Several Sundays ago, I went to the beach by myself. It turned into a landmark day. Totally routine—3 hours’ reading in a solitary folding chair, drinking guaraná, the national soft drink derived from a berry native to Amazonia, gazing out occasionally at the islands off Ipanema—until I decamped. Knapsacking my book (nothing worth a foray to Amazon.com), leaving the chair to be retrieved by the guy who’d rented it to me, I insouciantly threw the empty guaraná cans on the sand as I walked into the sunset.

It had taken nearly three years for my environmental consciousness to ascend to this level.

Why that long I now wonder.

Disclosure: after growing up in Northern California, and having been a link in human chains for Greenpeace, the Abalone Alliance, the Clamshell Alliance, and other pro-earth organizations, I have become a card-carrying neo-born-again anti-environmentalist. Not that I’m against the environment—of all human follies, our destruction of the host organism has got to be about the stupidest. I’ve just run out of enthusiasm for environmentalism. This change came about quickly once I became a resident of the struggling world, a vantage point from which I noticed—belatedly—something odd about the people raising the hue and cry for the environment. Nearly all of them live and thrive in the affluent regions that steadily gobble up 12 to 15 times their equitable share of the world’s resources every day, month, and year, and are responsible for the preponderance of the world’s waste. With environmentalists like these, does a poor planet have a hope? No. In which case, why not admit to ourselves that we care profoundly about the environment, just not enough to give up our privileges and sense of entitlement. That stride taken, we might focus our efforts on the immediate sufferings of people. Particularly people outside the present enviro-bloc, Anglo-America and the EU, where all that hyperconsuming is rationalized as necessary to keep the global economic engine from seizing up.

My thinking took a while to get to this unkind conclusion, and getting there had everything to do with living in Brazil.

One of my first friends here in Rio used to torment me by tossing whatever he no longer saw as useful—candy wrappers, ticket stubs, juice cartons, the plastic sleeve for a new VCR—on whatever ground he then occupied. He enjoyed my horror—couldn’t parse it, but saw it shocked me in some way that was to him ineffable; my gringo brain just couldn’t absorb the fact that people I knew, people I liked, would litter. To him, this outrage was hilarious. Finally, when he littered flagrantly in the presence of his four-year-old son, I asked once the boy was safely home with his mother, “Is that the example you want to set?”

“Yes, that’s exactly the example. If we didn’t throw our trash, the people the city pays to come at night and sweep it up would be out of jobs.”

A perverse logic, okay. But no more contorted than the economy in which it is operating. The two aluminum cans I left on the beach three years later were no doubt collected before I was back on the pavement, by one of a platoon of scavengers who eke out a subsistence by selling trash at the ferro velho—the scrap yard, a kind of Dickensian concern I doubt exists anymore in the affluent world, where lots gets recycled, but little gets reused. Of course those beachcombers could just about as easily dig the cans out of the orange bins staked along the beach. But why should they have to be exposed to the vermin and infection or—as my friend pointed out when I offered that argument—the indignity such rooting entails? For all I knew, he had been so employed himself.

We’re not indifferent to the impact of litter. As we see it, we just have more immediate concerns.

Happily, in regard to this shortcoming as in regard to so many others, we have help from outside.

And that’s a big part of the problem. Environmentalism has been introduced to Latin America largely by the same people who brought down the Monroe Doctrine, gunboat diplomacy, the Alliance for Progress, the Cuban embargo, Ollie North’s mullah-funded freedom fighters, IMF austerity programs, the Washington Consensus, and Dan Quayle’s still-resounding “Wish I’d Learned More Latin” speech.

There are always determined Northerners showing up with carpetbags chock full of bitter pills.

The same week I made my great stride at Ipanema beach, a wonderful example came my way. I received an urgent petition by email: Brazilian congress is on the verge of legislating the development of 50% of Amazon. There may even have been an exclamation point. It was signed by, among others, a brilliant professor of life sciences at a prestigious British university, who was its indirect route to me, and a whole roster of other academics. I was curious, so I right away emailed a query to the petition’s originator. Unsurprisingly, my email bounced back—sender non-existent. And as the immediate-to-me sender soon acknowledged in reply to my obnoxious retort (“think we’re all idiots down here?”), it was “a hoax.” Odd hoax. My guess is that it was some kind of way to collect email addresses for spammage, but who knows. More interesting than any ill intent is the heartfelt appeal’s premise: Brazilians are hellbent on the destruction of the Amazon, so alarmed enviros have good reason to believe just about any outlandish nonsense.

Not wholly unfair. The question of environmentalism in Brazil brings back a throwaway scene in Citizen Kane: the charismatic magnate is holding an impromptu photo-op. As he disembarks from a transatlantic liner, a reporter hollers, “How did you find business conditions in Europe, Mr Kane?”

“With great difficulty.”

Saving the environment is uppermost in few minds down here.

First, there’s not even a word for it in Portuguese—the environment is the “meio-ambiente,” a phrase close to surrounding midst, milieu or medium, all rolled together. Semantic shortages being as they may, the average person here does live in the middle—and at the mercy—of the damn thing. It climbs right in the kitchen window, snatches the last guava off the counter, and hops out.

It swings in trees and yowls at night. It swoops down and eats chicks and ducklings left unattended. And this is in the middle of any city. Early this year I tried without success to rent an apartment in the most densely-populated part of town, Copacabana. Its main rooms opened onto a morro, one of those rounded Yosemite-like stone hill-o-liths that make Rio the most breathtaking urban place in the world. The view of sloping basalt, not 30 yards away, was draped with bromeliads, and monkeys regularly scampered across. My first day of work in São Paulo two years ago, I glanced out my office window after a flash of color; it was a toucan, an actual Froot-Loops bird, alighted right there in a tree. Nearly anywhere in Brazil, even in the world’s second-most populous metro area, one takes this presence of nature for granted, just the way one takes for granted seagulls in Far Rockaway or Audi A6s in Marin.

The ubiquity of nature—a phenomenon easy to confuse with the environment when it’s harassing you while you hang the wash—explains an indifference here as would have in much of the US four generations ago. But the need for environmentalism may have taken longer to catch on here not just because this is a developing country but because development itself took hold here very late. The physical country, like 19th-Century America, remains an infinite landscape, a continent. Seemingly inexhaustible. The idea of nature is inextricable from the place. Artifacts of this link chiefly to the strong presence of non-European cultures. Brazil’s day-to-day existence derives much, in food and other aspects of material culture from the Indians and their connection to place. The orixás, the gods of macumba, Afro-Brazilian spiritism, construed as “divinized forces of nature,” assert themselves constantly, especially in the music that is itself pervasive (samba, for one example, originates in the dance to summon spirits who mediate for the orixás). São Paulo is the largest Japanese city located outside Japan, and the region’s agriculture and horticulture have benefited from this profoundly over the past century.

So, all this suffusion with environment, but so little concern?

The country’s slow emergence into development was not just economic retardation. Portuguese colonialism was about the extraction of resources for the purpose of creating wealth elsewhere. The crown not only did nothing to encourage development here, it did a great deal to discourage, even prohibit it. (Newspapers were banned in Brazil for the first 300 years of colonization, until the king took up roost in Rio to flee Napoleon. No hospital was built until 1840; no university until much later yet.) By the time industrialization arrived, Brazil was nearly four centuries old, and well over a century behind the competition. Still resource rich, but held back by its own founders. And in an understandably big hurry to catch up.

The only questions were how, and how fast?

World Wars, sandwiching worldwide Depression, slowed things down. Then, by the time it was finally Brazil’s turn, it wasn’t Brazil’s turn. Oh, no, the Amazon is sacred to all humanity, didn’t you guys hear? Just like the Mississippi Valley mighta been, except we already exterminated and deported its inhabitants and turned the place into an outlet mall.

Okay, I am not giving due credit to serious environmentalists, inside as well as outside Brazil. How, in the context of such a history, could serious environmentalism get much purchase?

Being heedless but not unmindful of the environment is very Brazilian.

Last year I spent a few months up the coast in Vitória, metro-area pop 3 million. I put up in the middle of the old, decaying downtown, at the foot of a densely forested mountain that was home to three araras, huge green-blue-yellow parrots. Every afternoon, they would swoop out from their tree, crag, ledge wherever araras roost, and come down to eat palm fruits and make a proprietary circuit of the town. My life-list is short, but I’ve seen the festooned glide of the resplendent quetzal, and passed through the Jurassic shadow of the Andean condor. These Brazilian birds inspire no less awe. When they screech, everyone would look up, sees the awesome swift movement of the national colors and the long trailing tail, and stand transfixed, mouth agape. Lifelong residents of Vitória don’t get inured to the spectacle. When I learned that these three araras are the three remaining on the island the city occupies, I remarked with some anguish to the friend who shared that information—just as the trio had passed over us in a park—how this must mean they’d be the last last, that while there were doubtless other araras in other places, we were seeing the end of the endemic line. It was clear this prospect had not occurred to him. We talked extinctions, with which he was plenty familiar, and the notion of critical mass, with which he was not. Seeing how much he was affected, I regretted having said anything.

One of my favorite couples has a farm outside São Paulo. It’s a family farm to which the generations have added their embellishments, culminating in a spectacular 18-going-on-36-hole course that’s a favorite with Bill Clinton and other dubious celebs. Yet nothing that’s been done to spruce up the place has been allowed to interfere with its serving as home to a herd of 80-100 capybaras. This is not because they’re legally protected (they were protected by the family before federal protection was brought to bear); not because they are droll and picturesque, and when they dive into the river transform from the world’s largest rodent into a mini-hippo, just eyes and nostrils above an otherwise undisturbed surface; it’s because they are part of the place. They dig stuff up, shit everywhere, make a mess, and can be a nuisance in numerous ways. That’s immaterial. They’re there. It’s taken for granted they’re staying. An element of the landscape, an article of faith.

Given the other contradictions embodied in Brazil—birthplace of fruit-as-millinery and of fute-volei, a logic-defying sport game played with a volleyball net, a soccer ball, and all body parts but the hands—it is no surprise that the distinct mindsets vivified by the araras and the capybaras coexist.

They coexist, however, across the society much more than within the individuals who compose it. The environmentalists are a minority. College students. The affluent and moderately affluent. Probably a demo approximate to what one would have isolated as “environmentalists” in the US as Ike was leaving office. People who had read Rachel Carson and had heard of Jacques Cousteau. My sampling on the environment question, like that on all questions, is crude, but crudely representative of the population: 7-10% rich people, 36-40% upper-middle- and middle-class people, the majority working-class to destitute. The majority look at environmentalism as a luxury good much like the others heedlessly consumed in front of them by the characters on the novellas. Out of their reach, for another class of people, and worked into the plot so as to trigger the masses’ longing for whatever the sponsors sell. Environmentalism is about as in-reach an ambition as a fully-loaded Accord.

A broader majority, inclusive of many in the middle class, who may in fact drive the Accord—second-hand, patched vinyl interior—see “environment” simply as a place they’ve never been. And are unlikely to go. Among the couple dozen people I know who’ve made an excursion to the Amazon (per person/dbl occupancy, inside cabin, US$4K and up, and that is not Abercrombie & Fitch), only two are Brazilians. More than the price is prohibitive: Manaus, the usual start- or end-point for an Amazon package, lies as distant from São Paulo and Rio as the Arctic Circle does from Manhattan. The unfamiliarity of Brazilians here in the built-up southeast with their country’s great wilderness tract is as unnoteworthy as a Nevadan’s ignorance of Alaska.

Which wilderness state is a good focal point for comparative environmentalisms. Just as Alaskans evince suspicion, even paranoia, with regard to the intentions of outsiders in general, environmentalists in particular (that lower-48-wide conspiracy to thwart the opulent indolence that is Alaska’s destiny), Brazilians come up with some great stuff when the topic is the Amazon. I have been told more than once, by educated Brazilians, that the United States owns a bigger-than-Massachusetts (scale mine, though the parcel is always said to be a rectangle, this apparently being a particularly sinister shape) bio-techno-petro-ranch in the Amazon basin, covertly acquired during the reign of the military dictatorship (the one here, I ask, or the one in Crawford?—could make a big difference in the mortgage rate). The intent of this clandestine land-grab/swindle varies: staging area for ultimate takeover of Latin America (bit late, really), mining (not an easy activity to conduct in secret on a profitable scale), and my personal fave, isolation of all those fabled Amazon medicines that will hold up the specter of eternal life before our Anglo-Saxon descendants (this cutting insidiously into Brazil’s area of tech dominance, cosmetic surgery)—before the Brazilians can take time out from polishing the World Cup to secure the patents.

As paranoid fantasies go, more fun than some bitter, cuckolded presidential-hopeful senator’s vast right-wing conspiracy. It could make a second sequel to The Boys from Brazil. Larry Olivier brought off mothballs to play the CEO of Pfizer; carnivalesque. And more diverting yet if you see the credentials of some people who buy into it.

Why do they?

One reason—the big reason—is that for Brazilians as for most of the world, The Amazon is more myth than reality.

As already noted, “the environment” means, for the vast majority here, either the Amazon or places that look a lot like it, but less menacingly vegetated. Moreover, this limited view seems to be held by a vocal faction outside Brazil, who regard that region, and Brazil’s apparently lamentable stewardship of it, with anxiety. That e-petition I got courtesy of all those European professors is just one of myriad instances I confront, and have to explain, of how foreign environmentalists are even more myopic about Brazil’s environments than the indifferent natives. After I researched, per my slovenly methodology, the bogus e-petition, a well-wired Guernica associate tracked it down for me. The appeal apparently originated in 2000, when the Brazilian congress did briefly contemplate legislation easing the limitation on development of private real estate in Amazonia to 50% of an owner’s rainforest acreage, rolling back from 20%. How an email floats around the internet for 5 years mystifies; the web is a scary place. Cyberflukes aside, the “explanation” posted at snopes.com provides a streaky window on the Amazon problem:

There is indeed “only one Brazilian rainforest” — in the Amazon, an area twice as large as the country of France and the home to about half of all the plant and animal species in the world. The Amazon was relatively untouched until the 1970s….

Erroneous, like so much “information” posted on the internet, but so what? I grab hold of this reference for two reasons. First, it’s typical of grand pronouncements about Latin America by those who in most cases have never been here—based on stuff the writer thinks he knows only because he’s heard it so many times. Second because, anti-environmentalist as I’ve become, I still believe environmentalism loses its ground, becoming mere sentimentalism about “nature,” when it shows disregard for the facts. The facts being:

•Brazil contains multiple rainforests, not just one. The mata Atlântica—the coastal rainforest, a long way from the Amazon—greeted the first Portuguese as a curtain of hardwoods stretching uninterrupted from São Paulo to Bahia. Much of it is now gone. Much of it is now still standing, some within sight of my desk. Indeed, more of the square-meterage within the city limits of Rio de Janeiro is still occupied by this magnificent rainforest than by asphalt, concrete, and sandy beach combined. In all the states where it stands, the mata Atlântica is protected.

•The percentage of the number of plant and animal species found in the Amazon is, whatever its absolute numerical value, significant. Given that science concedes that it has catalogued but a fraction of the species in the Amazon, and done only slightly better outside, what “half” means is up for grabs. The citation of contrived figures undercuts an environmentalist argument, which ought to be inherently scientific.

•And the substantively vague part: that all-purpose disclaimer “relatively.” Something is relatively this or that relative to something else. Relative to itself later on? To the world’s other massive rainforest basins at the time? Whichever the writer thinks he means, the rape of the Amazon was well underway by the late 19th Century, let alone by the 1970s. It was only a century later, in those 1970s, that those pesky Brazilians got significantly into the act.

And that timing is a major sticking point. Maybe it’s this latest chapter our environmentalist friends object to? Local participation? This is what people here believe, in large numbers, and with compelling reasons.

For the record: there was, back in the 1880s and 1890s this thing called a rubber boom. It made the papers. It’s what put Argentina on the skids and put a lot of Europe’s and North America’s great-grandparents on the road. The French, Belgians, English and Americans, the Goodriches, Goodyears, Firestones, Michelins, and Continental Tyres of the fin de siècle had a good run up the Amazon. And while they were in there, relatively untouching the place, the action largely left out the home team (except the Indians enslaved, dismembered, and killed—see Roger Casement’s unflinching reports to Her Majesty’s government—who, while a major beneficiary of this pillage tut-tutted dutifully in response). Eventually, the Europeans stole young rubber trees and in one of the early feats of industrial espionage moved the whole smelly business off to where they had other natives really under the boot heel, in Southeast Asia. Brazilian rubber collapsed. (As has, thanks to the Europeans’ knack for neo-colonialism in places like Kenya, Indonesia, and until recently the WTO, Brazilian coffee and Brazilian sugar.)

So tires came from elsewhere, and the auto industry kept cranking. As it exploded, Brazilians were again left overwhelmingly out of the oil exploration in the Amazon to mid-20th Century, when one of the country’s one visionary dictator set out to nationalize the game.

The point being not that snopes.com’s provision of sincere, though misleading, online info is insidious agitprop. It’s the more reckless kind of prop: well-intentioned off-the-cuff ignorance. Of which environmentalism seldom suffers a drought. Too often its ignorance has been lavished on the developing nations whose environments the well-intentioned see it as their manifest destiny to save.

Latin America, as outlined, has particular reason to greet this with its characteristic polite reserve. Its history of soliciting/taking/accepting/having imposed on it guidance from the other hemisphere is spotty at best. After enduring the battery of insults and indignities and cynical “assistance programs” only partially listed, and still producing great dance records, is a country like Brazil being unreasonable to say, “Why would we want to listen to you people? We’ve heard it all before.”

Of course, Brazilians—the ruling class by connivance, the mass by acquiescence—let that hemispheric inequity, and the attendant pillage, go on a long time. The basic issue in Brazil, then and now, is—before social equity, education, health care, the arts, etc., and environment—development.

Just as with the example of America’s own Amazon, the Fiftieth State. Imagine what would have been the attitude of the US, back when Alaska was admitted (much more recent than we might think—Jackie and Sister were already plotting to redecorate the White House), had the advanced, industrialized, educated, European and Europeanized world—decided for us that we were too benighted to know what to do with this huge pristine wilderness, and had to be led by the hand. (OK, we were, we ought to have been, but that’s another tirade for another pile of HTML.) Such guidance, paternally offered to a country in which the suggestion that a neighbor’s above-ground septic system is a bit funky will be followed quickly by a discharge of firearms, would not sit well. On top, factor in the source: a cluster of privileged nations that have, in their epic rapaciousness, laid waste to their own natural patrimony. Eradicated their continent’s indigenous species except sewer rat, felled its primary forests to build fleets of war and commercial takeover (said fleets more often than not burned or sunk by the builders’ neighbors, leaving the builders nought but deforestation), and fouled the waters so rankly that an industry of potable ferments and spirits arose only because every other liquid in reach was more toxic than alcohol. Would it be entirely ill-mannered of the nation on the receiving end of this cartel’s advice to say, “we’ll get back to you on that”?

Just like environmentally-minded Alaskans, many Brazilians who do think about environmental issues, and who don’t incline toward crackpot conspiracy theories, politely wonder why it is that so relatively few Amazon-crazed Americans exhibit any interest in restoring the wonders of the high-grass prairie (ever see pictures of that? me neither—our great-great-great grandparents eradicated it before Matthew Brady could get there to preserve an image of that ocean of 8-foot grasses, unique in all the world, just teaming with them plant and animal species). Or in merely preserving the rare, surviving botanical complexes of the canyons increasingly cluttered with the incongruous architectures of Bel Air. It’s a fair thing to wonder, be your position Alaska or Brazil.

Yet these same sincere first-world zealots, in hordes, exhibit a frantic anxiety about the far-flung reaches of the Amazon, which has in the world’s media-life become less a place than a slogan (and, with dubious irony, a web outfit charged with converting trees into the latest retread by Nicholas Sparks and glosses on The DaVinci Code). Could it be this crusade is appealing because….it’s just simply easier than tackling a problem on your own watch? It’s a hobby? That’s what I try to reassure my friends. That there is no real malevolence at work.

But the Brazilians I hear from don’t altogether buy that. The pattern is too clear. “Environment” is just another guise for the obsession the Europeans and English-speaking world-wide have with telling others what’s good for them. Religion once worked, but then crapped out; anti-Communism worked so well that it became obsolete; military force went out of style, except as applied in the regions where people practice indefensible religions and cruelly force women to wear unrevealing get-ups; the economic experiments carried out down here over 30 years have all crashed and burned. Happily, “Environment” still packs a wallop when the object is keeping our little brown brothers in line. Best thing about it is that the spokesmodels are all these hip, super-intense, inarticulate kids with rings in their noses and stuff. No ugly, shriveled Bill Buckley types need besmirch our screens.

Yo, Diego, wanna come on MTV and do a non-speaking to help me shoulder White Man’s Burden, oof, yup, got it on straight? OK, which one’s Camera 2, let’s roll tape. The actual environment championed is as remote from its overexposed First World champions as the River Amazon is from me and my neighbors—it’s an ideal having all the tangible immediacy that a landmine had for Princess Diana. (The last boom you hear may not be a claymore.) All that’s left to do is convert the veinous contour of the river system into some kind of leaf-logo. The Amazon as universal rallying cry and pure symbol.

Beautiful, really. A cabal of corporate PACs and anti-environmental lobbyists, if they had the organizational skills and the brains, could hardly put together a better scheme to thwart the aims of the responsible ecologically-minded forces in this part of the world.

So, until environmental regard for the larger world matures in the First World, it may be a good thing that the majority of Brazilians do not much ponder the environment-as-such. To be honest, which is no more my policy than to be fair, it’s a good thing we’ve got those earnest white teens and MTVers with piercings and dredlocks to chant environmental mantras. Just the way it did in the industrialized world, environmentalism can probably make inroads here fastest as a fashion thing. Remember the ‘70s—macramé, granola, posters of breaching whales? They’re alive and well in certain enclaves in Brazil.

I think back fondly to that era, and its wide-eyed enthusiasm, every time I’m walking home late and encounter a squad of orange-reflecto-suited workers rhythmically push-pulling their brooms. A wistful, nostalgic bossa nova to ready the place for another day of our dutiful petty consuming.

After 10 years as a literary agent in film and television, Jess Taylor went into voluntary exile in 2002. He lives in Rio de Janeiro.