troubled by the razing of the forest, Brazil’s politicos at first were pleased. The governor of Amazonia proposed “a chain saw for each family.” “I like trees and plants,” he said, “but they aren’t indispensable. After all, men [astronauts] have lived in space for almost a year without trees.”
In time, however, Brazil thought better of it, and it changed the laws. The government decreed how many acres a person was allowed to clear, and how many fires he might set within a day. But its officials did not enforce the laws. How could they, in forests so vast and wild? So the burn-and-clearers carried on.
For the Indians, the ancient people of the woods, the burning and the highway building brought doom. We can only guess how stunned the Indians were to see intruders, men with saws and matches, raze the jungle where they had always lived. In places, they resisted. At a place in the north where contractors were building a highway, local Indians killed two hundred soldiers (guards) with poisoned arrows. Other soldiers wiped out nearly all the Indians.
Once the settlers had burned their forests and occupied the land, Indians had two choices. Some of them might stay in place, as workers on the ravaged land or diggers in the gold fields. But others fell back deeper in the forest, where other Indians lived who hadn’t yet seen modern life. (Even now, perhaps three dozen tribes have never glimpsed outsiders.)
As their habitat has dwindled, and humans killed them, many plants and animals have disappeared. The jaguar, the only “big cat” in the two Americas, may go extinct. The alligator called the jacaré is slaughtered for its supple skin, used in shoes and purs
es. Certain monkeys are in danger: the woolly, the spider, the howler, and the bare-face tamarin. Likewise the pink porpoises that live far up the Amazon.
No one knows how many kinds of plants and beasts have perished, having lost the only habitats where they can live, and no one knows what fraction those vanished species were of all the species on the earth. Some believe the Amazon contains, or once contained, a tenth of all the species on the earth. In fact, however, no one knows how many kinds of microbes, insects, plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates exist on earth. Experts have described a million and a half, but they think the total may be anywhere from 5 to 30 million.
Many people, in Brazil and elsewhere, have campaigned to save the forest, and this struggle has had its saint and martyr. Chico Mendes was a rubber tapper in Amazonia’s far west. He made his living in the forest like many others, by slashing the bark of rubber trees and gathering the latex that oozed from the cuts. When he was eighteen, he met a labor organizer hiding from the police. This man showed Mendes something he had never seen, a newspaper, and taught him how to read and write.
In the 1970s, Brazil’s project to tame the Amazon drew immigrants to Mendes’s region. As was happening in other places, the newly settled ranchers and loggers brought in goons to terrorize the local people. They seized the forest that local people’s lives depended on (for rubber, food, and other uses) and started to destroy it. Mendes organized the local workers, and they set up human blockades around the threatened areas. The resulting standoffs rescued many thousand forest acres. Reserves were set aside, where local people still could tap the rubber and collect the fibers, fruit, and nuts.
The Human Story Page 42