Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Rick's problem wasn't with the fact of logging, but with how it was done. He couldn't
abide waste. Huge amounts of wood had been wasted to achieve economies of scale. “It
was so cheap here for perfect logs. It was the same in Michigan a hundred years ago. You'd
lose money if you touched anything but the filet,” he said, referring to the large, straight
section at the bottom of the tree. The rest of the tree, from the lowest branch on up, was left
to rot. “Billions and billions of board feet get wasted. I could build entire industries off the
waste here, if I could just get access. It drives me crazy. I've been trying for years to see if
I could get ahold of the tops left over by loggers—just their leftovers. And you can't do it.
It just rots. There are so many rules, it's…” He grabbed his head. “It's Brazil.” Sometimes
entire forests were wasted. He had once visited a large bauxite mine nearby. Bauxite, the
ore from which aluminum is derived, is big business now in the Amazon, and multinational
companies cut down large tracts of forest to begin their open-pit mines.
“They had these piles of logs,” Rick said. “They were prepping to
bury
them. It re-
minded me of pictures from Auschwitz. And can you get those logs? No.”
He was so passionate about waste that he had started a Brazilian subsidiary based on it.
The concept was to take leftover sawmill logs and use them to custom-build timber-frame
houses, turning scrap into a luxury product. Rick nodded his head toward Tang, who had
grown up nearby. “He's been building boats since he was three years old. He's one of the
best timber framers in the world,” he said. “So the idea was to use all that local talent that's
here, and then use some resources that are being wasted. Not just turn the forest into a com-
modity.”
He had called his local company Zero Impact Brazil. The lumberman was trying to turn
over a new leaf. He admitted, though, that he had made most of his money on the commod-
ity side: “For a while there, I was the largest buyer of forest products in Santarém.”
Now that was all over. The housing boom had crashed, and the market for exotic floor-
ing had gone with it. The entire timber industry had died back. Tang told us that over the
last five years, two-thirds of the sawmills in the area had closed. Logging trucks had gotten
scarce.
I stared into my coffee cup. Let this be a lesson to you, I thought. Never wait to see a
rainforest being logged out of existence, because one day you'll wake up and it will be too
late.
“Yeah,” Rick said. “Lots of money got dumped in here from all over the world. Big in-
vestments. They come here with real big eyes.” And like so many others, they had gotten
burned. “The typical business model in the Amazon,” he said, “is you go there with a lot of
money—and you leave broke.”
