Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
anything.” He claimed that the soy farmers were able to thrive only because of all the fer-
tilizers they used.
He said, too, that such large, open tracts of land changed the winds and the temperature
around them, and that the simple absence of shade made life harder. Where once they had
walked great distances in a day's work, the wide expanses of the soy farms meant less pro-
tection from the punishing Brazilian sun—and thus less walking.
We asked Nestor why he hadn't sold. Buyers had been offering big money. He said that
wasn't important. He didn't like money.
“If you don't like money,” I said, “then we won't bother paying for the beers.”
He laughed. “We like a
little
money.”
Now the ones who had sold their land and moved to Santarém regretted it, he said. They
wanted to come back. Another small farmer down the road told us the same. “Many think
that when they move to town, the money they got will never run out,” he said. “They go to
town, buy a house, a TV set, a refrigerator. But they never got an education, so they can't
get a job. When the money runs out and they have no means to work, they regret selling
the land.”
We never stopped hearing about the families who regretted selling—from Nestor, from
other farmers, from Father Sena. Here, people worried less about soy's effects on the forest
than about its effects on their society, about the ways it had impoverished the people who
had sold their farms.
“Now they are after a small plot of land and can't find one,” Nestor said. “Their daugh-
ters became prostitutes. Their sons became glue-sniffers.”
Gil said it was the same as when his grandfather had been bought out of his home in the
Tapajós National Forest. “They ran out of money right away. It happened to most of my
uncles.”
Another interesting thing about Nestor was that his farm was on fire.
Much of our conversation took place in the middle of a smoldering field, similar to the
one in which I would later melt the soles of my boots, staring at those ghostly, tree-shaped
piles of ash. The fire was the reason we had stopped to talk to Nestor in the first place.
I was here to see some deforestation, dammit, and if a field of slashed-and-burning trees
wasn't deforestation, then I didn't know what deforestation was.
