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

by Andrew Blackwell

  Cargill said we could visit. It had taken a week of phone calls and e-mails to exotic places like São Paulo and Minnesota to convince them we were harmless. The only reason they relented, I think, was that we told them we were shooting a television piece for an American news program, which was true.

  It felt like a get. We had secured access to the Amazonian terminal of the largest private company in the United States, the driver of the Santarém soy bubble. This was ground zero for the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, a match held to the carbon bomb’s fuse. In terms of habitat destruction and climate change, this was the temple of doom.

  Or not. Adam, the ingrate, says that I can’t say any of that stuff: it’s not true. This is the problem with having colleagues with integrity. They’re always bringing it to work.

  Soy, he tells me, whether or not I want to hear it, has never been a dominant cause of deforestation in the Amazon, has never been responsible for more than a tenth of the destruction. A measly tenth! The soy frenzy in Pará had generated a lot of heat in the media and among environmentalists. But when you look at the Amazon as a whole, soy has never come close to matching the deforestation caused by cattle ranching. In fact, even slash-and-burn farmers like Nestor still account for more deforestation than soy ever did. Which means that maybe I should have cast Nestor as a villain (even though he was friendly and sold us cheap beer) and been more sympathetic to Luiz, even though he had stumbled around shouting like a drunken jerk.

  Why, then, all the ruckus about soy? The answer, perhaps, is that soy burst onto the scene with such frightening speed—and also that, in Cargill, environmentalists had found a concrete target.

  In 2006 Greenpeace released a report called Eating Up the Amazon, which gave Cargill a lot of attention. The report traced soy grown on deforested land through the Cargill terminal and all the way to Europe, where it ended up as animal feed for chicken and beef sold in McDonald’s restaurants. This crystallized the problem in a powerful way. After all, an activist who can cry “J’accuse!” toward a specific McNugget is an activist who has nicely focused the case. Furthermore, the McNugget connection provided two strategic choke points for Greenpeace to attack: the Santarém terminal and the McDonald’s boardroom.

  To the terminal, they sent their ship the Arctic Sunrise, which blocked the dock and delivered a team of activists who climbed up onto the works, as they do, briefly shutting it down.

  To McDonald’s, they sent the heavy artillery: people in chicken suits. In Britain, Greenpeace shock troops dressed as poultry danced through McDonald’s franchises and chained themselves to restaurant tables. The news footage of this is pure Dadaist entertainment, with a police officer approaching one of the chickens to ask who’s in charge.

  Activists should break out the chicken suits more often. Within weeks, the pressure had worked its way backward along the supply chain. Cargill came to the negotiating table, along with all the other major buyers of Brazilian soy (including companies such as ADM). The companies were clearly terrified that they were next in line for their own visit from the chicken suits.

  Not three months after it all started, the soy buyers signed an agreement under which they would buy no soy from recently deforested land. According to David Cleary, a strategy director at the Nature Conservancy, which brokered the deal, the agreement goes beyond the standard set by the Brazilian government, which allows 20 percent deforestation on farmland. Under the terms of the agreement—known as the soy moratorium—Cargill won’t buy soy from any farm where a single tree has been cut since the moratorium began.

  In contrast to the Ambé project, which works from the bottom up, by way of local stakeholders, the soy moratorium is a top-down approach that depends on technology. The way it works is that soy growers must register their land, and Nature Conservancy and Cargill staff show up and walk the perimeter of each farm with handheld GPS devices. The farm is then monitored by satellite for any deforestation that occurs within its limits. Brazil already had a very sophisticated system for monitoring deforestation—it depends in part on information from NASA—but without knowing exactly which land belonged to which farmer, the government couldn’t do much about it. Now, though, they can monitor each specific farm to make sure trees aren’t being cut down, and cheap GPS technology makes it remarkably inexpensive to graft this additional monitoring onto the existing satellite-based system.

  The crazy thing about the soy moratorium—aside from the role that people in chicken suits played in creating it—is that it actually seems to have worked. It is still in effect, and soy-driven deforestation in the Santarém area has stopped dead. I know this because Adam showed me a graph, based on Brazilian government data, that shows the region’s cumulative deforestation. Immediately upon the implementation of the soy moratorium, the line goes flat.

  Luiz, the soy farmer, testified to its effectiveness. “If you’re not operating legally, you can’t sell a single grain of soy,” he groused. “You have to be legal, or Cargill won’t pay you.” If it weren’t for the moratorium, he told us, “we would plant everywhere.”

  Luiz was pissed off about it, but from a conservation point of view, the agreement had been so effective that there were now hopes to apply a similar system to the problem of cattle ranching. If successful, it could prove to be a major innovation in controlling deforestation in the developing world.

  I couldn’t stand it. Was there no end to the good news? Let’s recap a few of my most unwelcome findings:

  a) Amazonian deforestation tour conducted precisely at time of record-low deforestation.

  b) Topic of soy as a journalistic focus revealed to be a mistake provoked by a passing fad among the environmental media.

  d) I therefore fail to address the real problem, which is still beef.

  d) Multinational corporate villains revealed as key participants in an anti-deforestation success story.

  e) Goddamn it.

  And let’s not forget that the only people I saw tearing down trees were possibly angels of sustainability and local empowerment; and that the people setting forests on fire were friendly small farmers. It was hard to know where the catalog of disappointment would end.

  In any case, we had our access. Adam and Gil and I showed up at the Cargill terminal, the temple-of-not-so-much-doom, and were ushered into an air-conditioned reception room, where we awaited the attention of the terminal manager. In a display case at one end of the room, a glass goblet of soybeans stood next to a collection of bottled cooking oils and jars of mayonnaises and other food products derived from Cargill ingredients.

  The terminal manager walked in, the commander in chief of the million-odd tons of soybeans that passed through the terminal every year. A solid busybody of a man with thinning hair and a green polo shirt, he already looked impatient.

  The great thing about the tour he gave us was that even though we had a newfound appreciation of how Cargill might conceivably be helping to mitigate deforestation, and even though that meant that any story we did might actually take a positive spin on the company, this didn’t stop us all from playing out our appointed roles. We were the journalists out to get the multinational company, for which the terminal manager was a bloviating mouthpiece.

  After some blather about “environment is a priority” and “safety is a priority,” he told us we would not, as promised, be able to go out to the dock to see grain pouring into a ship bound for Liverpool or Amsterdam. Nor would we be allowed inside the huge hangar of the grain storage area. That is to say, for reasons of safety and lameness, we wouldn’t be allowed “in” the plant at all. Nor would we see so much as a single bean of soy, beyond those in the reception room display case. What was this, an oil sands bus tour?

  Instead, the terminal manager led us on a circuit around the outside of the storage facility, pointing out the truck bay—here, too, safety was a priority—and other completely boring, soyless locations and features.

  On a stretch of wet concrete between the water and th
e storage building, the terminal manager stopped and turned to us.

  “Here we have a forest for the preservation of native trees,” he said.

  We looked around. What was he talking about? To our left there was a small triangle of grass with a dozen scrawny trees. Only two or three of them even truly qualified as trees. The rest were little more than half-naked sprigs sticking out of the ground. This was their forest? “We have had some difficulties in growing the trees,” he said. “But we take very good care of them.”

  He stood there with his hands on his hips, and we stared. Here, in the heart of the Amazon, we had found the most pathetic nature preserve in the entire universe.

  “It’s small,” the plant manager said. “But it’s symbolic of our commitment to preserving the forest.”

  At kilometer 77 on BR-163, Rick’s rental car turned onto a side road. Mango followed, guiding our car off the pavement and onto dirt. We turned east, leaving the Tapajós National Forest at our backs. A wooden sign with hand-painted letters stood on the highway shoulder:

  VENDE-SE

  766 HaDE

  MATA VIRGEM

  4km—>

  “For sale…Damn, I wish I had some money!” Gil said, watching the sign go by. “Shit, I love forests!”

  We were driving to Rick’s rainforest. At long last, we were going to find out what he meant by goofing around. Adam and I each had our own worst-case scenario, and they both involved kidnapping.

  Two kilometers in, and the fields and overgrowth on the right became a thick secondary forest—the dense growth that floods into a previously disturbed area. Because secondary forest lacks the shady canopy of untouched, primary forest, it often grows with a thicket-like abandon absent in primary forest.

  Or as Gil put it, “Shit, look at this fucking forest! That’s a serious forest.”

  Rick’s land was taken care of by a young man named Antonio, who had been born and raised on an adjacent small farm. Antonio’s family home was a long, single-story cabin made with rough-hewn planks of itauba wood. It sat on a low rise bordered by trees. Children scurried and played in the yard. There were chickens, and a well, and an outdoor kitchen where Antonio cut fruit for us with a machete. It seemed vaguely like paradise. Only if you had been here thirty years could you understand that this was a landscape in the throes of change.

  It was Antonio’s father, Raimundo, who had established the farm in the 1970s, as part of a wave of settlers encouraged by the Brazilian government, which was high on the idea of developing the supposedly unproductive land of the Amazon. New arrivals could get a 100-hectare (250-acre) plot for almost nothing.

  “It was beautiful then,” Raimundo said, sitting in the front yard of what I might have otherwise called his still rather beautiful homestead. “The forest was vast, full with everything,” he said. “Game and all living beings. In those days everything was easier.”

  Like Nestor, Raimundo was now suffering the effects of the most recent wave of deforestation, and he echoed Nestor’s complaints about the large soy farms. But Raimundo didn’t hate the soy farmers. He had been offered a trunkload of cash, and had turned it down, and that was that. “We feel good, because everything they do, it’s for Brazil,” he said. “But what can I say? We feel the heat, because of the cleared land.”

  “Once it’s cleared, it will never be the same again,” Antonio said. “We know for a fact that place will never be what it was before.”

  And it wasn’t over yet. We asked Raimundo what he thought the area would be like when his son reached his age.

  “If they don’t come up with a law for a man to protect the forest he lives in, there will be nothing left,” he said. “Nothing left.” Perhaps because it was so poorly enforced, he was unaware that such a law already existed.

  Rick’s cabin was back in the forest, perhaps ten minutes by foot from Antonio’s house. The path led through the woods, along a wooden walkway that passed over a shady, clear-running creek, and finally to a sandy clearing. The cabin was a simple structure, no more than a few bare rooms made of planks cut by chainsaw. We slung our hammocks on the narrow porch.

  A wasp was harrying Adam. As he tried to squirm and jump away, it became enraged and stung him on the cheek. “What did I do wrong?” he asked himself. Then, looking at the encroaching jungle all around, he drew the lesson. “The forest is my enemy,” he said.

  We dumped our bags in the cabin and gathered in a troop facing Rick, our commander. “Are you ready for your jungle adventure?” he growled.

  Rick had himself never made it to the depths of his own forest—because of how large the property was, he said. But Tang suggested it was because Rick just kept going around and around on the same trail.

  “Have you seen the lake?” Tang asked.

  “No,” Rick said.

  “Have you seen the field?” Tang asked.

  “No.” Rick smiled ruefully. “I’ve probably only seen fifty hectares of the place.”

  The highlight of our walk through Rick’s rainforest was a magnificent tauari tree. Its base spread out along the ground in huge triangular fins that embraced cavernous spaces perhaps twenty feet tall. It wasn’t a tree so much as a group of searching, wooden walls that had come together to build a minaret.

  Rick stared up at it. “As you can see here, this thing is like an art piece,” he said. “Thousands of trees like this have been cut. Millions, probably. Tauari is a commercial species. Most of it went to France. For some reason they love it. Europeans love tauari.”

  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 ou
t 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 Santarém 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.