Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Gil was everywhere with the iPod Touch. Instead of selling it, he had fallen in love with
the thing and had decided to keep it for himself. Now he roamed back and forth, taking
videos.
Gil had a special connection to this place. His grandfather's family had lived here once,
before it was a protected forest. They had made a settlement of their own, with about a
dozen family members living off a piece of land that Gil's grandfather considered partic-
ularly rich. In the early 1970s, though, the government had decided to protect the area by
creating the Tapajós National Forest, and had expelled many of the people who lived there.
Gil's grandfather had been forced to sell his land.
“It was a reasonable amount of money,” Gil told me. But it had been disastrous for the
family. Instead of farming together, they found themselves looking for new and unfamili-
ar jobs. “Like truck driver, gold prospector, fisherman,” Gil said. One uncle had opened a
brothel and eventually sank into drug trafficking and violence.
Gil didn't think that creating the national forest had been wrong—only that it had been
created on the wrong model. “See, in those years, the policy was based in the USA's Yel-
lowstone,” he told me.
He couldn't have chosen a more relevant example. Yellowstone was the first national
park in the world, and its creation, in 1872, marked the moment in which white Americans
truly fell in love with the splendor of the land they had conquered. But for that love to grow,
the ideal of wilderness as a source of rapture and recreation had to be separated out from
the loathing we all felt for native Americans, whose presence in the West tended to distract
from our John Muir-style reveries.
Muir himself, the St. Francis of the American West and a prophet of wilderness pre-
servation, admitted that he was barely tolerant of the native Americans he encountered. In
1869, he wrote that he would “prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks.” Muir's rev-
erence for what he saw as the natural order of things continues to fuel conservation today,
but it didn't extend so far as to include humans—of any color—as part of the environ-
ment. “Most Indians I have seen are not a whit more natural in their lives than we civilized
whites,” he wrote. “The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild
is unclean.”
Native Americans were excluded from Yellowstone at its creation. Though people had
been present in the area that was to become the park for thousands of years, native Amer-
ican practices of hunting and planned burning were anathema to a view of nature as sac-
rosanct from human involvement. If native Americans had been allowed to remain, they
would have gotten in the way of all the nature white people wanted to appreciate. The cre-
ation of Yellowstone formalized the idea that human beings have no place in a protected
wilderness—unless they are tourists.
