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

The soy moratorium may prove a great success story in the end. It may even herald a way forward for the control of deforestation. But it lacks exactly what the Ambe’s sustainable logging project hopes to establish: local players who have a stake in the forest’s preservation. In the case of Ambe, the very people benefiting from the forest’s exploitation have a profound incentive to do it sustainably. But the soy moratorium’s several constituencies are different. One—Cargill and its competitors—is at best indifferent to the rainforest. Another—the soy farmers— would cut it down if they could get away with it. Yet another—the mostly foreign-based NGOs—can only hope to build their moral imperatives into the machinery of agribusiness and development, through political maneuvering and legal cajoling.

Finally, there’s whoever is still left in and around the forest—the people who, for whatever reason, didn’t sell and haven’t cleared all their land. And who’s to say how long it will be worth their while to hold on to it?

In the evening we ate dinner in Antonio’s yard and then retired to Rick’s cabin in the rainforest. From the clearing, I watched bats transit the moon as it rose over the jungle. Howler monkeys groaned in the distance. Nearby, a troop of frogs set up a ceaseless knocking rhythm, anchoring an aural tapestry of peeping and piping and cricketing, cicada-like sounds that glimmered in the darkness. Adam thrashed around with a flashlight in his mouth, dosing himself with choking clouds of bug spray.

At the edge of the clearing, Tang produced a guitar and began strumming, singing a plaintive tune into the dark.

“What is that, Tangy?” asked Rick. “That something from your home village?”

“It’s Dire Straits,” Tang said.

Gil had passed out in his hammock, a lumpy pod hanging between two trees in the dark. We walked out past Antonio’s house, past a pair of drowsy cattle, to where the soy fields began. Tang lay on the road, his arms behind his head, and Rick and Adam and I stared at the night sky. Our original hope had been to see the distant glow of fires in the south. In the days of the free-for-all, Rick told us, it had been possible to see the night sky aflame with apocalyptic color, the radiant flush of a forest casting off its earthly bonds. The awestruck way he spoke reminded me of Hilton Kelley’s description of refinery flares in Port Arthur. There is a kind of destruction that has beauty in its weapon.

Tonight, though, there were no horizons of orange and red. It wasn’t really burning season, if they even bothered to have a good burning season these days. And so we were left with silent flickers of lightning in the far heat, and the stars. The last time I had seen the stars so well had been on the Kaisei, listening to the Pirate King digress on Orion, on the Pleiades, on Cetus.

A large bat flapped out of the night and passed over our heads. “Here they come—agh!” Adam cried, ducking for cover. Even in the middle of a soy field, the forest was out to get him.

The bat followed its erratic flight path out over the soy field behind us. I looked at the field, how it stretched out of sight in the dark. Just how did they clear this stuff?

Years ago, Rick told us, a rancher down the highway had bought a large piece of forest and wanted to clear it. “He hired five hundred guys, bought five hundred chainsaws, and just went at the forest,” he said. “In one season, I don’t know how many thousand hectares he cleared, just brrrrcchh!”

Rick had said he wanted to be portrayed as one of the guys that have got good intentions. And I thought his enthusiasm for the rainforest was genuine. But the fact that he had been a major exporter of wood from Santarem also meant that his business almost certainly had been built on illegally logged wood. As recently as the mid-2000s, 60 to 80 percent of the wood coming out of the Amazon had been logged illegally. And although Rick didn’t like to get specific, more than once he had made vague references to the frenzy of the old days, of the crazy things he’d seen in the Brazilian logging industry. He knew the business he had made his fortune in. When he talked about preserving his seven hundred hectares of rainforest, he sounded like a man trying to prove to himself what kind of person he was.

The soy field just in front of us, I realized, was about the size of a single hectare. In general, I have no sense for what an acre is, much less a hectare. But I had looked it up, and here was one in front of me: a piece of land about the length of a soccer field on each side.

“Isn’t that a huge piece of land?” Rick said. “And then there’s seven hundred of those back there in that forest.” Rick’s piece of rainforest suddenly seemed incredibly massive—an entire world.

“I still have a hard time even believing that I own that piece of property…This shouldn’t even belong to a human being!” He laughed. “To have that kind of ability or power or whatever it is, or…”

“It’s not like owning a car, or a house,” I said. “It’s like owning a little universe that you’re inside.”

He nodded. “And it’s been there since, oh, you know. It’s evolved for millions of years…And what gives me the right to just be born and all of a sudden it’s mine? I’m like a speck on the Earth. I’ve only been here for like, just a grain of sand in time, and all of a sudden I’ve got this ability to just erase something that took…”

Rick shook his head and looked at the darkness on the other side of the hectare, where his rainforest began.

“All of a sudden I’m here,” he said. “And it’s like, I’m the guy holding the bag.”

Six IN SEARCH OF SAD COAL MAN E-waste, Coal, and Other Treasures of China

Guiyu.

The smell of burning solder. Capacitors underfoot. Shattered components spilling from beneath a closed gate. Cellphone faceplates in heaps three feet tall, leaves raked up in autumn. We turn a corner. Ten-foot-tall drifts of gray computer plastic lie waiting to be sorted and recycled, like dirty snow dumped by a plow.

Old keyboards stacked on pallets, cube on cube, bales of electronic cotton. A warehouse of keyboards, a soccer field’s worth of keyboards. A four-foot stack of identical keyboards, grimy and half crushed. I recognize the model; I used to own one. Has my old keyboard come through this place, for its keys to be ripped off, its metal extracted, its plastic melted down? I pry a key off and put it in my pocket.

A team of men shovel hay from the bed of a large truck, tossing it over the side into a heap. The timeless gesture of bodies shoveling hay, but it’s not hay. They’re shoveling circuit boards. Naked and green, the clattering square fronds pile up by the wheel of the truck.

Women toss piles of scrap aluminum into the air with shallow baskets, separating the wheat from the chaff. With broad, circular sieves, a family shakes out resistors and capacitors of different sizes. Did they come here from the countryside? Did they use these tools on the farm?

We did, said Mr. Han. We would use them for corn, back on the farm in Sichuan. Now, though, farms use machines to process the corn, and we just use sieves like these for sorting components.

Mr. Han had his own business. He and his wife had both grown up on farms in the Chinese province of Sichuan, to the northwest. They had met while working in an electronics recycling workshop here in Guiyu, near the southeast coast, and after marrying, they had opened a workshop of their own. They specialized in motherboards— the central circuit boards of personal computers. Mr. Han bought them in large bales three feet on a side, imported from overseas, likely North America.

Together with his wife and her sister and his wife’s sister’s husband, he sorted and processed every component of the motherboards. They cut out the valuable CPU chips for resale, pried off recyclable plastic, melted down and collected the solder that attached the components to the motherboard, sorted the components into sacks, and sent the cleaned motherboards off to have their gold extracted.

Theirs was one of thousands of similar workshops in town. Guiyu’s entire economy is based on tearing apart old electronics and reselling the components and raw materials. Walk the streets and you will see building after building with a workshop at ground level and family quarters on the upper floors.

It’s a dirty business. Computers are full of all kinds of things that are bad for you—things other than the Internet—and when you tear them apart, or melt them down, or saw them into pieces, a portion of those toxic substances is released. In a place like Guiyu, with what I’ll call relaxed workplace standards, you end up with