Vilifying the Deforester: 9 days with Amazonian Cowboys

Jump-off 2 was a 9-day stint into the Apuí territory of the eastern Amazon, an ironic trade of Suruí Indians and tribal tattoos for Apuí cowboys and cattle ranchers. There were lassos and cattle stampedes, electric eels and waterfalls, tarantulas and pick-up trucks, and as always lessons learned from the ground up.

I set out at 5 am with two other researchers on the two day trek from Manaus to Apuí. The first step is a ten hour boat ride down the Amazon River, which fulfilled just about every childhood fantasy I’ve had about researching in the Amazon. Boarding an old boat at sunrise and swiftly cruising down the black glass river, with absolutely nothing but jungle and canopy rushing to the banks to watch you pass. The red river dolphins rushed out of the water, flipped and dived back in every few meters, and florescent birds landed on the deck for a brief second before hopping back into their canopies.

Unfortunately, the river dream, only gets you half way there. It pulls up unceremoniously to a small town called Nova Apuana where there is one hotel with ten beds, and a juice stand to hold you over until day 2 of the journey.  The only way out to Apuí from here is by dirt road, with a local named Jaime who has conveniently monopolized the “transit system” with his crap-mobile (a bright green 1990 Ford pick-up truck, complete with orange fur seats and an engine held together by duck tape.)

The road took 9 hours (complete with surprise tarantulas that crawled out from beneath the seats within the first hour). First we lost the muffler and exhaust, then went the clutch (we drove six hours in one gear), then a gasoline leak, then the breaks burst, and finally, a solid 2 hours stuck in a muddy red ditch. The only good thing to come out of the crap-mobile was a marked increase in my Portuguese profanity prowess.

Pulling into Apuí was like pulling into an alternate Amazonian universe. The Green canopies and jaguar filled forests were long abandoned for the dirt roads and scorched earth which stretched on for miles, all cleared for the thousands of cattle that roamed lazily about in every direction.

As it turns out, Apuí, is an example of completely perverse government policies. In the 70’s Brazil decided it wanted to settle the Amazon, but the only way to get people up there was the promise of free land and prosperity. So they said, “Hey kids, if you head north we’ll give you a ton of land ‘FO free” and all you have to do to earn the land title is deforest as much as you can every year and start some “productive agriculture”. Yea yeah, don’t worry we’ll give you roads and schools and doctors and stuff too.. all in good time.” And so an exodus of land grabbers started north and formed municipalities like that of Apuí with the hope of a bright new future as farmers of the North.

Thirty yeas later, there is ONE horrendous road, with ONE horrendous driver (Jaime and the Crap-mobile). There is a makeshift hospital somewhere that people are afraid to use because it is so poorly staffed and equipped. Most people drop out of school at age 13, and the agriculture was replaced within seconds by cattle when everyone realized that Amazonian soil is too acidic to grow anything on. But the deforestation continues at breakneck pace by the local inhabitants and their families because at the very least the people there want to maintain legal rights to their land, in hopes that they’ll at least have legal land and lots of cows to pass onto their kids.

Seeing all of this I couldn’t help wonder where it was I got my image of what deforestation really is. I think immediately of a brilliant friend of mine who once jokingly said, “Most all of my moral values came from Fern Gully,” and she’s pretty much right. When we were young, we learned that all deforesters were evil lumber jacks with bad morals and no teeth, when we got older we learned that the evil toothless lumberjacks were actually foreign corporations fueling the illegal timber trade and THAT seemed like a bad guy worth fighting. Somewhere along the line though, we successfully vilified ALL deforesters based on Robin Williams and the batty rap.

But last week, I sat in the middle of the Amazon, at a local birthday party, with a three-year-old child bouncing on my lap. The birthday boy, turning 20, wore a cowboy hat and Gaucho’s and a gold belt buckle in the shape of bullhorns. He passed me his second daughter as well (she was five), and told me about his most recent job.  He had been paid 500 bucks to go out and deforest 20 hectares for some rich cattle rancher that wanted to illegally expand his territory. And so under the cover of night, a group of six or seven 20-yr-olds, rushed into the forest with chainsaws to earn next month’s rent.

“What would you do?” he asked me. “There’s no other option out here, I’m 20 with two kids, and no other form of income, and nobody’s gonna come help now…”

With at least twenty new questions, I am no closer to closing my research, but am taking a welcome reprieve from cobras and tarantulas to head northeast… way northeast, like Scotland northeast! After a quick pit stop in Rio I am off to the land of whisky and kilts to celebrate the wedding of the one and only Lauren Valenta, and share a week of fabulousness with Team Valenta before jumping back into research at the government level in Brazil’s capital.