staring voice of the awestruck. The skidder plunged toward us, a colonizing robot from another world, surprisingly fast, shouldering trees aside as it bore closer, nearly on top of us.
And then we were running for our lives, screaming with joy and terror, leaping out of the way. It passed just a few yards from us, wheels grinding, and then it was gone. In its wake, a gigantic log slid coolly, massively, over the forest floor.
“Fucking
On our way out, we stopped at the
Gil shook his head. “It’s hard to believe this won’t fuck up the forest, isn’t it?”
Gil met us for breakfast at the hotel. As we planned our day over coffee and pastries, a muscular, middle- aged American man approached our table and started talking windsurfing with Gil. The American was wearing flip- flops and shorts, and had long, curly gray-blond hair and a deep, gravelly voice. A surfing buddy of Gil’s, I thought. The subculture of Amazonian beach bums—one that I hadn’t known existed two days earlier—was growing every day.
Then he turned to me, a business card in his hand. It was Rick. The man from Michigan who owned his own rainforest. On two days’ notice, he had decided to come down to meet us in Brazil. He said there were a lot of misconceptions out there about the Amazon and about logging, and evidently he thought my presence in Santarem was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get his story out.
I don’t know what I had expected Rick to look like—a doughy guy in a polo shirt and khakis?—but it wasn’t this. With his stony features and huge arms, he looked like a muscle-bound Gary Sinise. Or like someone who might choose to beat the crap out of the real Gary Sinise. He was accompanied by one of his few remaining local employees, a smart, understated young man whom Rick called Tang. They got some coffee and breakfast and joined us at our table.
Rick lived wood. His company imported wood to the United States, processed it, and sold it as exotic flooring. The business had been driven by the cheap money of the housing bubble, he said. “People building ten-thousand- square-foot houses because they could, putting in exotic hardwood floors because they could.”
He got down to the business of misconception-correcting. “On TV in America, they used to show some burnt, dying wasteland, and they’d have a logging truck driving through it,” he said. “The assumption is that loggers cleared it. That they just nuke the place. But that’s not the case.”
Of all the trees growing in the rainforest, Rick told us, only five or six species were commercially viable. So logging in the Amazon had always been extremely selective. “If there were no cattle ranching, and no soy, the average person wouldn’t be able to tell that one single log had been cut around here. Because there’s no market for 94 percent of the forest.”
Rick knew, though, that it was more complicated than that. “The worst thing loggers do is make roads,” he admitted. And that created access for commercial agriculture. We later spoke to one of Rick’s colleagues on this point. “Loggers don’t destroy the forest, but they open the door,” he said. “We are like high-class gangsters. We come into a museum, but we only steal the one multimillion-dollar painting. Then we leave the door open, and everyone else comes in after us, and they take everything. Even the lightbulbs.”
Rick’s problem wasn’t with the fact of logging, but with how it was done. He couldn’t abide waste. Huge amounts of wood had been wasted to achieve economies of scale. “It was so cheap here for perfect logs. It was the same in Michigan a hundred years ago. You’d lose money if you touched anything but the filet,” he said, referring to the large, straight section at the bottom of the tree. The rest of the tree, from the lowest branch on up, was left to rot. “Billions and billions of board feet get wasted. I could build entire industries off the waste here, if I could just get access. It drives me crazy. I’ve been trying for years to see if I could get ahold of the tops left over by loggers—just their leftovers. And you can’t do it. It just rots. There are so many rules, it’s…” He grabbed his head. “It’s Brazil.” Sometimes entire forests were wasted. He had once visited a large bauxite mine nearby. Bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is derived, is big business now in the Amazon, and multinational companies cut down large tracts of forest to begin their open-pit mines.
“They had these piles of logs,” Rick said. “They were prepping to
He was so passionate about waste that he had started a Brazilian subsidiary based on it. The concept was to take leftover sawmill logs and use them to custom-build timber-frame houses, turning scrap into a luxury product. Rick nodded his head toward Tang, who had grown up nearby. “He’s been building boats since he was three years old. He’s one of the best timber framers in the world,” he said. “So the idea was to use all that local talent that’s here, and then use some resources that are being wasted. Not just turn the forest into a commodity.”
He had called his local company Zero Impact Brazil. The lumberman was trying to turn over a new leaf. He admitted, though, that he had made most of his money on the commodity side: “For a while there, I was the largest buyer of forest products in Santarem.”
Now that was all over. The housing boom had crashed, and the market for exotic flooring had gone with it. The entire timber industry had died back. Tang told us that over the last five years, two-thirds of the sawmills in the area had closed. Logging trucks had gotten scarce.
I stared into my coffee cup. Let this be a lesson to you, I thought. Never wait to see a rainforest being logged out of existence, because one day you’ll wake up and it will be too late.
“Yeah,” Rick said. “Lots of money got dumped in here from all over the world. Big investments. They come here with real big eyes.” And like so many others, they had gotten burned. “The typical business model in the Amazon,” he said, “is you go there with a lot of money—and you leave broke.”
Now it was Rick’s turn. The timber frames weren’t selling. Zero Impact Brazil was surviving only by selling off its assets.
We stood up to go, agreeing to talk again soon, to arrange a visit to Rick’s rainforest. We’d go down there and “goof around,” he said. He was insistent on that point—on the goofing around. Adam and I exchanged a glance. What did that mean, exactly?
Rick also wanted to talk some more about the forest, about waste, about his company. “I wanna portray us as at least the guys who have got good intentions,” he said.
Stoking a mild despondency about Brazil’s failure to keep up its end of the environmental-horror-story bargain, I turned for succor to the Catholic Church. Adam had uncovered an activist priest who promised to say inflammatory and pessimistic things about the Amazonian situation. He had made headlines overseas—the BBC called him “the Amazon’s most ardent protector”—and had a reputation as a fierce champion of the rainforest.
Gil knew where to find him, of course. He knew everybody, perhaps because he spent his every spare moment on the tiny terrace of his house, greeting passersby, waving, hollering, gossiping. Walking around Santarem with him was like tagging along for a victory lap with a popular former mayor. Acquaintances and friends shouted from windows and sidewalks on every block.
We went looking for Father Edilberto Sena not at his church but at the offices of his radio station, which says something about his approach to liberation theology. The station operated from a small, two-story building on a busy street up the hill from the river, and Sena used it to promote his activist causes, beginning with an editorial broadcast every morning.
From half a block away, Gil spotted him pulling into a parking spot, and we introduced ourselves on the sidewalk. He was a short man, youthfully sixtysomething, with a pugnacious smile and good English.
As we walked toward the entrance of the radio station, two young women crossed our path. Sena stopped in his tracks and turned to us.
“One problem of the Amazon…” he said. “Too many beautiful girls around.”
Smiling, he laid a hand on his chest.
“A poor priest
