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

by his house were the most beautiful girls in the world. “You’re going to love the girls here,” he said. “They’re amazing.” Concerned that he would start making introductions, we hastened to let him know that we both had girlfriends. Somehow, even for me, this remained true. For reasons unclear, I still lived with the Doctor.

It was dark. The park had filled with young couples, and families, and bands of teenagers. Children tumbled through the playground. A soccer game scuffled on the basketball court. Gil had turned philosophical. He felt so lucky to be alive, he told us. His sense of gratitude was oddly specific, though. He was grateful, first, for his carbon fiber windsurfing board. This was an amazing piece of technology.

“My first board weighed a ton, but this one is only like ten or fifteen kilos,” he said. “I’m so grateful for that. And I’m so grateful that I’m forty-six and can get lots of little blue pills that can give me an incredible erection.”

Adam choked on his beer.

“Not Viagra, man,” Gil continued. “Viagra will give you a big erection, but it will make it very wide, you know.” He gestured. “Very wide. But these little blue pills, I get them right around the corner. They cost like nothing. You take one of these pills, you will have a serious erection. You haven’t taken those pills?”

We confirmed that we had not.

“So those are the two things I’m so grateful for at this time, that I can have in my life,” he said.

“Carbon fiber and little blue pills,” I listed, by way of a recap.

“That’s right,” Gil said, holding two fingers up. His eyes widened with realization. “There’s not a third thing! AAAGGHH!”

We took off. We had hardly rested since New York. “Don’t go!” Gil cried. But then he relented and walked us to our hotel, two blocks away. He had decided to go around the corner for a blue pill.

“I’m going to have some serious sex tonight,” he said. “Thank you for this wonderful day!”

Highway BR-163 begins in Cuiaba, at the southern end of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, and runs north for more than a thousand miles, plunging directly through the Amazon. Built in the early 1970s, it is still mostly unpaved where it passes through the jungle, and during the rainy season it becomes a river of mud. Trucks founder in its legendary ruts and potholes, their progress slowed to less than a hundred miles a day. BR-163, it would be fair to say, is one of the world’s crappiest major roads.

It has the distinction, however, of being one of only two roads that traverse the Amazon from north to south. As the Economist put it, BR-163 joins “the ‘world’s breadbasket’ to the ‘world’s lungs.’” It links Mato Grosso—the agricultural powerhouse that has made Brazil the world’s second-largest soy producer, after the United States—to the forested expanses of Para. As such, the highway is a focus not only of commerce but also of some serious environmental anxiety. As Gil had pointed out to me, roads bring deforestation. You only cut down forests you can reach, and only turn jungles into ranches and farms if you have a way to carry off the beef and soy.

Once there is a road—even a crappy one—civilization begins to course along it, pushing out into the bordering forest. Humans like to think of themselves as builders and conquerors, but their presence spreads more like a vine, sending out tendrils, building a network, growing into the gaps until it forms a smothering blanket. Satellite images show that by the time it reaches the Tapajos River, BR-163 is sprouting cleared land in dense, perpendicular gashes, each a dozen miles long, like the teeth of a giant rake.

The road terminates, finally, in Santarem, at the western end of the waterfront. And it is here, not a hundred yards from where BR-163 runs out of places to go, that Cargill Incorporated of Minnetonka, Minnesota, built its soy terminal.

The terminal is Santarem’s most conspicuous structure, a metal barn that stretches several hundred feet, with a huge Cargill logo on one side. A grain conveyor more than a thousand feet long extends from the northern end of the building to a tanker dock in the river. On the day we cruised past it, on a riverboat rented from a friend of Gil’s, we saw a bulk carrier receiving its cargo, beans pouring out of massive downspouts, and plumes of soy dust floating out of the ship’s compartments. Docked at the next moorage upriver was a Holland America cruise ship, a little smaller than the soy ship, and blinding with its bright wall of cabins. Next in line, smaller still, was a timber transport waiting for the cruise ship to vacate the dock so it could resume loading containers of wood. At a single glance, we could see the comings and goings of three major Amazonian industries: soy, tourists, and timber.

Construction of the Santarem terminal began in 1999 and was finished in 2003, even though Cargill had failed to do the necessary environmental impact study—a fact that resulted in the terminal being declared illegal by the Brazilian courts multiple times. Nevertheless, it opened.

For Cargill—the largest privately held corporation in the United States—building the terminal was a strategic move that allowed soybeans to get to market faster and more cheaply than before. Soy from Mato Grosso could be shipped north by river or trucked along BR-163. At the Santarem terminal, the soy could then be offloaded and stored before being shipped directly to Europe via the Amazon River. The fact of the terminal would therefore be a further incentive for the Brazilian government to pave the rest of BR-163. And that would mean yet another launching pad for assaults on the rainforest. (Paving a thousand-mile-long highway through the jungle, though, is easier said than done. As of 2012, it is still unfinished.)

There was incentive, too, for any farmer in Mato Grosso who cared to do the math. Why bother sending only your crop to the Cargill terminal when you could send the entire farm? Land was cheap around Santarem, and a soy farm built close to the Cargill terminal would save on both land and transportation costs.

Farmers flooded north. By 2004, a year after the terminal opened, cultivation of soy in the area had jumped to 35,000 hectares (about 85,000 acres, and a five-year increase of more than 2,000 percent) and land prices had shot up by a factor of thirty. Local farmers were under ever-increasing pressure to sell their land to the soy farmers. Soon, soy was being touted as rainforest enemy number one, and Greenpeace activists were crawling over the Cargill terminal building—in much the same way as they had crawled over the machinery of the oil sands mines— and demonstrators in the UK were showing up at McDonald’s dressed as chickens to protest the use of Brazilian soy as chicken feed. The soy rush was on.

The highway in the dark. BR-163. The kilometers ticked by. This close to Santarem, the road was paved and free of potholes. Our driver sped south with abandon. He was a cheery, hulking man whose nickname translated as “Mango.”

Locations on the road south of Santarem are found not by signs or named roads but by their kilometer number. We were headed for a turnoff somewhere in the low 70s. There, we would meet some people who spent their days ripping trees out of the rainforest. It was all perfectly legal, though—part of a sustainable logging project, and nothing to get upset about, unfortunately.

Dawn brightened by increments behind the tinted windows of Mango’s car. We saw where we were. The rainforest. Right! After a couple of days in Santarem, a morose foreigner could almost forget that he had come here to see the jungle, to walk around inside the vast hydrological pump that is the Amazon, which lifts and distributes an ocean’s worth of water across the Americas, shaping and driving weather patterns around the continent. Now, the Amazon canopy flew past, mist rising among the treetops. On the right, at the boundary of the Tapajos National Forest, trees approached to the edge of the road. Gil squinted through his window, looking for kilometer markers. On the left, the vista modulated between forest and rangeland—and then would fall away into the flat blankness of a soy field: mile-long rectangles of bare earth, stretching away to a residual wall of forest in the distance.

We reached the logging camp at around seven in the morning. The loggers were meeting in a bare, wooden room in the main building. Men and women in hard hats and work clothes stood in a circle and made announcements. There was laughter and applause. They joined hands and said a prayer. Then we went out and got into the back of a large, covered truck and bounced and shuddered down a rutted dirt road in the direction of the Tapajos River, into the heart of the national forest. We were riding with the Ambe project.

The idea of logging in a protected forest is probably abhorrent to most people, at least those who aren’t loggers. After all, what’s protected supposed to mean? Here in the Tapajos, though, a collective of people who live on the margin of the forest have been allowed a “sustainable” logging concession. The idea is that this will offer them alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture and illegal logging, and provide economic development and improve living standards in the community without severely degrading the forest.

The key is that the people making money off the forest are the ones who call it home. Once they are living off