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

With his fist, he pounded on one of the giant, fin-like roots. It made a deep, thudding reverberation.

It was a spectacular tree, mystifying in its beauty. And yet, standing under it there in the jungle, I saw that I would have to stop fighting a realization that had been dogging me the whole trip: a rainforest, however fascinating, is still just a forest.

This is not as vapid an observation as it sounds. The legend of the jungle is so powerful, and so laden with the importance of biodiversity and the lungs-of-the-planet thing, that we forget that an Amazonian rainforest has an awful lot in common with a regular North American forest. To wit: it is a forest. Yet the Amazon of our dreams persists—a place overgrown with mythology and legend, with humid stories of explorers and murky tales of pre-contact tribes. You almost expect it to be made of jade.

This is true even when the mythology is negative. Werner Herzog, in a wonderful interview during the making of his movie Fitzcarraldo, proclaimed that the jungle was full of “misery,” that the birds cried out not in song but in pain, that the Amazon rainforest was a world of obscenity and horror. But in this, Herzog was being no less mawkish than Kathleen Turner in her breathy search for a giant emerald in Romancing the Stone—not to mention Michael Jackson in his Earth Song. Then there’s James Cameron’s Avatar, the ultimate expression of jungle-as-magical-place, driven by a story so painfully condescending to its forest-dwellers that he could get away with it only in science fiction.

In these cinematic Amazons, sunlight must always filter seductively, a leopard or a giant spider—or a fetching blue alien with breasts—must be around every bend, and every step on the path must be won with a machete slashed through the succulent fronds of something greener-than-green. Poison darts fly unceasingly from blowguns, leeches latch instantly onto legs and bellies. And piranhas, of course—always piranhas—wait for the dip of an unwise toe in the river. It’s not just a jungle. It’s Eden with some danger thrown in.

Maybe other parts of the Amazon are like that, but around here, it was primarily a forest. It had trees, and leaves, and dirt, and animals. And in this case, it had an owner. Most important, it also had a swimming hole. Finally, Adam and I understood what Rick had meant by goofing around. He had meant there was a rope swing.

The swimming hole was down the path beyond the cabin, where a stream—a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Amazon—eddied into a wide pool surrounded by trees. A small wooden swimming dock had been built out into the water.

The Americans had brought their swimming trunks, the Brazilians their briefs. There were the requisite jokes about piranhas, and we dove in. Rick climbed the slanted trunk of a collapsed tree, holding the rope swing in one hand. He surveyed his kingdom—and then jumped, carving a magnificent arc, his mane of gray-blond curls trailing behind him, a late-career Tarzan in board shorts.

If anything, his arc was a little too magnificent. It brought him over the platform of the swimming dock, and for a moment I thought he was going to break his neck. Instead, the Michigan-born Lord of the Jungle watched with a bemused grimace as the dock passed underneath him, and then he swung back, still seizing tight to his vine, his feet dragging through the creek, and at last he let go, collapsing ingloriously into the water.

We were on an island in an ocean of soy. Out at the property line, Rick’s forest fell away into a huge, flat expanse of dry earth. We had gone to take a look.

It wasn’t yet planting season. Heat wavered over the crumbled dirt. A trio of silos stood in the distance. Gil danced back and forth taking video with his iPod Touch. Rick pointed out the line of green running alongside the field. It was the border of his forest. He had owned it for ten years.

“This huge, thousand-acre soybean field here, at one time was all forest,” he said. “One year I came through here with some people, and there was a huge pile of logs, still burning. They just cut that piece out.”

It wasn’t just the small farmers who had felt the pressure to sell, but anyone who owned uncut forest in the Santarem area. When I asked Steven Alexander—another American who owns a tract of uncut forest in the area— whether anybody had offered to buy his land, he laughed.

“I had a line of people trying every day to buy it!” he said.

A gentle, white-bearded man in his early seventies, Alexander had been living in the area for thirty years, working for a health and education NGO, and later as a forest guide. He had bought his land back when it was cheap. Now it, too, was an island, and he took a dim view of the Amazon’s long-term prospects.

“My guess is that it will become much like North America or Europe,” he said.

“Really?” I asked. “The Amazon will look like France?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Over a period of time, a hundred years, two hundred, I don’t think we can expect to see anything more than preserves…Everything around that will go.” The Amazon rainforest would remain as a mere archipelago, islands of protected forest scattered across the river basin.

“It seems to be the way of the world now, doesn’t it?” Alexander said. He smiled gently. “More and more people, more roads, more development, less forest. That seems to be the trend.”

Cargill, Greenpeace, and the Nature Conservancy all agreed that the soy moratorium was a success. But it had left some business unfinished. For one thing, there was the question of the Cargill terminal’s dubious legality. And what about the small farmers who, having sold out, found themselves profoundly impoverished? Both of these concerns had been fundamental to activists’ case against the soy industry. Greenpeace had produced a short film— titled In the Name of Progress: How Soya Is Destroying the Amazon Rainforest—that highlighted those two issues in stark, accusatory terms. But once the moratorium was signed, they were dropped.

This, more than anything else, explains the rift between an international NGO like Greenpeace and an impudent local activist like Father Sena. In his view, Greenpeace and the Nature Conservancy had secured a weak agreement. The decrease in deforestation, he thought, was due to the global economic slowdown, not the moratorium. And even if the moratorium was stopping soy farmers from cutting down forest themselves, what about the small farmers they displaced? They were much harder to track. Meanwhile, nothing was being done to mitigate the damage that had already been done—and the Cargill terminal was still allowed to exist.

“Greenpeace forgot about us,” Sena said. “They used our movement.” They had made heroes of themselves, declared victory, and moved on.

When Adam later tracked down Andre Muggiati, a forest campaigner at Greenpeace Amazon, he nearly admitted as much. “Edilberto is still a good friend,” he said of Sena. But he said that, for Sena, “the only solution for the problems would be to put Cargill out, to send all the soy farmers back to the south. That is not reasonable. We always knew that at some point we would have to sit at the table with Cargill to get an agreement. If you ask the impossible, you never get to a solution.” Activism could only do so much. “Capitalism and free initiative are legal in Brazil,” he said. “You can’t come to Cargill and say, ‘Go away.’ You cannot go to the soy farmers and say, ‘Return the land to the peasants.’”

Who could disagree with Muggiati? But however sensible, his words could have come out of Cargill’s own mouth, and so hint at some uncomfortable parallels between the agribusiness giant and the environmental NGOs that opposed it. Both sides had operated with a degree of realpolitik about the possibility for justice in the wake of the soy boom. Both had maneuvered through legal gray areas to advance their cause. Of course, Greenpeace had no hand in overturning the way of life that had sustained the small farmers of Para. But it did use them as poster children in its campaign, only to discard them once a realistic political goal had been reached. And the goal it achieved—if indeed it was truly achieved—was to protect the forest, not to address the social ills that had gone along with the soy boom. It’s also difficult not to find some irony in a guy from Greenpeace invoking realism and the rule of law—when a good deal of that organization’s public activism depends on idealism and on the targeted flouting of the law.

Father Sena—militant priest, spitfire idealist, girl-watcher—ended up on the outside. When negotiations for the soy moratorium began, Sena’s Amazon Defense Front had been part of them. But the ADF wanted too much: a ten-year moratorium, extending two years retroactively, instead of the more realistic, yearly-renewable arrangement that was ultimately agreed upon. Sena told us that he had walked away. “We said, ‘Forget it. You can cheat people from the United States, but you cannot cheat us.’” That left Para’s soy moratorium to be designed by Cargill (of Minnesota) and the Nature Conservancy (of Virginia) and Greenpeace (founded in Vancouver) and a grab bag of other NGOs and agribusiness giants, most of them from the northern hemisphere.