To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  Implementation of these laws is left to IBDF, the Brazilian Institute for Forestry Development, but this body is said to possess less than a hundred inspectors to police an area in which 20,000 might be too few. It has been announced that its hand will be strengthened by the end of the year by Brazil’s new independent space satellite, which will report back on violations of the forest code. Here it might be argued that by the time photographic proof of such violations is supplied, the damage will have been done. But how, it may be asked is the feeble David of the IBDF to stand up, if needs be, to such Goliaths as Daniel Keith Ludwig, absolute ruler of an area somewhat larger than Belgium (referred to sarcastically as ‘The Kingdom’ in the Brazilian Press) from which, incidentally, observers are debarred?

  IBDF’s one semi-success was with Volkswagen do Brasil, a pigmy by comparison, with a ranch no bigger than Luxembourg. The US Skylab satellite photographed a huge unapproved fire that had been started here, and it was reported that a million adjacent hectares of the forest were alight. Reprimanded for carelessness or wilfulness by the head of SUDAM, the Superintendency for Amazonian Development, Volkswagen’s director is reported to have replied that burning was the cheapest way of clearing land.

  Of course it is the cheapest for those who are not there to stay, but the short-term yields they derive are paid for by a huge and irreversible loss suffered by Brazilians who have to live with the results. Ninety per cent of the soil of the Amazon Basin is so poor that it cannot be converted into adequate pasture without the addition of costly fertilisers, and as soon as these fertilisers are no longer forthcoming, the coarse African grass it supports will go. For a multitude of small-scale ranchers three acres of land can hardly feed a single cow, and after two or three years, when the rains have washed the nutrients from the soil, over-grazing and over-trampling take effect and the dust-bowl process begins.

  Wild animals are of less than secondary importance in developing countries, and little is said in newspaper polemics on the fate of the animals in the path of the fires. Their lot is death on a hardly imaginable scale. Birds, monkeys, jaguar and deer may escape the racing flames, but most of the Amazon animals, armadillos, anteaters, porcupines, sloths and frogs, are slow-moving and are doomed to incineration. Innumerable bats, whose beneficent function it is to keep insect populations in check, are disorientated by smoke, and fall into the flames. A great variety of small mammals, rabbits, agoutis, pacas, and rodents of all kinds are moved by instinct to take refuge in burrows or in holes quickly scuffled out in the forest litter, and in these they are roasted. Animals that live by, and in the water, otters, water-opossums and fish are doomed, too, not always directly by the fire, but the loss of forest cover, causing streams to overheat and become clogged with algae and silt; devoid therefore of both oxygen and food. An INPA scientist said: ‘We are threatened with possibly the greatest ecological disaster in world history.’ He had calculated that between 5,000 and 20,000 vertebrate animals were killed per square kilometre when the forest burnt down. But the burning goes on.

  In only one year, 1975, Amazonia lost four per cent of its trees, and scientist Harald Sioli said that if the rate of destruction was not slowed down, nothing would remain of the forest by 2005. It was a sum that people could do in their heads, but the conclusion was one that few could bring themselves to accept, on the grounds that ‘the authorities’—that disembodied but relatively intelligent force set between them and God—would never be stupid enough to allow this to happen.

  But in January 1979, coinciding almost with our arrival in Brazil, the deadline of conclusive destruction seemed to have come even nearer. Speakers at the Third World Forestry Congress at Manaus had hardly risen to their feet to congratulate themselves and the audience on the beneficent change in the official attitude towards problems of conservation, when a sensational story broke in the newspapers. This revealed details of a secret deal in which huge tracts of Amazonia were to be sold off in lots to acquire the foreign currency required to liquidate Brazil’s current balance of payments crisis. The newspaper Folho do São Paulo valued the concessions it alleged the Government was proposing to grant at 20 billion US dollars, and saw that 40 per cent of the forest would have to be sold to foreign concessionaires to produce this figure.

  In Brazil, as elsewhere, governmental right hands often do not know what left hands are doing and these revelations set off a flux of outraged denials, sometimes published in the Press side by side with astonishing admissions. ‘Such a proposal would be political madness,’ said the Ministry of Agriculture, and a spokesman for the President agreed. ‘The thing is absurd. Anyone who tries to put such stories about must have an ulterior motive.’ SUDAM, the Superintendency for Amazonian Development, seemed oblivious of these high-level denials, and burbled on endlessly as to what was intended. SUDAM had always seemed to prefer ranches to trees, and had licensed and partially financed the deforestation of 3½ million hectares in 1976. In this instance it was happy to indicate the rough location and size of the areas to be opened up to foreign investment.

  Worse was to come. Paulo Berutti, Director of the IBDF, the very instrument created to preserve the forests, let it be known that he had gone to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation in person, and persuaded them to supply a team of 22 technicians to carry out a study of the Amazonian forest and present a plan for its ‘economic development’. He agreed with SUDAM that 40 per cent of what was left of the original 280 million hectares might be involved.

  This admission turned Berutti overnight into the most detested man in North Brazil. A meeting of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Amazonas demanded his banishment from the country, while a civic march in protest organised by various academics, conservationists and members of Berutti’s own staff was promptly suppressed by the police. The new proposals made Sioli’s predictions look optimistic. Berutti’s assurances that future exploitation of the Amazon would be based upon the principle of recycling forest reserves failed to convince. Too many people remembered the holocausts caused by Volkswagen do Brasil and others. Paulo Nogueira Neto, Special Secretary for the Environment, said, ‘This amounts to handing over our forests to the tender mercies of the multinationals. You might as well put a goat in charge of a garden.’

  In Manaus, capital of Amazonia, the weather provided evidence of secondary inconveniences to be expected as deforestation progressed. It had been raining torrentially off and on for some weeks, and could be expected to go on doing so for at least a couple of months. The Rio Negro, on the banks of which the city is built, was rising at the highest rate ever recorded: 7.5 centimetres a day. The Hydrographic Service was able to predict at this stage the strong possibility of a repetition, by the middle of February, of the floodings of the past three years, when the city’s centre had been under water. The news from the Manaus-Cuiabá highway was that 600 lorries were stuck in the mud without hope of immediate rescue, filling the air with the stench of their decaying cargoes of food. The passengers from a stranded bus had taken refuge in an Indian village. Such floods, occurring at rare intervals in the past as a result of freak weather, are now coming to be accepted as a normal feature of the rainy season, lending weight to the theory that they are caused by the forest’s loss of capacity to absorb water.

  We took advantage of a break in the weather to hire a plane and in this we flew northwards from Manaus, keeping in sight the new BR174 Highway.

  It was a good time to see the forest from the air, because by January the dry season’s smoke has cleared away. A little late burning-off and tidying-up goes on, as the weather allows, but all the essential details of the landscape below are visible in the clear, rain-freshened air.

  We flew at about 1,000 feet over the limitless spread of trees, having from this height the appearance of sparkling moss. Across this the BR174 was a red line, ruled to the horizon. Immediately beneath, the road was close enough for the erosion to be visible, biting into its margins, and there were swamps created in its ma
king, bristling with dead trees and gaudy with stagnation. Fires appeared as blue smudges here and there, and there were never less than a half-dozen in sight, and many charcoal scrawls and flourishes showed on the green pages of the jungle where others had burnt out. Such clearances were often the work of rich businessmen running plantations as a side-line, or hobby-farmers from the city. Land here costs too much to attract ranchers thinking in terms of 20,000 to 30,000 hectares, whose operations would show up on a satellite photograph. Close to Manaus it was a matter of 100 hectares here and 200 there, but it was sad to think just how many small fires must have been alight all over the Amazon Basin on a fine day like this.

  What our bird’s-eye view made so startlingly clear was that the process the scientists called ‘desertification’ was even more rapid than we had been led to expect. In many places where patches of forest had been left, strewn with ash to await replanting or cultivation, the arid ochre of the sub-soil already showed through. There were old, abandoned fields, too, now totally eroded, and from them the new desert spread like a creeping tide in all directions.

  Later, accompanied by an INPA scientist, we drove along the BR174 with the object of studying the close-quarter effects of what we had seen from the air. An hour’s drive brought us to the scene of a recognisable fire on the 100-hectare estate of a successful Manaus shopkeeper. We had passed several estates like it along the road, often bearing romantic names (in one case ‘My Blue Heaven’), and sometimes furnished with a swimming pool by which the fazendeiro and his friends could have sat to enjoy the view across a wasteland resembling the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme.

  The estate we visited would be largely for the owner’s weekend use, but a manager had been put in charge to make sure of a reasonable return on investment, too, and when cleared of forest the estate would be planted with profit trees.

  The manager had no objection to describing and even demonstrating his methods. Clearing the forest with machete, saw and axe, he said, was a slow and laborious business. You could do it with a tenth of the effort by getting a big fire going, and to do this all that was needed was a good supply of combustibles. His own method was to buy up all the old lorry tyres he could find. Having cut down the big trees and left them to dry for a few weeks, the lorry tyres would be stacked at intervals through the dry foliage, doused in petrol, and then set alight. The heat generated by this kind of fire took care of all the small standing trees and the undergrowth, and all that anybody had to do after that was to go round and saw down a few stumps that might have been left.

  A final hectare or two was about to be cleared, and we looked on while this was done. It was a sad but spectacular business, with small risks to be taken if one were so inclined, and these were clearly enjoyed by the young fire-raisers who went in to the attack, cans of petrol in hands. As fire roared up from the underbrush a whole panorama of foliage shrivelled, leaving the bone-structure of the trees sheeted in flame. We were startled by the speed of the fire’s advance, dodging and leaping into the branches, clinging to lianas, turning into small bonfires among the bundles of orchids and ferns lodged in the forks and axils. The noise, as wood exploded everywhere under pressure of boiling sap, was terrific.

  If there were a real danger here, it lay in the chance of getting in the way of a frantic snake as it came twisting out of the flames. One or two of these were quickly despatched by the club-armed workers. This was the moment providing the manager’s children with the opportunity to capture an occasional baby boa-constrictor, much in demand as a pet. They had managed to cut one off a week before, and it was already quite tame; an engaging and endlessly curious creature, which slithered away to inspect any new arrival at the farmhouse, and was overfed on live lizards by its admirers. But few animals were as lucky as this, and a short walk into the most recently burnt-off area revealed a number of small charred skeletons.

  The estate was to be planted with fruit, rubber and avocado pear trees, and the soil here was so poor that an inch or two of humus and ash could be scuffled away with the boot to expose subsoil like yellow concrete. Several hundred seedling trees waited in containers. To give them as good a start as possible the manager had dug holes by the hundred and replaced the arid subsoil with good earth, and in this the young trees would be planted. Not a single forest tree was to be left. Asked if he had not heard of the Forest Code, and the 50 per cent rule by which no more than one half of the forest cover could be removed on any property, the manager agreed that he had. In a case like this, he said, it did not apply. It was not as if he had cleared the land for pasture or for agricultural use. Trees had been cleared, but others would be planted in their stead. Where was the difference?

  There is no country where the problems of conservation are so earnestly and endlessly discussed as in Brazil, no country where intentions are better and the determination stronger to protect a national heritage—in this case above all the Amazon forest, and all the life it shelters. The furious outcry provoked by the alleged proposal to hand over a huge proportion of the forest to foreign companies makes it seem unlikely that this will be allowed to happen. What is more probable is that after the clamour subsides things will be found to be drifting along much as before, with a million acres of forest quietly snipped away here and there, worse flooding year by year, yet another increase in such diseases as malaria (known to be aggravated by forest disturbance), more Indians dying of disease.

  Meanwhile a new threat to the existence of the forest is about to develop—this time one that is far more likely to bring about the final solution. The appetites of the big ranching concerns have been to some extent held in check by the pressure of Brazilian opinion, but the assault on the forest to come is likely to engender less opposition, as reflecting an urgent national need.

  Two barrels of petroleum substitute can be made from a ton of wood, and the Amazon forest is estimated to contain 415 billion cubic feet of timber. The Brazilian Press—already punch-drunk from the battle over the proposed surrender of 40 per cent of the forest to foreign concessionaries—signalled the opening of a new battle front by quotations from an article in Data Shell. Ethyl alcohol and methane, commonly substituting for petrol in the last war, said the article, were now easily and cheaply produced from vegetable matter. Technical difficulties hampering Amazonian production in the past had been overcome, and with the decrease in reserves and constant increase in petroleum prices, substitutes were about to come into their own. Data Shell mentioned an expectation of increased production in the Amazon region.

  These are all the facts one really needs to know in deciding for oneself whether or not the trees will still be there in the year 2000.

  IN THE SIERRA

  SOUTH FROM MADRID THE Estremadura highway unwinds through the sun-devoured plains. A tide of affluence flowing from the capital has rolled over this part of the land. The horizons are smudged by factories, there is neon in the villages, and once in a while a little pyramid of wrecked or exhausted cars has been piled up by the roadside, like the burial cairn of a chieftain of our days. After Talavera, which supplies the world with bathroom tiles, the pencilled outline of the Sierra de Gredos shows to the west at the bottom of the sky. It is less than an hour away, but entering it the traveller is transported instantly to a different world where the traditional Spain makes a last stand.

  Oropesa, which crowns the summit of a hill a few miles south of Talavera, is the ancient capital of the region. It is a place where nothing much happens, and apart from the pleasantness of an old-fashioned town and the spectacle of people living quiet lives in traditional fashion, there is nothing to attract visitors but the fifteenth-century castle-cum-palace, now a State parador. The setting is impressive and one questions whether the builders of these battlements, walls, and towers were inspired purely by military considerations, or whether romantic notions could not have entered into it, so fanciful is the final result. The castle illustrates the appetite of mediaeval Spain for silence and a dignified gloom, for, on pa
ssing through the hotel’s doors, one is instantly swaddled in a twilight scented with the faint, dark odour of antiquity. Details of battle tapestries decorating the walls of vast halls and chambers are made out with difficulty. Voices are hushed in space.

  By contrast the bedrooms are small and austere—a manifestation of the Spanish spirit which strives to counterbalance grandeur with simplicity. The view is over the roofs of the town, descending layer by layer in pink and grey striations, the oldest of them curving gently like those of pagodas at their edges. Beautiful roofs advertise poverty, and outside the palace-castle complex there has never been any money in Oropesa to finance innovation and ugliness. The town, like the castle, is silent in the Spanish way, with all its window shutters closed and no one in the streets outside the social hours of the evening. The sky is full of swifts and circling storks, and these, with their breeding season now past, have left their nests everywhere, like huge discarded hats on all the high places of the town.

  To the west the view from the castle is of the Sierra, rising like an enormous wave from the 15-mile-wide featureless plain. Fifty miles of it are on view although seen no more than as an outline in mist, sometimes momentarily obscured by the storks as in the evening they come up by the hundred from the plains to roost in the towers and pinnacles of Oropesa. After the Pyrenees the Sierra de Gredos, 150 kilometres in length, is the largest mountain range in Spain. It is also the least known and therefore the most interesting. Although there are no towns, and hardly any villages in the sierra itself, a string of villages in the foothills are a living museum of the Spain of the past. It seems incredible that these mountains should have waited until 1834 to be explored. The expedition sent reported on the presence of innumerable wild goats—about 4,000 of which remain—ancient burial-sites and dolmens, and wild men dressed in skins. These early hunters lived in chozos; tiny, circular stone-walled huts of the kind built by their Celtic ancestors, and still occupied by their descendants, the shepherds of today. Since then, only botanical expeditions are likely to have investigated the sierra with any thoroughness.