Sometimes just a brief visit to a place is enough to make one
feel deeply emotionally invested in it – in love, even, or at least rivetted
with admiration or awe. This has been the case with my own fleeting sojourns in
southern Patagonia and in the Amazon forests. In the latter case I wasn’t even
in especially deep jungle – a tourist camp not so far from the million-soul
city of Manaus, not far beyond the edge of logging operations. But I was
instantly, sensuously, in love with the flooded varzea, the sounds of howler monkeys, and the extraordinary
sun-patterns of leaves, even with the forbidding spiders and the taste of
piranha fish and the military columns of vicious ants.
So it’s with increasing dismay that I read article after
article warning of threats to the integrity of the Amazon basin and its
astounding diversity of both human and non-human denizens. Some warnings are
embedded in global reports, such as that of the World Wildlife Fund, which
details how some 60% of non-human biodiversity has been destroyed by human
activity in the last few decades. Another report, drawing on extensive satellite-generated data, reveals that only five countries
hold some 70% of that biodiversity. One of those countries is Brazil, in which
the Amazonian basin largely lies.
A second wave of more sharply localised reports has
accompanied the recent presidential election in Brazil, which to the world’s
general horror has brought to power a fascistic lunatic, Jair Bolsonaro. He
compares himself to the aggressive and ignorant Donald Trump (who himself has
spent the last two years rescinding some 76 Clinton- and Obama-era laws
designed to protect the US environment – which is also to say, protecting
citizens against their own unthinking destructiveness). Bolsonaro has lost no
time in expressing support for expanding Amazonia’s agribusiness – in whose
financial pocket he nestles – and infrastructural projects into the Amazon. Between the two of
them, these leaders constitute a veritable ecological Antichrist.
Bolsonaro and Trump, and their supporters, are of course
only the latest spearhead to a long-evolving process. If you thought that Trump
was transparently biased against environmental health in appointing an Exxon
oil exec to head the Environmental Protection Agency, recall that the two Bush
presidents did so, too. And it’s not only hard-right leaders at fault: recall
that Brazil’s leftist president Lula da Silva, now in jail for corruption, had
also approved a massive hydroelectric dam project on an Amazon tributary – just
one of dozens either under construction or planned. (If there is any slowing
down of this, it may ironically be because of the revelation of the so-called “Car-Wash”
corruption scandal that did for Lula.)
The Amazon has been under siege for a long time,
particularly in the so-called Arc of Deforestation, a two thousand-mile swathe
from the lower south-western edge of the basin to the north-eastern regions abutting
the Atlantic coast. Dam building is just one threat: Brazil has touted itself as the nation of clean
hydroelectricity for several decades. This is despite the now manifest problems
with such grand, pride-driven nationalistic projects which, from the Colorado
to the Ganges, have proven short-lived, destructive and economically inefficient.
The US and India have started walking back from big dams, and in January this
year an undertaking was made by Brazil, then under Temer, to also slow down on
the dams. I am not so confident that Bolsonaro will honour that pledge,
whatever the dire ecological effects will be on the basin’s ecosystems, its
dependence on annual flooding, its tens of thousands of displaced indigenous people,
and its wildlife. The latter can no longer be regarded as merely a frosting of
interesting animals for tourists to gape at: they are vitally functional
elements in complex ecosystems which constitute one of the world’s greatest
carbon sinks and therefore a crucial stabiliser of global climate.
Other threats are just as important, especially
agrobusinesses: not only logging and mining, sanctioned and otherwise, and not
only conversion to pasture for cattle to supply the hungry northern fast-food
chains, but also more nominally benign plantations, especially soybeans, manioc
and rice. All involve deforestation, desiccation of wetlands, and human
displacement on a huge scale: in one estimate, 52 000 square miles per year.
The fate of the indigenous peoples – groups of whom have
remained sheltered from the invasion of modernity until very recently – is central
to the trauma, and they are also central players in such resistance as can be
marshalled. In the environmental impact studies supposed to mitigate new
projects’ effects, Amazonians are routinely simply ignored, the integrity of
their lifeways dismissed as irrelevant, their knowledge of their environment
either exploited without compensation or derided. Reserves intended to protect
them or wildlife comprise a tiny proportion of the whole basin. This is despite
Article 225 of Brazil’s Constitution, which states that all citizens have a
right to an ecologically balanced environment.
The depth of indigenous knowledge comes across strongly in
Wade Davis’s extraordinary account of ethnobotany in the Amazon, One River. As Davis and his
ethnobotanical predecessors ranged across the Amazon in tireless searches for –
and ‘discovery’ of – literally hundreds of plant species “new to science”, they
found tribe after tribe with profound and intricate, both practical and
myth-enriched, knowledge of the forest’s plants. Here is just one passage of
many:
The children appeared to know
everything about plants and were somewhat taken aback by our ignorance. Shyly
at first and then in great bursts of enthusiasm they explained that plants were
like people, each with its own mood and story. Cacti sleep by night. Mushrooms
grow when they hear thunder, lichens only in the presence of human voices. The
solitary blossoms of the open field have no feelings for others. Delicate
gentians fold up their petals in shame ... All plants have names and are useful
...
This is not just quaint: it is a saving pointer towards an
ecology living itself out through us, not being controlled by its human
components. Of course one can over-romanticise such lives – people who live in astonishing
congruence with plants and animals and insects, all but immune to the physical
ills of modernity from heart disease to blood pressure to diabetes, and simply
not going anywhere – immune also to
the myths of “progress” and “profit” that drive the world’s technological
societies. including Brazil’s agro-industrial elites. Nor perhaps can they be
preserved in amber; one of Davis’s interlocutors argues that Amazonians, being
as intelligently curious about other worlds as any incoming tourist, should
have the choice of what to embrace in modernity if they want to.
Fair enough – but most often they have no choice: their forests, and everything they have ever known, is
catastrophically burned, cut or flooded away beneath them with neither
understanding nor compassion nor compensation.
Davis also shows how profound outsiders’ misunderstanding
can be. As it happens, he and his mentor Richard Schultes were mostly intrigued
by Amazonians’ sundry use of hallucinogenics and their spiritualist
associations. The most common of these is coca, which in its raw chewed form is
a mild stimulant but also highly nutritive, and a crucial element in daily
life, from mindset to nutrition, from origin myths to shamanic ritual. This
fine-tuned and entirely harmless dependence on coca has been totally ignored
because, of course, coca is also the source of cocaine. The US-led “War on
Drugs” throws out the baby with the bathwater: in trying indiscriminately to
destroy coca crops, especially in Colombia, the authorities are waging war on
an entire cultural nexus which has been satisfactorily in place for millennia.
Little wonder (quite apart from new global drugs-economics) the war is failing.
The short story, in a highly fragmented and conflictual
situation (more environmental defenders have been murdered in Brazil than in any
other country), is that a massive shift in governmental mindset, policy-making,
financial dependencies and enforceable legislation is required. Though the
seeds of more fruitful policies exist, such a turnaround seems unlikely. José
Heder Benatti is a contributor to a massively detailed volume of essays, tables
and maps, Biodiversity in the Brazilian
Amazon (2004 - a book Bolsonaro should read carefully, alongside Wade Davis).
Benatti makes a rare and gloomy foray into literary philosophy:
The expression “Man is a wolf to
man” is well-known. This quotation summarises the ideas of Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), who argued that man in his natural state was individualistic,
profoundly selfish, and with insatiable desires for power, which would only end
at death. ... Thus he did not naturally live by cooperation; he was not a
social being by nature. Life in society was a pact, artificial and precarious,
and insufficient in itself to guarantee peace. For the pact to be honoured and
peace secured, it was necessary for individuals to renounce their right to
everything and transfer it to a sovereign with absolute powers. ... Leviathan.
Even as indigenous Amazonians seem to prove Hobbes wrong in
part concerning the first point, it is in modernity that we seem to have
voluntarily given ourselves up to superior powers, whether these manifest as a
Zimbabwean dictator, a democratically-elected set of idiots, or the
mind-numbing addiction to Samsung and Apple. Benatti goes on:
Man and nature are unable to live
‘naturally’ in harmony – the former will always try to modify, change, or destroy
the latter, disrupting the ecological balance and putting ecosystems at risk.
Protected areas have to be created in order to ensure a ‘peaceful’ co-existence
and the survival of nature. However such a pact of mutual respect can function only if there is a
strong absolute State ... an ecological Leviathan.
Benatti might be right, even as globally we wrestle with
unruly forms of democratisation that militate against precisely such absolutism
– and therefore against sufficiently far-reaching moves to save nature, and our
better natures. Perhaps the best hope, though it’s a slow-acting antidote, is a
thorough-going re-education – an education that would teach Leviathan, like
certain individuals, to fall in love with things strange and beautiful, to
treasure something other than itself.
*****
