To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  BURNING THE TREES

  THE AMAZON FOREST LEAVES its mark on the imagination of all who see it. It is one of nature’s exaggerations, matching the great river, which viewed across white beaches, the further bank out of sight, could be an ocean drifting eastwards.

  One third of the world’s trees grow in the forest’s five million square kilometres—an area larger than Europe. It extends its umbrella of shade over half Brazil; the cool, damp, crepuscular corner of a continent. It is shown as blanks on the map between the veining of rivers and has little legend and no history.

  Romantic explorers and holy madmen like the celebrated Colonel Fawcett paddled their canoes up creeks, and hacked brief trails in the jungle in search of hidden cities, but there was never anything there but trees and painted, feathered Indians, almost as much a part of the jungle as the trees themselves. The first satellite photographs revealed more of the details of the forest than had three centuries of exploration. The trees provided the final refuge of 100-odd Indian tribes, numbering perhaps 40,000 people. It is believed that almost as many have disappeared since the turn of the century—many as the result of outright murder, more through the white man’s diseases, against which the Indian has no immunity. Occasionally a new Indian group is found—flushed out of the trees by pioneers who cut the trails ahead of the road-building gangs—and when this happens about a quarter of those ‘contacted’ can be expected to die of one commonplace Western ailment or another within the year. Indians are entirely dependent upon the forest. They cannot survive outside it.

  Theodore Roosevelt, spokesman and clairvoyant of the world of quick profits, pondered over the Amazonian vacuum and predicted what was to come. He had written a book about the pleasures of ranching, but had little use for trees. ‘The country along this river,’ he wrote in 1914, ‘is fine natural cattle country, and one day it will see a great development.’ His judgment as to the suitability of the land for cattle ranching was abysmally wrong; his prediction at least half correct. The ranchers arrived and the great attack on the trees began.

  Sixty years later the Brazilian people were to learn that about a quarter of the forests of the Amazon Basin and Mato Grosso had already been destroyed. Eleven million hectares of trees had been cleared in the preceding decade alone, and it became a matter of simple arithmetic, if this were allowed to go on, to forecast a date when the forest would cease to exist altogether.

  Most of the clearing was done by foreign enterprises such as Daniel Keith Ludwig’s Jari Forestry and Ranching Company, the Italian firm Liquigas, Volkswagen do Brasil, and King Ranch of Texas. These and many more had been encouraged in their attack on the forest by financial incentives offered by the Brazilian Government. Great fires—some of them ignited by napalm bombing—raged all over Amazonia, consuming trees by the hundred million, and for months on end travellers on planes on their way from Belém to Manaus or Brazilia saw little of the landscape beneath them through the smoke.

  There were few parts of the world left in this century where uninhibited commercial adventures of this kind were still possible, where land could be picked up for next to nothing. Wages were about a tenth of those paid in Europe or the US, and a modest investment in stock and equipment offered the prospect of spectacular profits. The Government’s early enthusiasm for giant ranches began to falter when it was found that, like the trees they replaced, they seemed to live on themselves, and produced little surplus to help with the balance of payments. Nor did they relieve unemployment, because when a ranch became a going concern it took only one man to look after 1,000 head of cattle.

  With the growing suspicion that the multinationals were little concerned with the long-term problems of the nation, voices were raised to inquire whether this rape of the forest, so apparently devoid of economic reward, might not in the long run have some undesirable effect on the climate. The mild obsession, familiar in northern latitudes, over the possibility of the return of the Ice Age is replaced in the tropics with a conviction that the reverse is likely to happen. In Peru a loss of permanent snow has been recorded from the Andean ice-peaks. Bolivia has suffered from declining rainfall and searing winds, while in Brazil itself parts of the north-east in the area of Ceará have been reduced to near-desert.

  These misgivings were given alarming substance by the publication of figures based on 17 years’ field-studies in Amazonia. This research was done by Harald Sioli, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Limnology, in West Germany, and his calculations argued that the Amazon forest contributed through photosynthesis 50 per cent of the world’s annual production of oxygen. He claimed that it could not be sacrificed without a dramatic, if not fully predictable, deterioration in world climate. He calculated that the forest contained about 300 tons of carbon per hectare, and that its total extension of 280 million hectares, if burnt down, would allow sufficient carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere to cause a 10 per cent increase of the gas. The threat was two-fold: the loss of the forest’s important contribution of oxygen, and of its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. Sioli noted that the burning of fossil-fuels had already caused a 15 per cent increase in carbon dioxide over the past century, and that the forests were failing to contain the increase. He concluded that destroying the Amazon forest would be like getting rid of one of the world’s major oceans—environmentally suicidal.

  There has been some scientific bandying of arguments over these figures, which have been wholeheartedly endorsed by some experts and received with caution by others. One climatologist, for example, has argued that one-third of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil-fuels remains in the air, while another believes that the proportion is two-thirds. These are matters for discussion by the illuminati. On the danger represented by oxygen reduction, Dr Mary McNeil, an American specialist in laterite soils, says that were all tropical forests—of which the Amazon forest is a major component—to go, the earth’s atmosphere would soon be denuded of oxygen.

  To turn to the other problem of the excess of carbon dioxide, Norman Myers, a consultant in environmental conservation, wrote in New Scientist, in December 1978, ‘Widespread deforestation in the tropics could lead to increased reflectivity of sunlight in the equatorial zone (the “albedo effect”) and to a build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Both these processes could upset global climatic patterns … ’

  Enear Salati, professor of physics and researcher in agriculture at the University of São Paulo, was quoted in Critica of Manaus as saying that the destruction by burning of the Amazon forest, and consequent increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, could result in heightened world temperature, the melting of the polar ice-caps, and a sufficient rise in ocean levels to bring about the inundation of hundreds of coastal cities throughout the world.

  The predictions of all these experts are deeply worrying in their various ways. It seems clear that the least we have to fear from the loss of the Amazon forest is undesirable meteorological changes, and the worst the catastrophe promised by Sioli and Salati.

  The threatened forest offers the paradox of an area into which is crammed the greatest abundance and diversity of living things to be found anywhere on earth, yet is potentially a desert. Only the thinnest skin of humus covers the laterite floor. Apart from what is derived through photosynthesis, the trees live almost by what can be described as self-cannibalisation, upon nutrients furnished by the litter they themselves provide, made rapidly available through the action of insects, worms and fungi. The forest recycles 51 per cent of the rain that falls on it, and produces little more energy than it consumes. It lives then, almost independent of the soil, in a state of equilibrium.

  Remove the trees and the average temperature of the area where they once stood increases by 30°F, rainfall declines sharply (by five per cent per year over the last 10 years in some areas recently deforested in neighbouring Bolivia), yet flooding becomes a recurrent hazard, because with the loss of the ‘sponge effect’ of the forest’s root-
mat, the soil can no longer contain the excess of water. With the rains, such nutrients as the forest floor contained are instantly washed away, and the laterite, laid bare to the sun, oxidises and loses every trace of fertility. This is no equatorial replay of the slow process of the formation of dustbowls in ruined US prairies: this is instant desert unless immediate and costly counter-measures are taken.

  From the time of its discovery until now, as it faces the threat of obliteration, the Amazon jungle has remained a scientific void. Those who have penetrated it—in the main rubber tappers and diamond prospectors—have been acquisitive rather than curious. Rough counts of its fauna have been made. Bates, the Victorian naturalist and contemporary of Darwin, collected 17,000 different insects before giving up, and it has been estimated that there may be 2,000 species of birds.

  All the figures attempting to define this vanishing abundance are vague. Forest ecologists at INPA (the National Institute for Amazonian Research) had counted about 400 species of tress growing in a single hectare. New plants and trees were being discovered with almost every week that went by. Even to the scientists it was beginning to appear pointless to continue with the labour of classifying and cataloguing all these living things so soon to vanish.

  Where the destruction of trees threatens a commercial resource, the government is sometimes moved to act. In the province of Acre, where the worst deforestation took place, 10,000 Brazil nut-gatherers had lost their livelihood and only a handful of them could find work on the new ranches. A law was therefore passed prohibiting the cutting down of the castanheiras. But forest fires are not selective, and as before, the nut trees went with the rest. Where it was possible to leave one standing in isolation it was soon found that such solitary survivors failed to produce nuts. It was discovered that without the presence of certain insects the pollination of their flowers could not take place, and the pollinators had gone with the rest of the forest. Even had nuts been produced, such trees could not have increased their numbers, because this called for the co-operation of a species of rodent, also defunct, which had been programmed by evolution to chew the hard coating off the nuts, and distribute them in places suited to their germination.

  These recently discovered mechanisms responsible for the production of the Brazil nut provide a clue to the dimensions of our ignorance of the workings of the forest. Some trees will not fruit without the aid of a single specific bird, others are fertilised by bats, yet others by moths, and a number of seeds receive their germinative impulse in some selected animal’s digestive tract. The macaw, an agent of this kind, is relentlessly hunted for supply to the pet trade, and its disappearance from any area eventually damages that area’s ecology. There is a tree producing pseudo-fruit, with no biological function other than the reward of its private army of insects, kept to ward off the attack of such predators as leaf-cutter ants. Strangest of such arrangements is the case of the inga edulis, a gigantic runner-bean, dangling from the tree that bears it in the waters of a creek; the bean can only germinate after a spell in the gut of a fish, which eventually defecates it into propitious mud.

  Such are the marvels of these vegetable-animal alliances for survival: the tree providing shelter and food, the animal offering those complex biological services without which the tree could not reproduce. INPA’s Department of Forest Ecology was involved in an experiment to establish plantations of certain valuable trees, such as the rosewood, source of an oil used in the manufacture of perfumes, and exploited to the verge of extinction in its forest habitat. The rosewood project promised success, but seedlings wilted and flagged when transferred to INPA’s facsimile jungle. One of the many defence mechanisms developed by the Amazon jungle is the dispersal of its species, which grow in isolation, sometimes only one to a hectare.

  There may exist in these particular trees an inbuilt dislike for the proximity of others of their own kind, causing them to frustrate all attempts to grow them in the nurseryman’s row. So extraordinary is their sensitivity that no more than four trees per acre can be cut down without causing environmental trauma, and when disturbed a tree may suspend its growth—no one knows how—for up to 20 years. ‘The fact is that we don’t really know how to plant forest trees,’ said an INPA scientist. ‘There just isn’t enough money for research.’ INPA employs at present 43 such specialists, although according to Dr Warwick Kerr, its director, a minimum of 1,500 would be required to solve the problem of the forest’s economic development without destroying it.

  Above all there was an urgent need for research into the therapeutic utilisation of the many types of chemical defences developed by tropical trees against insect or virus attack. Very few species had as yet been studied, but they had provided quinine, cortisone, new types of oral contraceptives, and what was hoped would prove to be effective anti-cancer drugs. In all such discoveries, the drugs had been found to be in use by the Indians who, it might be supposed, were the possessors of other valuable therapeutic secrets yet to be communicated. To quote Dr Paulo de Almeida Machado, the previous director of INPA, ‘Whatever science can learn before the forest is destroyed will mean the difference between short-term prosperity and sound economic development.’ He added that although Indians might survive, their culture will not.

  The approach of Doomsday for the Amazon forest was signalled by the launching of the great road-building programme of the early 1970s intended to slice it into easily accessible segments. This enterprise, undertaken in haste and with small forethought, followed a visit in 1970 by President Medici to the chronically distressed north-east, at that time proclaimed a disaster area after one of the worst droughts in its calamitous history. The President spoke movingly to the large crowds who had flocked into the town of Recife to hear him. By chance he was standing within a few miles of that once enchanted spot in Pernambuco of which Darwin had written in 1832, ‘Forests and flowers and birds I saw in great perfection, and the pleasure of beholding them is infinite.’ Of these Arcadian delights nothing remained, replaced as they were by treeless wastelands, ruined smallholdings among the thorny scrub, and the shanty villages of peasants who had to live on an average of 50 American cents a day.

  The President promised, in effect, to spirit these wretched people away from their dour surroundings and deposit them in sylvan glades of Amazonia, where they would receive 100 hectares of land apiece. Along the new highways he proposed to build low-cost but cheerful housing, and supply credits and facilities of all kinds, and thus they would be encouraged to lay the foundations of new and fruitful lives.

  As a safety-valve for the chronic poverty of the north-east the project was a failure. The intention had been to settle five million peasants in Amazonia by 1980, but after two years, only 100,000 had come and many of them were already beginning to slip away back to the badlands they had left.

  Like poor city-dwellers induced to leave the companionable slums for the aseptic planning of a garden suburb, they soon yearned for the familiar squalor they had left. They lacked the energy and the improvising genius necessary to come to terms with soil that produced two crops—three at most—before giving up the ghost. Rain, the greatest of all blessings in the north-east, was now the enemy. Life had to be shared with a multitude of stinging insects; new sicknesses defied the familiar remedies, and there were snakes in the back garden. Thus the planning floundered and collapsed, leaving Amazonia littered with destitute homesteaders.

  The new highways—the desert-makers as they have been called—did nothing to improve the lot of Brazilian subsistence farmers, but they fulfilled the wildest hopes not only of the multinationals, but of a new breed of predators who knew the true facts of the expendability of Amazonian soil and made it clear that they were not there to stay. As one American rancher put it to Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Chairman of Survival International: ‘You can buy the land out there now for the same price as a couple of bottles of beer an acre. When you’ve got half a million acres and 20,000 head of cattle, you can leave the lousy place and go live in Paris
, Hawaii, Switzerland, or anywhere you choose.’

  Inevitably, these roads open the way to the destroyers not only of trees but of men, for they pass through a number of Indian reserves, promoting the contacts that are so often fatal. Where thought necessary the Indians have simply been picked up and put down elsewhere, despite the fact that the new environment may not provide a living.

  Brazil abounds with vigorous and articulate conservation groups, but they are powerless in the presence of one crushing fact: the desperate need of the country’s many poor. In January 1979 O Journal do Brasil published figures showing that in Rio de Janeiro alone 918,000 people were living in ‘absolute poverty’, and in the city’s total population of nine millions, 27 per cent lived in ‘relative poverty’. These are the statistics that blunt conservationist scruples. There is a constant pressure to develop more sources of food, joined to an irrepressible belief that sooner or later a way will be found to turn the relatively unproductive five million square kilometres of the Amazon Basin into a bottomless larder.

  The Government seeks to put a brake on the excesses of ‘developers’ by measures that are too often evaded or ignored. Official approval must be obtained for large-scale forest clearances, but nobody seems to bother. Regulations exist prohibiting the burning-off of forest close to river banks where animals tend to congregate. These go unheeded. Slopes are not allowed to be cleared, because to do so is to guarantee immediate erosion, but in our experience landowners give priority to clearing the slopes on their estates. They do so because it is easier to drag or roll the treetrunks down the slopes and leave them to rot at the bottom, than to go to the trouble of extracting them. A promising law forbade the clearing of more than 50 per cent of any concession, but many methods exist by which it is dodged. A common one is to clear half one’s land in compliance with the regulation, and then sell the forested remainder, a half of which will be cleared by the buyer in his turn—and so on.