Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Turns out I didn't. In the Amazon, deforestation is a dispiritingly messy subject to un-
pack. Even Adam found the topic surprisingly opaque once he got down to the nitty-gritty
of it for me. The main theme of any in-depth article about deforestation in Brazil, he once
told me, ought to be how frustrating it is just trying to figure out what counts.
Take Nestor's case. You would think a charred stump is a charred stump, but not so.
Nestor was just rotating his crops.
Slash and burn
has a scary ring to it, but around here
slashing and burning is often part of a farmer's yearly routine. The piece of land Nestor was
burning had already been cultivated multiple times. He would grow a crop of manioc—a
root vegetable known elsewhere as cassava or yuca—and then leave the field to become
overgrown with trees and brush while it lay fallow.
Now, several years later, he was going to cultivate it again. To prepare it, he had cut
down the new growth, let it dry for a few weeks, and was burning it off. From a carbon
point of view, his footprint was neutral: the CO
2
going into the air on the day we visited
was CO
2
that had been sucked out of the air by this vegetation over the course of the past
five years or so. True, there was a carbon debt—and habitat loss—from the original estab-
lishment of his farm, but that had been decades ago.
The real argument is over what drives
new
deforestation. And it's not as simple as who's
holding the chainsaw. A person cutting down trees might be there because of government
incentives to encourage the settlement of “undeveloped” areas. A soy farmer may only
have come north because land was too expensive in his home state—or because an Amer-
ican buyer like Cargill has set up shop in Pará. All sorts of things can prompt deforestation
at a distance. A soy farmer using previously cultivated land could argue that he isn't des-
troying the Amazon. But what if the small farmer who sold him that land goes off to clear
new land somewhere else? To whom do you attribute the destruction?
Even if you can answer that question, you are then confronted with the situation that
once an area of rainforest is settled, the settlers themselves become the de facto caretakers
of whatever is left. Landowners in Brazil are subject to a unique forest law that obligates
them to leave 80 percent of their land in native forest. Even giant soy farms aren't allowed
to clear more than 20 percent of their land. (The farming lobby is trying to change this
law.) If the law were effective, it would mean that anyone who cut down twenty hectares
of jungle would end up being responsible for protecting another eighty.
It's hard to imagine a muddier picture. Decades ago, when Nestor first set up his farm,
he might accurately have been characterized as the face of deforestation—sucking the pos-
sibilities of the land, as Father Sena would say. But now Nestor was a local stakeholder
whose livelihood as a farmer depended on resisting the waves of development that fol-
lowed him. His permanence on the land had earned him a place under the Sena Doctrine.
But wouldn't that happen to anyone who stayed long enough?
