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

we see the results: a wasteland of burning stumps and blackened earth. The sky is orange with smoke and flame. It’s the image Rick complained about: that loggers just nuke the place.

And then, among the devastation, a lonely figure. Head downcast, clothes scorched and torn, he wanders the destroyed forest. Who is this desolate stranger, this angel of grief lost in a nightmare of deforestation?

It’s Michael Jackson. Obviously. And he is here to ask penetrating questions about the environment: “What about sunrise?” he sings. “What about rain? What about all the things that you said we were to gain?”

Sales of Earth Song were a little weak in the United States, but in Britain it was Michael’s most successful song ever, hitting No. 1 for six weeks over the 1995-96 holiday season. And it has the best environmental music video of all time, meaning it’s totally wretched.

Soon we see sad-faced African bushpeople staring woefully at a murdered elephant; and sad-faced Amazonians in traditional undress, watching helplessly as trees fall in the rainforest. There are also some sad-faced Croatians thrown in for good measure. It was the nineties, after all.

Michael falls to his knees, pounding the earth with his fists. Then the Amazonians, the Africans, and the Croatians fall to their knees and begin pawing at the ground. Soon, everyone is grinding their fingers through the soil, shaking fistfuls of dirt at the sky.

A mighty wind begins to blow. (They actually show the planet from space, engulfed by the mighty wind.) Michael is now in full Christ mode, standing with arms outstretched, holding on to two twisted tree trunks to keep from being blown away by the righteous hurricane he has summoned. And then—wait for it—time begins to run backward. In Africa, the elephant resprouts its tusks and hops up, newly unmurdered. Michael Jackson and the downtrodden peoples of the Earth are undoing all the damage. All hell unbreaks loose. “Where did we go wrong?” he screams. “Someone tell me why!” The meaningless lyrics are paired with images of meaningless fantasy. Smokestacks suck their own filth out of the sky. In the Amazon, two local lumberjacks look on in astonishment as their work is undone, a massive tree lifting magically into the air and rejoining its stump. We cut to a close-up of a logger’s awestruck face and see—

It’s Gil.

We paused the video. On the screen, video-Gil stared up at the magic un-logged tree. Next to the computer, real-life Gil stood with a gleeful I-told-you-so look on his face.

“AAAGGHH!” he screamed.

All week, he had been spinning his story about having been in a Michael Jackson video, but we had never considered the possibility that it was actually true. Finally I had called his bluff—and there he was, on YouTube, intercut with the King of Pop’s righteous convulsions. The young Gil Serique, son of the Tapajos, with more than ten million views.

Cargill said we could visit. It had taken a week of phone calls and e-mails to exotic places like Sao Paulo and Minnesota to convince them we were harmless. The only reason they relented, I think, was that we told them we were shooting a television piece for an American news program, which was true.

It felt like a get. We had secured access to the Amazonian terminal of the largest private company in the United States, the driver of the Santarem soy bubble. This was ground zero for the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, a match held to the carbon bomb’s fuse. In terms of habitat destruction and climate change, this was the temple of doom.

Or not. Adam, the ingrate, says that I can’t say any of that stuff: it’s not true. This is the problem with having colleagues with integrity. They’re always bringing it to work.

Soy, he tells me, whether or not I want to hear it, has never been a dominant cause of deforestation in the Amazon, has never been responsible for more than a tenth of the destruction. A measly tenth! The soy frenzy in Para had generated a lot of heat in the media and among environmentalists. But when you look at the Amazon as a whole, soy has never come close to matching the deforestation caused by cattle ranching. In fact, even slash-and- burn farmers like Nestor still account for more deforestation than soy ever did. Which means that maybe I should have cast Nestor as a villain (even though he was friendly and sold us cheap beer) and been more sympathetic to Luiz, even though he had stumbled around shouting like a drunken jerk.

Why, then, all the ruckus about soy? The answer, perhaps, is that soy burst onto the scene with such frightening speed—and also that, in Cargill, environmentalists had found a concrete target.

In 2006 Greenpeace released a report called Eating Up the Amazon, which gave Cargill a lot of attention. The report traced soy grown on deforested land through the Cargill terminal and all the way to Europe, where it ended up as animal feed for chicken and beef sold in McDonald’s restaurants. This crystallized the problem in a powerful way. After all, an activist who can cry “J’accuse!” toward a specific McNugget is an activist who has nicely focused the case. Furthermore, the McNugget connection provided two strategic choke points for Greenpeace to attack: the Santarem terminal and the McDonald’s boardroom.

To the terminal, they sent their ship the Arctic Sunrise, which blocked the dock and delivered a team of activists who climbed up onto the works, as they do, briefly shutting it down.

To McDonald’s, they sent the heavy artillery: people in chicken suits. In Britain, Greenpeace shock troops dressed as poultry danced through McDonald’s franchises and chained themselves to restaurant tables. The news footage of this is pure Dadaist entertainment, with a police officer approaching one of the chickens to ask who’s in charge.

Activists should break out the chicken suits more often. Within weeks, the pressure had worked its way backward along the supply chain. Cargill came to the negotiating table, along with all the other major buyers of Brazilian soy (including companies such as ADM). The companies were clearly terrified that they were next in line for their own visit from the chicken suits.

Not three months after it all started, the soy buyers signed an agreement under which they would buy no soy from recently deforested land. According to David Cleary, a strategy director at the Nature Conservancy, which brokered the deal, the agreement goes beyond the standard set by the Brazilian government, which allows 20 percent deforestation on farmland. Under the terms of the agreement—known as the soy moratorium—Cargill won’t buy soy from any farm where a single tree has been cut since the moratorium began.

In contrast to the Ambe project, which works from the bottom up, by way of local stakeholders, the soy moratorium is a top-down approach that depends on technology. The way it works is that soy growers must register their land, and Nature Conservancy and Cargill staff show up and walk the perimeter of each farm with handheld GPS devices. The farm is then monitored by satellite for any deforestation that occurs within its limits. Brazil already had a very sophisticated system for monitoring deforestation—it depends in part on information from NASA—but without knowing exactly which land belonged to which farmer, the government couldn’t do much about it. Now, though, they can monitor each specific farm to make sure trees aren’t being cut down, and cheap GPS technology makes it remarkably inexpensive to graft this additional monitoring onto the existing satellite-based system.

The crazy thing about the soy moratorium—aside from the role that people in chicken suits played in creating it—is that it actually seems to have worked. It is still in effect, and soy-driven deforestation in the Santarem area has stopped dead. I know this because Adam showed me a graph, based on Brazilian government data, that shows the region’s cumulative deforestation. Immediately upon the implementation of the soy moratorium, the line goes flat.

Luiz, the soy farmer, testified to its effectiveness. “If you’re not operating legally, you can’t sell a single grain of soy,” he groused. “You have to be legal, or Cargill won’t pay you.” If it weren’t for the moratorium, he told us, “we would plant everywhere.”

Luiz was pissed off about it, but from a conservation point of view, the agreement had been so effective that there were now hopes to apply a similar system to the problem of cattle ranching. If successful, it could prove to be a major innovation in controlling deforestation in the developing world.

I couldn’t stand it. Was there no end to the good news? Let’s recap a few of my most unwelcome findings:

a) Amazonian deforestation tour conducted precisely at time of record-low deforestation.