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

times. He would grow a crop of manioc—a root vegetable known elsewhere as cassava or yuca—and then leave the field to become overgrown with trees and brush while it lay fallow.

Now, several years later, he was going to cultivate it again. To prepare it, he had cut down the new growth, let it dry for a few weeks, and was burning it off. From a carbon point of view, his footprint was neutral: the CO₂ going into the air on the day we visited was CO₂ that had been sucked out of the air by this vegetation over the course of the past five years or so. True, there was a carbon debt—and habitat loss —from the original establishment of his farm, but that had been decades ago.

The real argument is over what drives new deforestation. And it’s not as simple as who’s holding the chainsaw. A person cutting down trees might be there because of government incentives to encourage the settlement of “undeveloped” areas. A soy farmer may only have come north because land was too expensive in his home state—or because an American buyer like Cargill has set up shop in Para. All sorts of things can prompt deforestation at a distance. A soy farmer using previously cultivated land could argue that he isn’t destroying the Amazon. But what if the small farmer who sold him that land goes off to clear new land somewhere else? To whom do you attribute the destruction?

Even if you can answer that question, you are then confronted with the situation that once an area of rainforest is settled, the settlers themselves become the de facto caretakers of whatever is left. Landowners in Brazil are subject to a unique forest law that obligates them to leave 80 percent of their land in native forest. Even giant soy farms aren’t allowed to clear more than 20 percent of their land. (The farming lobby is trying to change this law.) If the law were effective, it would mean that anyone who cut down twenty hectares of jungle would end up being responsible for protecting another eighty.

It’s hard to imagine a muddier picture. Decades ago, when Nestor first set up his farm, he might accurately have been characterized as the face of deforestation—sucking the possibilities of the land, as Father Sena would say. But now Nestor was a local stakeholder whose livelihood as a farmer depended on resisting the waves of development that followed him. His permanence on the land had earned him a place under the Sena Doctrine. But wouldn’t that happen to anyone who stayed long enough?

Come back in thirty years. Maybe there will be a proud soyero making a stand, refusing to sell his farm for the construction of a mega-mall next to the Tapajos National Forest, and we’ll call him a defender of the Amazon.

“I don’t know what you do around here after dark,” Rick said. “I don’t drink. I guess if you drink, if you like to party, you can go to a bar and visit with people.”

Adam and I had bumped into him in the park across from our hotel and invited him to eat dinner with us. At an outdoor restaurant across from the waterfront, we sat on plastic patio furniture and ate steak and chicken, and Rick pressed on us once again the need to visit his forest. “We can swim, we can goof around,” he said.

Rick had first come to Brazil twenty-five years earlier, seized by the idea of importing wood directly from Brazilian suppliers. In an era before e-mail or widespread fax machines, finding those suppliers had meant coming down in person. So that’s what he did, wandering from city to city through the Amazon, knocking on sawmill doors, even though he spoke no Portuguese. (Twenty-five years later, he still didn’t.)

It hadn’t taken long for the sawmill operators to figure out that, although he “looked like a hippie,” as he put it, Rick wasn’t there to protest, or to chain himself to a tree. He wanted to buy trees.

It made him his fortune. He became a major exporter of wood from Santarem. He told us that for several years in the 1990s, he was the biggest customer of Cemex—at the time, the largest logging company in Santarem. The world’s appetite for exotic lumber had been one of the forces sending tendrils of destruction into the rainforest, and Rick had cut out the middlemen, and fed it.

Yet he seemed less a businessman than a searcher of some kind. Whether it was the experience of seeing his business die back, or something else, he had been humbled.

He showed us a photograph of the river on his phone. Underneath the distant sliver of a kitesurfing kite, a tiny figure rode the surface of the water.

“That’s me,” he said.

He put his phone away. “You know how some people say that when you’re surfing, you connect with the water, or whatever?” he asked. “I can kind of relate to that now. When you’re kitesurfing, you’re really in touch with the environment. You’ve got the water, and the waves, and also the wind. You finally relax, and stop trying to control it. You stop fearing it.”

He laughed at himself. He was a gruff chisel of a man. Adam and I sat and listened. Over our shoulders, the Amazon and the Tapajos mixed and flowed, invisible in the dark.

“I don’t know what you’d call that,” Rick said. “Something like a religious experience.”

We went to find the soyeros, those dirty bastards from the south.

“I found out land was cheap in Para,” said Luiz. “It was the only place I could afford it. So we came here to buy a plot of land and own it. That’s why we’re here.”

Luiz was a short man in his early sixties, with watery eyes and an uncertain gait. He was a soy farmer, with three hundred hectares under the plow, just up the highway from Nestor’s land. He was also, to my eye, drunk.

“Would you have moved here if the Cargill port wasn’t here?” Adam asked.

Luiz frowned and shook his head as Gil translated. “What would I do here?” He had come for the same reason as the other soy farmers. He had realized that while the price of soy would be the same in Para as in Mato Grosso, the cost of transport would be much less.

“We only came here because of Cargill,” he said. “Not that Cargill went to Mato Grosso and called us. But we watch the news.”

We walked along the edge of his field, deep and crumbly with muddy earth, to the barn where he kept his combine. Luiz plunged his forearm into a sack of grain and pulled out a handful of dry soybeans, his balance wavering as he held it up for us to see. “Soybeans are dollars,” he said.

Luiz could see me staring at the combine, a tall, old machine with green sides. He swung up the ladder to the driver’s perch, and soon the machine rumbled to life, its rows of harvesting blades gnashing and turning. He turned it off and I climbed up to the steering wheel. I peered out at the soy field in front of me, and imagined rumbling through it on the combine at harvest time.

Things hadn’t worked out perfectly for the soyeros. The value of Luiz’s land had crashed by 60 percent since he’d bought it. Even worse, when he’d bought it, he hadn’t known he wouldn’t be able to clear off all the trees.

“The environmentalists” He spat the word. Ambientalistas. “They came with these laws, and it was forbidden to clear more than 20 percent of the area.” He had been forced to lease additional land in order to grow a large-enough crop. It made no sense to him. This was rich, flat land. It ought to be cultivated. And the forest on his land wasn’t even virgin forest, he said. There were no good hardwoods left on it, no monkeys, no fruit. The law ought to be that if you’re going to protect a forest, it’s a real forest.

But that wasn’t how it worked. “For the environmentalists, the farmers of Para are criminals, some sort of thug,” he said, and laughed. “They’d be more hurt to see a smashed tree than a dead farmer.”

It wasn’t just the environmentalists either. Although religious, Luiz had stopped going to church. “I stopped going because I would feel angry,” he said. He knew what people like Father Sena called him. He just didn’t understand why. “The priests attack us, but we’re not criminals. We’re not harming anyone’s lives.”

We left. In the car, speeding back toward Santarem, Mango laughed. He couldn’t believe Luiz hadn’t known why people hated the soyeros around here.

I’ll tell you why they hate you, Mango said. It’s because you’re cutting down the forest, you asshole!

First there is a toucan on a branch, minding its business. The sound of synthesizers. Then a magnificent tree, rising skyward behind the toucan. There are shafts of sunlight. Look how they filter down, extra Amazon-y.

Then, grinding through the vegetation—a bulldozer. It crashes toward us, a mechanized demon in the Garden of Eden. Closer and closer it comes, filling the screen. The image fades, and now