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

it, they become critical stakeholders in its preservation; the community can only be sustained by the forest so long as the forest continues to exist. Suddenly it isn’t just a few napping forest wardens who stand between the jungle and an army of illegal loggers and rule-bending soy farmers. The forces of not in my backyard are hitched to the cause of preservation.

The air changed as we entered the forest, becoming suddenly rich and earthy, the heat of the day eased by moisture and shade. The truck dropped us off and drove away, leaving us to follow a small survey crew on its morning rounds. I listened to the jungle: squeaks and whoops, squawks and trills, sounds that must have been coming from a bird or an insect but that sounded like someone blowing across the mouth of a bottle. Cascades of insect noise, almost electronic. Calls and responses. Sounds that were weirdly familiar—that I had heard before in movies and museum exhibits. The soundscape makes the jungle.

The survey crew went about its work. I tagged along behind a cheerful man with a machete, doing my best to stay out of the swinging whirlwind of his blade.

I wondered why I was sweating so much. In the deep shade of the canopy, it wasn’t even hot—yet I sweated. Never in my life, not even in moments of optimal gym-nirvana, had I sweated like this. My shirt was soaked. My hair was soaked. My arms were soaked. I could not have been more drenched by a sudden downpour. The very hard hat on my sweating head was itself sweating. Moisture dripped from its brim. How? The question asked itself. How does a plastic hard hat sweat?

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 Tapajos 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