Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Gil met us for breakfast at the hotel. As we planned our day over coffee and pastries, a
muscular, middle-aged American man approached our table and started talking windsurf-
ing with Gil. The American was wearing flip-flops and shorts, and had long, curly gray-
blond hair and a deep, gravelly voice. A surfing buddy of Gil's, I thought. The subculture
of Amazonian beach bums—one that I hadn't known existed two days earlier—was grow-
ing every day.
Then he turned to me, a business card in his hand. It was Rick. The man from Michigan
who owned his own rainforest. On two days' notice, he had decided to come down to meet
us in Brazil. He said there were a lot of misconceptions out there about the Amazon and
about logging, and evidently he thought my presence in Santarém was a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to get his story out.
I don't know what I had expected Rick to look like—a doughy guy in a polo shirt and
khakis?—but it wasn't this. With his stony features and huge arms, he looked like a muscle-
bound Gary Sinise. Or like someone who might choose to beat the crap out of the real Gary
Sinise. He was accompanied by one of his few remaining local employees, a smart, under-
stated young man whom Rick called Tang. They got some coffee and breakfast and joined
us at our table.
Rick lived wood. His company imported wood to the United States, processed it, and
sold it as exotic flooring. The business had been driven by the cheap money of the hous-
ing bubble, he said. “People building ten-thousand-square-foot houses because they could,
putting in exotic hardwood floors because they could.”
He got down to the business of misconception-correcting. “On TV in America, they
used to show some burnt, dying wasteland, and they'd have a logging truck driving through
it,” he said. “The assumption is that loggers cleared it. That they just nuke the place. But
that's not the case.”
Of all the trees growing in the rainforest, Rick told us, only five or six species were
commercially viable. So logging in the Amazon had always been extremely selective. “If
there were no cattle ranching, and no soy, the average person wouldn't be able to tell that
one single log had been cut around here. Because there's no market for 94 percent of the
forest.”
Rick knew, though, that it was more complicated than that. “The worst thing loggers do
is make roads,” he admitted. And that created access for commercial agriculture. We later
spoke to one of Rick's colleagues on this point. “Loggers don't destroy the forest, but they
open the door,” he said. “We are like high-class gangsters. We come into a museum, but we
only steal the one multimillion-dollar painting. Then we leave the door open, and everyone
else comes in after us, and they take everything. Even the lightbulbs.”
