Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Everyone knows forests are good and deforestation is bad. Forests are habitat. Forests
absorb carbon dioxide and forestall global warming. But not everyone knows that cutting
them down and burning them not only releases carbon dioxide into the air but also creates
local feedback loops that cause the forest to die back even further, meaning more habitat
loss and more CO
2
emissions. The Amazon, at ten times the size of Texas, give or take a
couple of Texases, has so much forest that to cut it back is to set off what some have termed
a
carbon bomb,
with global consequences.
I had come to Brazil to see the burning fuse on that tremendous carbon bomb. There
was only one catch: this probably wasn't it. You could even argue that this blackened, boot-
melting wasteland, with its phantom trees and prowling flames, was protecting the forest
from something even worse. Here, near the joining of the Amazon and one of its greatest
tributaries, the people standing in the way of the rainforest's destruction sometimes looked
a lot like they were cutting it down, or setting it on fire.
India was supposed to be next. India, with the Doctor, married, for our honeymoon. But
the Doctor had met me on the wharf when the
Kaisei
made San Diego, and called it off. A
chasm opened in the ground and swallowed the world. It wasn't me, she said. But still. No
wedding. No marriage. My life evaporated in a single afternoon.
I took it hard. The global environment, formerly such a candy store of problems, now
lost its appeal. Even climate change and mass extinction seemed pretty minor next to the
growing monument of my heartache. Yet books must be written. Who would take up the
gospel of pollution tourism if I let it drop? I ditched India for the meantime and made for
the Amazon, a fugitive from my own despair.
My friend Adam came with me. Or maybe I should say that I went with him. Ostensibly
he was coming so we could shoot a television news piece in Brazil. We had collaborated on
that kind of work before. But I also suspected that, unlike me, Adam
wanted
to go to Brazil.
He may have thought, too, that I could use a little support. Left to my own devices, I might
spend the entire Amazon trip in a hotel room, under a mosquito net, watching whatever
passes for cable TV down there.
Friends—they're always trying to encourage you, and to convince you that you're not
incompetent and unlovable and doomed to failure. Why can't they just butt out? On the
other hand, with Adam on board, I could renounce all the detailed background research that
I was going to blow off anyway. What was I going to do—crack open the Amazon with a
week's googling? Screw that.
