Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing touted as rainforest enemy number one, and Greenpeace activists were crawling over
the Cargill terminal building—in much the same way as they had crawled over the ma-
chinery of the oil sands mines—and demonstrators in the UK were showing up at McDon-
ald's dressed as chickens to protest the use of Brazilian soy as chicken feed. The soy rush
was on.
The highway in the dark. BR-163. The kilometers ticked by. This close to Santarém, the
road was paved and free of potholes. Our driver sped south with abandon. He was a cheery,
hulking man whose nickname translated as “Mango.”
Locations on the road south of Santarém are found not by signs or named roads but by
their kilometer number. We were headed for a turnoff somewhere in the low 70s. There,
we would meet some people who spent their days ripping trees out of the rainforest. It was
all perfectly legal, though—part of a sustainable logging project, and nothing to get upset
about, unfortunately.
Dawn brightened by increments behind the tinted windows of Mango's car. We saw
where we were. The rainforest. Right! After a couple of days in Santarém, a morose for-
eigner could almost forget that he had come here to see the jungle, to walk around inside
the vast hydrological pump that is the Amazon, which lifts and distributes an ocean's worth
of water across the Americas, shaping and driving weather patterns around the continent.
Now, the Amazon canopy flew past, mist rising among the treetops. On the right, at the
boundary of the Tapajós National Forest, trees approached to the edge of the road. Gil
squinted through his window, looking for kilometer markers. On the left, the vista modu-
lated between forest and rangeland—and then would fall away into the flat blankness of a
soy field: mile-long rectangles of bare earth, stretching away to a residual wall of forest in
the distance.
We reached the logging camp at around seven in the morning. The loggers were meeting
in a bare, wooden room in the main building. Men and women in hard hats and work
clothes stood in a circle and made announcements. There was laughter and applause. They
joined hands and said a prayer. Then we went out and got into the back of a large, covered
truck and bounced and shuddered down a rutted dirt road in the direction of the Tapajós
River, into the heart of the national forest. We were riding with the Ambé project.
The idea of logging in a protected forest is probably abhorrent to most people, at least
those who aren't loggers. After all, what's
protected
supposed to mean? Here in the Tapa-
jós, though, a collective of people who live on the margin of the forest have been allowed a
“sustainable” logging concession. The idea is that this will offer them alternatives to slash-
