To Run Across the Sea (21 page)

Remove the trees and the average temperature of the area where they once stood increases by 30°F, rainfall declines sharply (by five per cent per year over the last 10 years in some areas recently deforested in neighbouring Bolivia), yet flooding becomes a recurrent hazard, because with the loss of the ‘sponge effect’ of the forest’s root-mat, the soil can no longer contain the excess of water. With the rains, such nutrients as the forest floor contained are instantly washed away, and the laterite, laid bare to the sun, oxidises and loses every trace of fertility. This is no equatorial replay of the slow process of the formation of dustbowls in ruined US prairies: this is instant desert unless immediate and costly counter-measures are taken.

From the time of its discovery until now, as it faces the threat of obliteration, the Amazon jungle has remained a scientific void. Those who have penetrated it—in the main rubber tappers and diamond prospectors—have been acquisitive rather than curious. Rough counts of its fauna have been made. Bates, the Victorian naturalist and contemporary of Darwin, collected 17,000 different insects before giving up, and it has been estimated that there may be 2,000 species of birds.

All the figures attempting to define this vanishing abundance are vague. Forest ecologists at INPA (the National Institute for Amazonian Research) had counted about 400 species of tress growing in a single hectare. New plants and trees were being discovered with almost every week that went by. Even to the scientists it was beginning to appear pointless to continue with the labour of classifying and cataloguing all these living things so soon to vanish.

Where the destruction of trees threatens a commercial resource, the government is sometimes moved to act. In the province of Acre, where the worst deforestation took place, 10,000 Brazil nut-gatherers had lost their livelihood and only a handful of them could find work on the new ranches. A law was therefore passed prohibiting the cutting down of the
castanheiras
. But forest fires are not selective, and as before, the nut trees went with the rest. Where it was possible to leave one standing in isolation it was soon found that such solitary survivors failed to produce nuts. It was discovered that without the presence of certain insects the pollination of their flowers could not take place, and the pollinators had gone with the rest of the forest. Even had nuts been produced, such trees could not have increased their numbers, because this called for the co-operation of a species of rodent, also defunct, which had been programmed by evolution to chew the hard coating off the nuts, and distribute them in places suited to their germination.

These recently discovered mechanisms responsible for the production of the Brazil nut provide a clue to the dimensions of our ignorance of the workings of the forest. Some trees will not fruit without the aid of a single specific bird, others are fertilised by bats, yet others by moths, and a number of seeds receive their germinative impulse in some selected animal’s digestive tract. The macaw, an agent of this kind, is relentlessly hunted for supply to the pet trade, and its disappearance from any area eventually damages that area’s ecology. There is a tree producing pseudo-fruit, with no biological function other than the reward of its private army of insects, kept to ward off the attack of such predators as leaf-cutter ants. Strangest of such arrangements is the case of the
inga edulis
, a gigantic runner-bean, dangling from the tree that bears it in the waters of a creek; the bean can only germinate after a spell in the gut of a fish, which eventually defecates it into propitious mud.

Such are the marvels of these vegetable-animal alliances for survival: the tree providing shelter and food, the animal offering those complex biological services without which the tree could not reproduce. INPA’s Department of Forest Ecology was involved in an experiment to establish plantations of certain valuable trees, such as the rosewood, source of an oil used in the manufacture of perfumes, and exploited to the verge of extinction in its forest habitat. The rosewood project promised success, but seedlings wilted and flagged when transferred to INPA’s facsimile jungle. One of the many defence mechanisms developed by the Amazon jungle is the dispersal of its species, which grow in isolation, sometimes only one to a hectare.

There may exist in these particular trees an inbuilt dislike for the proximity of others of their own kind, causing them to frustrate all attempts to grow them in the nurseryman’s row. So extraordinary is their sensitivity that no more than four trees per acre can be cut down without causing environmental trauma, and when disturbed a tree may suspend its growth—no one knows how—for up to 20 years. ‘The fact is that we don’t really know how to plant forest trees,’ said an INPA scientist. ‘There just isn’t enough money for research.’ INPA employs at present 43 such specialists, although according to Dr Warwick Kerr, its director, a minimum of 1,500 would be required to solve the problem of the forest’s economic development without destroying it.

Above all there was an urgent need for research into the therapeutic utilisation of the many types of chemical defences developed by tropical trees against insect or virus attack. Very few species had as yet been studied, but they had provided quinine, cortisone, new types of oral contraceptives, and what was hoped would prove to be effective anti-cancer drugs. In all such discoveries, the drugs had been found to be in use by the Indians who, it might be supposed, were the possessors of other valuable therapeutic secrets yet to be communicated. To quote Dr Paulo de Almeida Machado, the previous director of INPA, ‘Whatever science can learn before the forest is destroyed will mean the difference between short-term prosperity and sound economic development.’ He added that although Indians might survive, their culture will not.

The approach of Doomsday for the Amazon forest was signalled by the launching of the great road-building programme of the early 1970s intended to slice it into easily accessible segments. This enterprise, undertaken in haste and with small forethought, followed a visit in 1970 by President Medici to the chronically distressed north-east, at that time proclaimed a disaster area after one of the worst droughts in its calamitous history. The President spoke movingly to the large crowds who had flocked into the town of Recife to hear him. By chance he was standing within a few miles of that once enchanted spot in Pernambuco of which Darwin had written in 1832, ‘Forests and flowers and birds I saw in great perfection, and the pleasure of beholding them is infinite.’ Of these Arcadian delights nothing remained, replaced as they were by treeless wastelands, ruined smallholdings among the thorny scrub, and the shanty villages of peasants who had to live on an average of 50 American cents a day.

The President promised, in effect, to spirit these wretched people away from their dour surroundings and deposit them in sylvan glades of Amazonia, where they would receive 100 hectares of land apiece. Along the new highways he proposed to build low-cost but cheerful housing, and supply credits and facilities of all kinds, and thus they would be encouraged to lay the foundations of new and fruitful lives.

As a safety-valve for the chronic poverty of the north-east the project was a failure. The intention had been to settle five million peasants in Amazonia by 1980, but after two years, only 100,000 had come and many of them were already beginning to slip away back to the badlands they had left.

Like poor city-dwellers induced to leave the companionable slums for the aseptic planning of a garden suburb, they soon yearned for the familiar squalor they had left. They lacked the energy and the improvising genius necessary to come to terms with soil that produced two crops—three at most—before giving up the ghost. Rain, the greatest of all blessings in the north-east, was now the enemy. Life had to be shared with a multitude of stinging insects; new sicknesses defied the familiar remedies, and there were snakes in the back garden. Thus the planning floundered and collapsed, leaving Amazonia littered with destitute homesteaders.

The new highways—the desert-makers as they have been called—did nothing to improve the lot of Brazilian subsistence farmers, but they fulfilled the wildest hopes not only of the multinationals, but of a new breed of predators who knew the true facts of the expendability of Amazonian soil and made it clear that they were not there to stay. As one American rancher put it to Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Chairman of Survival International: ‘You can buy the land out there now for the same price as a couple of bottles of beer an acre. When you’ve got half a million acres and 20,000 head of cattle, you can leave the lousy place and go live in Paris, Hawaii, Switzerland, or anywhere you choose.’

Inevitably, these roads open the way to the destroyers not only of trees but of men, for they pass through a number of Indian reserves, promoting the contacts that are so often fatal. Where thought necessary the Indians have simply been picked up and put down elsewhere, despite the fact that the new environment may not provide a living.

Brazil abounds with vigorous and articulate conservation groups, but they are powerless in the presence of one crushing fact: the desperate need of the country’s many poor. In January 1979
O Journal do Brasil
published figures showing that in Rio de Janeiro alone 918,000 people were living in ‘absolute poverty’, and in the city’s total population of nine millions, 27 per cent lived in ‘relative poverty’. These are the statistics that blunt conservationist scruples. There is a constant pressure to develop more sources of food, joined to an irrepressible belief that sooner or later a way will be found to turn the relatively unproductive five million square kilometres of the Amazon Basin into a bottomless larder.

The Government seeks to put a brake on the excesses of ‘developers’ by measures that are too often evaded or ignored. Official approval must be obtained for large-scale forest clearances, but nobody seems to bother. Regulations exist prohibiting the burning-off of forest close to river banks where animals tend to congregate. These go unheeded. Slopes are not allowed to be cleared, because to do so is to guarantee immediate erosion, but in our experience landowners give priority to clearing the slopes on their estates. They do so because it is easier to drag or roll the treetrunks down the slopes and leave them to rot at the bottom, than to go to the trouble of extracting them. A promising law forbade the clearing of more than 50 per cent of any concession, but many methods exist by which it is dodged. A common one is to clear half one’s land in compliance with the regulation, and then sell the forested remainder, a half of which will be cleared by the buyer in his turn—and so on.

Implementation of these laws is left to IBDF, the Brazilian Institute for Forestry Development, but this body is said to possess less than a hundred inspectors to police an area in which 20,000 might be too few. It has been announced that its hand will be strengthened by the end of the year by Brazil’s new independent space satellite, which will report back on violations of the forest code. Here it might be argued that by the time photographic proof of such violations is supplied, the damage will have been done. But how, it may be asked is the feeble David of the IBDF to stand up, if needs be, to such Goliaths as Daniel Keith Ludwig, absolute ruler of an area somewhat larger than Belgium (referred to sarcastically as ‘The Kingdom’ in the Brazilian Press) from which, incidentally, observers are debarred?

IBDF’s one semi-success was with Volkswagen do Brasil, a pigmy by comparison, with a ranch no bigger than Luxembourg. The US Skylab satellite photographed a huge unapproved fire that had been started here, and it was reported that a million adjacent hectares of the forest were alight. Reprimanded for carelessness or wilfulness by the head of SUDAM, the Superintendency for Amazonian Development, Volkswagen’s director is reported to have replied that burning was the cheapest way of clearing land.

Of course it is the cheapest for those who are not there to stay, but the short-term yields they derive are paid for by a huge and irreversible loss suffered by Brazilians who have to live with the results. Ninety per cent of the soil of the Amazon Basin is so poor that it cannot be converted into adequate pasture without the addition of costly fertilisers, and as soon as these fertilisers are no longer forthcoming, the coarse African grass it supports will go. For a multitude of small-scale ranchers three acres of land can hardly feed a single cow, and after two or three years, when the rains have washed the nutrients from the soil, over-grazing and over-trampling take effect and the dust-bowl process begins.

Wild animals are of less than secondary importance in developing countries, and little is said in newspaper polemics on the fate of the animals in the path of the fires. Their lot is death on a hardly imaginable scale. Birds, monkeys, jaguar and deer may escape the racing flames, but most of the Amazon animals, armadillos, anteaters, porcupines, sloths and frogs, are slow-moving and are doomed to incineration. Innumerable bats, whose beneficent function it is to keep insect populations in check, are disorientated by smoke, and fall into the flames. A great variety of small mammals, rabbits, agoutis, pacas, and rodents of all kinds are moved by instinct to take refuge in burrows or in holes quickly scuffled out in the forest litter, and in these they are roasted. Animals that live by, and in the water, otters, water-opossums and fish are doomed, too, not always directly by the fire, but the loss of forest cover, causing streams to overheat and become clogged with algae and silt; devoid therefore of both oxygen and food. An INPA scientist said: ‘We are threatened with possibly the greatest ecological disaster in world history.’ He had calculated that between 5,000 and 20,000 vertebrate animals were killed per square kilometre when the forest burnt down. But the burning goes on.

In only one year, 1975, Amazonia lost four per cent of its trees, and scientist Harald Sioli said that if the rate of destruction was not slowed down, nothing would remain of the forest by 2005. It was a sum that people could do in their heads, but the conclusion was one that few could bring themselves to accept, on the grounds that ‘the authorities’—that disembodied but relatively intelligent force set between them and God—would never be stupid enough to allow this to happen.