b) Topic of soy as a journalistic focus revealed to be a mistake provoked by a passing fad among the environmental media.
d) I therefore fail to address the real problem, which is still beef.
d) Multinational corporate villains revealed as key participants in an anti-deforestation success story.
e) Goddamn it.
And let’s not forget that the only people I saw tearing down trees were possibly angels of sustainability and local empowerment; and that the people setting forests on fire were friendly small farmers. It was hard to know where the catalog of disappointment would end.
In any case, we had our access. Adam and Gil and I showed up at the Cargill terminal, the temple-of-not- so-much-doom, and were ushered into an air-conditioned reception room, where we awaited the attention of the terminal manager. In a display case at one end of the room, a glass goblet of soybeans stood next to a collection of bottled cooking oils and jars of mayonnaises and other food products derived from Cargill ingredients.
The terminal manager walked in, the commander in chief of the million-odd tons of soybeans that passed through the terminal every year. A solid busybody of a man with thinning hair and a green polo shirt, he already looked impatient.
The great thing about the tour he gave us was that even though we had a newfound appreciation of how Cargill might conceivably be helping to
After some blather about “environment is a priority” and “safety is a priority,” he told us we would not, as promised, be able to go out to the dock to see grain pouring into a ship bound for Liverpool or Amsterdam. Nor would we be allowed inside the huge hangar of the grain storage area. That is to say, for reasons of safety and lameness, we wouldn’t be allowed “in” the plant at all. Nor would we see so much as a single bean of soy, beyond those in the reception room display case. What was this, an oil sands bus tour?
Instead, the terminal manager led us on a circuit around the outside of the storage facility, pointing out the truck bay—here, too, safety was a priority—and other completely boring, soyless locations and features.
On a stretch of wet concrete between the water and the storage building, the terminal manager stopped and turned to us.
“Here we have a forest for the preservation of native trees,” he said.
We looked around. What was he talking about? To our left there was a small triangle of grass with a dozen scrawny trees. Only two or three of them even truly qualified as trees. The rest were little more than half-naked sprigs sticking out of the ground. This was their forest? “We have had some difficulties in growing the trees,” he said. “But we take very good care of them.”
He stood there with his hands on his hips, and we stared. Here, in the heart of the Amazon, we had found the most pathetic nature preserve in the entire universe.
“It’s small,” the plant manager said. “But it’s symbolic of our commitment to preserving the forest.”
At kilometer 77 on BR-163, Rick’s rental car turned onto a side road. Mango followed, guiding our car off the pavement and onto dirt. We turned east, leaving the Tapajos National Forest at our backs. A wooden sign with hand-painted letters stood on the highway shoulder:
“For sale… Damn, I wish I had some money!” Gil said, watching the sign go by. “Shit, I love
We were driving to Rick’s rainforest. At long last, we were going to find out what he meant by
Two kilometers in, and the fields and overgrowth on the right became a thick secondary forest—the dense growth that floods into a previously disturbed area. Because secondary forest lacks the shady canopy of untouched, primary forest, it often grows with a thicket-like abandon absent in primary forest.
Or as Gil put it, “Shit, look at this fucking forest! That’s a
Rick’s land was taken care of by a young man named Antonio, who had been born and raised on an adjacent small farm. Antonio’s family home was a long, single-story cabin made with rough-hewn planks of itauba wood. It sat on a low rise bordered by trees. Children scurried and played in the yard. There were chickens, and a well, and an outdoor kitchen where Antonio cut fruit for us with a machete. It seemed vaguely like paradise. Only if you had been here thirty years could you understand that this was a landscape in the throes of change.
It was Antonio’s father, Raimundo, who had established the farm in the 1970s, as part of a wave of settlers encouraged by the Brazilian government, which was high on the idea of developing the supposedly unproductive land of the Amazon. New arrivals could get a 100-hectare (250-acre) plot for almost nothing.
“It was beautiful then,” Raimundo said, sitting in the front yard of what I might have otherwise called his still rather beautiful homestead. “The forest was vast, full with everything,” he said. “Game and all living beings. In those days everything was easier.”
Like Nestor, Raimundo was now suffering the effects of the most recent wave of deforestation, and he echoed Nestor’s complaints about the large soy farms. But Raimundo didn’t hate the soy farmers. He had been offered a trunkload of cash, and had turned it down, and that was that. “We feel good, because everything they do, it’s for Brazil,” he said. “But what can I say? We feel the heat, because of the cleared land.”
“Once it’s cleared, it will never be the same again,” Antonio said. “We know for a fact that place will never be what it was before.”
And it wasn’t over yet. We asked Raimundo what he thought the area would be like when his son reached his age.
“If they don’t come up with a law for a man to protect the forest he lives in, there will be nothing left,” he said. “Nothing left.” Perhaps because it was so poorly enforced, he was unaware that such a law already existed.
Rick’s cabin was back in the forest, perhaps ten minutes by foot from Antonio’s house. The path led through the woods, along a wooden walkway that passed over a shady, clear-running creek, and finally to a sandy clearing. The cabin was a simple structure, no more than a few bare rooms made of planks cut by chainsaw. We slung our hammocks on the narrow porch.
A wasp was harrying Adam. As he tried to squirm and jump away, it became enraged and stung him on the cheek. “What did I do wrong?” he asked himself. Then, looking at the encroaching jungle all around, he drew the lesson. “The forest is my enemy,” he said.
We dumped our bags in the cabin and gathered in a troop facing Rick, our commander. “Are you ready for your jungle adventure?” he growled.
Rick had himself never made it to the depths of his own forest—because of how large the property was, he said. But Tang suggested it was because Rick just kept going around and around on the same trail.
“Have you seen the lake?” Tang asked.
“No,” Rick said.
“Have you seen the field?” Tang asked.
“No.” Rick smiled ruefully. “I’ve probably only seen fifty hectares of the place.”
The highlight of our walk through Rick’s rainforest was a magnificent tauari tree. Its base spread out along the ground in huge triangular fins that embraced cavernous spaces perhaps twenty feet tall. It wasn’t a tree so much as a group of searching, wooden walls that had come together to build a minaret.
Rick stared up at it. “As you can see here, this thing is like an art piece,” he said. “Thousands of trees like this have been cut. Millions, probably. Tauari is a commercial species. Most of it went to France. For some reason they love it. Europeans love tauari.”
