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

alone.

A plastic bottle ran under the boat.

I keyed the radio to report it to whoever was manning the debris log. But before I could, a sprinkling of confetti appeared on the water, and then another bottle. Then some more confetti, a piece of tarp, some other objects—a crescendo of trash that peaked within a few seconds. I looked out to starboard and saw us bisect what I thought was a stripe of garbage several meters wide that ran toward the horizon.

It wasn’t solid. No carpet of trash. But it was the densest, most localized stretch of debris I had seen all voyage. I called the wheelhouse on the radio and told them we had just crossed over a current line.

We didn’t stop. Nobody even called Where away? Who was in the wheel-house— the Pirate King? The captain? They had eyes only for San Diego. But I had just seen it: the Great White Stripe of Trash. I keyed the radio again, filling with rage. This was fucking stupid, I told them. I think we just crossed right over a current line.

The Kaisei motored on toward San Diego. I think Mary was in her cabin.

Five SOYMAGEDDON Deforestation in the Amazon

The smell of smoke, a plume rising by the road, and then we saw the flames. The forest was on fire. “Stop! Stop!” Gil cried, and Mango pulled over. Adam and I waded through the brush and emerged into a world of ash and cinder.

We were in the Amazon rainforest. The former Amazon rainforest, to be exact. The broad field where we stood was empty, freshly scorched to the ground. The air swirled with cinders. They mixed with sudden clouds of small, attacking insects. Where had they come from? Was there a species of bug driven to riot by the smell of smoke?

At the edge of the field, we found the fire crawling over what was left to burn. It reared up in brief flares, as tall as we were, then ducked its head back toward the ground. Adam started videotaping.

I turned back to the field, a monochrome square a hundred yards to a side. A single massive tree stood alone in the ruin. The ground was warm through my boots. In front of me, long bands of white crossed the ground, dividing, and dividing again, growing thin. They were the ghosts of trees. Felled and burning, they had turned to ash where they lay. Ashen branches sprouted from ashen trunks. I kicked one and it rose into the air, a white eddy circling on the hot breeze.

Everyone knows forests are good and deforestation is bad. Forests are habitat. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and forestall global warming. But not everyone knows that cutting them down and burning them not only releases carbon dioxide into the air but also creates local feedback loops that cause the forest to die back even further, meaning more habitat loss and more CO₂ emissions. The Amazon, at ten times the size of Texas, give or take a couple of Texases, has so much forest that to cut it back is to set off what some have termed a carbon bomb, with global consequences.

I had come to Brazil to see the burning fuse on that tremendous carbon bomb. There was only one catch: this probably wasn’t it. You could even argue that this blackened, boot-melting wasteland, with its phantom trees and prowling flames, was protecting the forest from something even worse. Here, near the joining of the Amazon and one of its greatest tributaries, the people standing in the way of the rainforest’s destruction sometimes looked a lot like they were cutting it down, or setting it on fire.

India was supposed to be next. India, with the Doctor, married, for our honeymoon. But the Doctor had met me on the wharf when the Kaisei made San Diego, and called it off. A chasm opened in the ground and swallowed the world. It wasn’t me, she said. But still. No wedding. No marriage. My life evaporated in a single afternoon.

I took it hard. The global environment, formerly such a candy store of problems, now lost its appeal. Even climate change and mass extinction seemed pretty minor next to the growing monument of my heartache. Yet books must be written. Who would take up the gospel of pollution tourism if I let it drop? I ditched India for the meantime and made for the Amazon, a fugitive from my own despair.

My friend Adam came with me. Or maybe I should say that I went with him. Ostensibly he was coming so we could shoot a television news piece in Brazil. We had collaborated on that kind of work before. But I also suspected that, unlike me, Adam wanted to go to Brazil. He may have thought, too, that I could use a little support. Left to my own devices, I might spend the entire Amazon trip in a hotel room, under a mosquito net, watching whatever passes for cable TV down there.

Friends—they’re always trying to encourage you, and to convince you that you’re not incompetent and unlovable and doomed to failure. Why can’t they just butt out? On the other hand, with Adam on board, I could renounce all the detailed background research that I was going to blow off anyway. What was I going to do—crack open the Amazon with a week’s googling? Screw that.

Originally, the Brazil trip was going to be about beef. Cattle ranching has long been a major driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Surely there was some friendly rancher out there who would give us the inside scoop on how virgin rainforest gets turned into hamburgers. Just think of the steaks we would eat.

But then we found out about soy. That’s where the action was, we read (Adam read). Soy farmers were leveling great stretches of forest so they could sell animal feed to Europe. We ditched the ranching idea and chose Santarem as our destination. The city is the site of a controversial export terminal built by the multinational company Cargill to bring soybeans out of the Amazon. Near Santarem, we would be able to see it all: unblemished jungle, jungle being cut back, soy fields, and the terminal itself, a cruel agribusiness dagger thrust directly into the pulsing, green heart of the world. At least, this was my fervent hope.

With research outsourced to Adam, it fell to me to direct field operations. I put together a reporting plan.

1) Buy airline ticket (IMPORTANT).

2) Fly to Brazil.

3) Exit airplane.

4) Exit airport.

5) Find taxi.

6) Ask taxi driver to take us to the Amazon, preferably the part on fire.

This was a plan I could handle, especially once Adam—seeing I had no intention of addressing Action Item No. 1—went ahead and bought our plane tickets himself. (I still haven’t paid him back.)

Then, as if to punish me for it, he shows up in my office wearing a green visor and waving a sheaf of papers, and gets all NEWSFLASH on me. The Brazilian government had just announced record- low rates of deforestation for 2010. The lowest rates of deforestation ever recorded.

Those bastards. Here I was, about to drag my ass to Brazil to go adventuring through a jungle-clearing orgy of absolutely first-rate proportions, and up pops President Lula to tell me that deforestation is more or less solved. It was disgusting. Since when? Wasn’t deforestation like death and taxes? I’d been hearing about the inexorable destruction of the rainforests since I was a child. Now that, too, would be taken away from me?

It didn’t matter. We had our tickets. And so we turned to the traveler’s customary scramble of last-minute chores: suddenly you have a critical need for magnetic bug-proof socks, and a polarized hat, and a million other little purchases to help you convince yourself that you actually want to go on the trip.

While Adam spent his last few evenings researching deforestation patterns and Brazilian environmental policy, I screwed around on the Internet, disconsolately hoping for something to spur my curiosity. Somehow, I stumbled across an advertisement for some real estate near Santarem: