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.
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