SOYMAGEDDON - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - page 141

forest. There are also some sad-faced Croatians thrown in for good measure. It was the
nineties, after all.
Michael falls to his knees, pounding the earth with his fists. Then the Amazonians, the
Africans, and the Croatians fall to their knees and begin pawing at the ground. Soon, every-
one is grinding their fingers through the soil, shaking fistfuls of dirt at the sky.
A mighty wind begins to blow. (They actually show the planet from space, engulfed by
the mighty wind.) Michael is now in full Christ mode, standing with arms outstretched,
holding on to two twisted tree trunks to keep from being blown away by the righteous hur-
ricane he has summoned. And then—wait for it— time begins to run backward. In Africa,
the elephant resprouts its tusks and hops up, newly unmurdered. Michael Jackson and the
downtrodden peoples of the Earth are undoing all the damage. All hell unbreaks loose.
“ Where did we go wrong? ” he screams. “ Someone tell me why! ” The meaningless lyrics are
paired with images of meaningless fantasy. Smokestacks suck their own filth out of the sky.
In the Amazon, two local lumberjacks look on in astonishment as their work is undone, a
massive tree lifting magically into the air and rejoining its stump. We cut to a close-up of a
logger's awestruck face and see—
It's Gil.
We paused the video. On the screen, video-Gil stared up at the magic un-logged tree.
Next to the computer, real-life Gil stood with a gleeful I-told-you-so look on his face.
“ AAAGGHH! ” he screamed.
All week, he had been spinning his story about having been in a Michael Jackson video,
but we had never considered the possibility that it was actually true. Finally I had called
his bluff—and there he was, on YouTube, intercut with the King of Pop's righteous convul-
sions. The young Gil Serique, son of the Tapajós, with more than ten million views.
Cargill said we could visit. It had taken a week of phone calls and e-mails to exotic places
like São Paulo and Minnesota to convince them we were harmless. The only reason they
relented, I think, was that we told them we were shooting a television piece for an Americ-
an news program, which was true.
It felt like a get. We had secured access to the Amazonian terminal of the largest private
company in the United States, the driver of the Santarém soy bubble. This was ground zero
for the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, a match held to the carbon bomb's fuse. In
terms of habitat destruction and climate change, this was the temple of doom.