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

by Andrew Blackwell

  “My guess is that it will become much like North America or Europe,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked. “The Amazon will look like France?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Over a period of time, a hundred years, two hundred, I don’t think we can expect to see anything more than preserves…Everything around that will go.” The Amazon rainforest would remain as a mere archipelago, islands of protected forest scattered across the river basin.

  “It seems to be the way of the world now, doesn’t it?” Alexander said. He smiled gently. “More and more people, more roads, more development, less forest. That seems to be the trend.”

  Cargill, Greenpeace, and the Nature Conservancy all agreed that the soy moratorium was a success. But it had left some business unfinished. For one thing, there was the question of the Cargill terminal’s dubious legality. And what about the small farmers who, having sold out, found themselves profoundly impoverished? Both of these concerns had been fundamental to activists’ case against the soy industry. Greenpeace had produced a short film—titled In the Name of Progress: How Soya Is Destroying the Amazon Rainforest—that highlighted those two issues in stark, accusatory terms. But once the moratorium was signed, they were dropped.

  This, more than anything else, explains the rift between an international NGO like Greenpeace and an impudent local activist like Father Sena. In his view, Greenpeace and the Nature Conservancy had secured a weak agreement. The decrease in deforestation, he thought, was due to the global economic slowdown, not the moratorium. And even if the moratorium was stopping soy farmers from cutting down forest themselves, what about the small farmers they displaced? They were much harder to track. Meanwhile, nothing was being done to mitigate the damage that had already been done—and the Cargill terminal was still allowed to exist.

  “Greenpeace forgot about us,” Sena said. “They used our movement.” They had made heroes of themselves, declared victory, and moved on.

  When Adam later tracked down Andre Muggiati, a forest campaigner at Greenpeace Amazon, he nearly admitted as much. “Edilberto is still a good friend,” he said of Sena. But he said that, for Sena, “the only solution for the problems would be to put Cargill out, to send all the soy farmers back to the south. That is not reasonable. We always knew that at some point we would have to sit at the table with Cargill to get an agreement. If you ask the impossible, you never get to a solution.” Activism could only do so much. “Capitalism and free initiative are legal in Brazil,” he said. “You can’t come to Cargill and say, ‘Go away.’ You cannot go to the soy farmers and say, ‘Return the land to the peasants.’”

  Who could disagree with Muggiati? But however sensible, his words could have come out of Cargill’s own mouth, and so hint at some uncomfortable parallels between the agribusiness giant and the environmental NGOs that opposed it. Both sides had operated with a degree of realpolitik about the possibility for justice in the wake of the soy boom. Both had maneuvered through legal gray areas to advance their cause. Of course, Greenpeace had no hand in overturning the way of life that had sustained the small farmers of Pará. But it did use them as poster children in its campaign, only to discard them once a realistic political goal had been reached. And the goal it achieved—if indeed it was truly achieved—was to protect the forest, not to address the social ills that had gone along with the soy boom. It’s also difficult not to find some irony in a guy from Greenpeace invoking realism and the rule of law—when a good deal of that organization’s public activism depends on idealism and on the targeted flouting of the law.

  Father Sena—militant priest, spitfire idealist, girl-watcher—ended up on the outside. When negotiations for the soy moratorium began, Sena’s Amazon Defense Front had been part of them. But the ADF wanted too much: a ten-year moratorium, extending two years retroactively, instead of the more realistic, yearly-renewable arrangement that was ultimately agreed upon. Sena told us that he had walked away. “We said, ‘Forget it. You can cheat people from the United States, but you cannot cheat us.’” That left Pará’s soy moratorium to be designed by Cargill (of Minnesota) and the Nature Conservancy (of Virginia) and Greenpeace (founded in Vancouver) and a grab bag of other NGOs and agribusiness giants, most of them from the northern hemisphere.

  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 Ambé’s sustainable logging project hopes to establish: local players who have a stake in the forest’s preservation. In the case of Ambé, 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 Santarém 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

  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 workshops full of lead dust and other heavy metals and clouds of who the hell knows what floating through the streets. The water is laced with PCBs and PBDEs and other hazardous acronyms. The air, the water, the dust—in Guiyu it comes with promises of cancer, nerve damage, and poisoned childhood development.

  Exporting toxic waste across borders, especially to developing countries, is supposed to be illegal. The Basel Convention, the treaty that outlaws it, was already nearly twenty years old by the time I visited Guiyu, in 2011. In the case of electronic waste, though, the convention is easy to circumvent. As the green-electronics coordinator at the ever-present Greenpeace has said, “the common way exporters get round existing regulations is to relabel e-waste as second-hand goods for recycling.”

  Of course, it is recycling. Which is another thing, along with the town’s curiously agricultural character, that complicates any appreciation of a place like Guiyu. But whether you consider it a toxic hellhole or a paragon of recycling and resourcefulness, the rivers of junked electronics flow in.

  That it makes economic sense to ship the stuff halfway around the world for recycling is explained first by the low cost of labor here. But you must also consider the volume of empty shipping containers returning to China. Incredible amounts of manufactured goods are sent from China to the West in shipping containers, and since the conveyor belt must run both ways, sending freight back is cheap. The result is that we don’t really buy our electronics from China after all. We just rent them and then send them back to be torn apart.

  India and certain African countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, also get in on the game, but China is the e-waste importer par excellence, and Guiyu is the industry’s crown jewel. Guiyu is so famous for its commitment to electronic waste that it has become a mecca for journalists interested in the topic—which some people here don’t like. In 2008, a crew from 60 Minutes was attacked while filming a television report in Guiyu. Shady business-people don’t want their dangerous, quasi-legal industry exposed. But maybe there was an element of local pride as well. If my town were world famous as a warren of poisonous bottom-feeding, I’d probably be pissed off, too, when people wandered into my workshop with cameras. Whatever the source of the bad vibes, Guiyu sounded unfriendly. I had heard stories of journalists being screamed at, chased, pelted with bricks.

  Guiyu isn’t the only weirdly specialized place in Guangdong Province. Only two hundred miles down the coast is the “special economic zone” that is the city of Shenzhen, one of the most concentrated areas of electronics manufacturing in the world. (It was to companies in Shenzhen, Mr. Han said, that he sold his recycled components.) Shenzhen is home, for instance, to the famous “Foxconn City,” the giant complex where iPhones and a million other things are built.

  From waste recycling to questionable industrial processes to simple carbon emissions, Guangdong is a land to which we outsource not only our manufacturing but also our pollution. The environmental reporter Jonathan Watts put it best, in his book When a Million Chinese Jump: “This is where the developed world dodges its own rules.”

  Then you have Gurao, the Bra Town of Guangdong, just up the road from Guiyu. Passing through Gurao on the bus, I saw billboard after billboard of semi-nude lingerie models. Colossal women in bras looked down from the facades of factory buildings. One lounged next to a violin. Nearly all the models were Western; full hectares of white flesh w
ent by. A rippling male abdomen crowned a pair of tumescent briefs—the work of the Guangdong Puning Unique and Joy Clothing Co. Hanging from the streetlights, where another town might fly banners celebrating a holiday or a music festival, there were pennants with more white people in their undies. The children of Gurao must grow up thinking that without their city to stand in the breach, the Westerners of the world would go completely naked.

  I saw bras, but Cecily smelled a story. Cecily was my fixer and translator, a young Chinese reporter whom I had hired in Beijing. She was intrigued by Bra Town. She wanted us to pose as entrepreneurs interested in importing bras to the United States. That way, she thought, we might get a look inside one of those factories.

  That we would consider working undercover to get an inside look at the presumably legal underwear industry was symbolic of a broader problem: in China, I was not supposed to be a journalist. My tiresome habit of telling myself I wasn’t one anyway made no difference. Several people, professional reporters with years of experience in China, had advised me to travel on a tourist visa, not to be open about my agenda as a writer, and not to do anything that could draw the attention of local authority figures or media, not to mention those unfriendly guys with the bricks in Guiyu.

  As for Cecily, she said I should specify that she was a tourist guide and wasn’t doing any journalistic work. (She was a tourist guide. She did no journalistic work.) And there were larger things afoot. The Chinese government had been spooked by the revolutions of the Arab Spring; before I left the country, it would begin a crackdown that included police intimidation of foreign journalists, and even some violence.