Deep in the Brazilian Amazon - Module 2

C2 Proficiency · Gapped Text · Expert Proficiency, Pearson Education

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Deep in the Brazilian Amazon

It is important to acknowledge though, that not everything is getting worse. Some of the campaigning in the past 20 years has worked and there are cautious grounds for hope. Paulo Adario, a veteran ecologist, is one of the individuals to have done most in the service of conservation, and he is happy to bring me up-to-date.

There are hundreds of such tribes in the forest – many of them now enmeshed in 'integration projects' or other demoralising fiascos – but those that most often capture international attention are the uncontacted. There is some dispute, however, as to what exactly is meant by the term.

The best way to think about these few remaining isolated tribes is to imagine a series of concentric circles. There are the tribes that have regular relations with the outside. Then there are a good number of tribes who have very circumscribed dealings with the outside world. Then finally, in the heart of the forest, there are these few remaining peoples with none.

Time on the river is like time at sea. It's measured in the way the light changes the colour of the water. At dawn, there are mists and the river appears almost milky. By noon it is the colour of cinnamon. And then, in the evening, the low sun shoots streaks of amber and gold before the dusk rises up and everything turns to indigo. One such evening, we visited a fisherman.

Tribal leaders have even been to London to complain, saying that these dams will force their people from the land and threaten their way of life. There has also recently been an unprecedented operation to destroy the unlawful gold-mining dredgers that are now killing off river habitats by dredging up silt.

The amount of land that has been covered by concessions for its extraction, together with gas, has increased fivefold in the last ten years – almost 50 percent of the entire Peruvian-owned Amazon. This means that the government has effectively sold off half of the rainforest it owns for this purpose and 75 percent is forecast by 2020.

One reason we struggle to understand the region is that there is so much to take in. And because there has been some good news on the headline problem – deforestation – it has faded in our collective consciousness in the past few years. So it's worth stepping back and reminding ourselves of some of the fundamentals.

In other words, it is the incursions and what follows that have the most impact. But now another problem is causing acrimony, fear and dispute. More than 100 new hydroelectric dams are planned across Brazil and Peru, including the most controversial of all – the Belo Monte Project on the Xingu river.

Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, there are no horizons and so the dawn does not break but is instead born in the trees – a wan and smoky blue. The crazed clamour of the night – growls, hoots, croaks – has died away and for a moment there is almost hush. This is also the only time of cool. Then, suddenly, the great awakening begins and the air is filled with a thousand different songs, chirps, squawks and screeches – back and forth, far and near, all around. Nothing anywhere can prepare you for this unique experience in a supremely challenging part of the world.

The area of the Amazon rainforest is larger than Western Europe and the forest stretches over nine countries. There are approximately 1,250 tributaries that service the main river, 17 of which are more than 1,000 miles long. Roughly a fifth of the earth's oxygen is produced in the Amazon rainforest and more than two-fifths of all the species in the world live there. Surprisingly enough, oil is one of the main resurgent threats to the region.

Major disruption and destruction to the forest usually follows, starting with seismic testing and then helicopters, roads, crews, and so on. And inevitably, there are catastrophic spills and accidents. Health studies have found that 98 percent of the children of the indigenous Achuar tribe have high levels of cadmium in their blood, and two-thirds suffer from lead poisoning. A lawsuit is currently being brought to court by some of their members due to the contamination of the region.

Beatriz Huertas Castillo, a writer and researcher, explains: 'They are indigenous peoples who, either by choice or by chance, live in remote isolation from their national societies. There are at least 14 such tribes in Peru. We think 69 in Brazil. Maybe 100 in the Amazon area as a whole.' They are among the handful of peoples left alive on the planet who have next to no idea of what the world has become and who live as they have done for thousands of years.

'I spoke to Mashco-Piro women when they were first contacted,' says Castillo. 'And they were terrified of disease, of being slaughtered, of their children being taken into slavery. In the past, every encounter has brought terror for them – they have no immunity to our diseases and they were thought of as animals, even hunted. Now they see the loggers and the oil companies coming in a little further every year. And for them it's the same thing so they flee into neighbouring territories.'

The problems of this new threat, as explorer, writer and Amazon expert John Hemming explained, are these: the territories of tribes such as the Kayapo will be flooded; vast amounts of the greenhouse gas methane will be released, due to rotting vegetation; further roads and colonisation will happen in their wake; they change the flow and run of all the river systems, which affects untold numbers of aquatic species, meaning that more food will have to be imported for consumption, more roads will have to be built, and so grimly on.

'Since the 2004 peak of 27,000 sq km of forest destroyed, matters have improved with regard to deforestation,' he says when I call him at his home in Manaus, the great river city right in the heart of the Amazon. 'Last year we only lost 6,500 sq km.' However, that is still an area more than four times the size of Greater London.

His grandfather had been among the first of his tribe to be contacted and his own sons were wearing football shirts; his eldest was training to be a guide. He put it like this: the Amazon matters because right now it is where humanity is making its biggest decisions – actualities that have an impact first on the lives of his children, but eventually on the lives of ours too. To have no view, I realised as I left, amounted to much the same as being a hypocrite.

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