As I’m writing this, it’s still 2019. The year is not over, but it can already be considered a catastrophic one for the Brazilian Amazon. I spent much of it in the Tupinambá village of Cabeceira do Amorim, inside the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve in western Pará. Nearly every night, Ezeriel and I would watch Jornal Nacional in the living room of his home, a place of unplastered walls and usually crisscrossed with hammocks of the most diverse colors, sizes, and shapes. There isn’t even a bed in the room Ezeriel shares with his wife, the cacica Estevina, an important Indigenous leader. His sons and daughters have already left the nest and started families of their own. Some live in the city of Santarém while others moved to Manaus or Macapá. Many still live in the village and have become excellent hunters. Every night they return to their childhood home with their spouses and children, bringing fish and game to share for dinner.
A few of them join Ezeriel and me as we watch the news of the surge in deforestation currently taking place in the Amazon, our mouths agape. Ezeriel raises an eyebrow. The director of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which is also responsible for monitoring forest fires and other destructions of rainforest habitat, was on a national network calling President Jair Bolsonaro “pusillanimous and cowardly” after the president questioned the institute data. Since the beginning, his administration has been dismantling Brazil’s environmental protection agencies. Quietly, as if holding something back, Ezeriel mentioned that loggers were looking to resume their activities inside the reserve, which he and many other Indigenous Tupinambá and Kumaruara people claim as ancestral territory.
These are the same logging companies that have been devastating the Tupinambá territory, as well as that of other Indigenous and riverside peoples in the region, for decades. Now they even have the support of some local residents, and logging has resumed to the east, in Nova Canãa. The Tupinambá, with their twenty villages, are concerned, which is why they want to mark the boundaries of their territory clearly, to manage it autonomously and expel the loggers. But the wind is not at the backs of those striving to defend the rivers and rainforests.
There’s the data collected by satellites and there are the daily personal experiences of destruction. It is precisely in the tension between these two scales that I’m trying to write about the ongoing disaster, about the fate of the rainforest and its ways of life. Sheer numbers can’t do it. They don’t communicate enough to fully account for what’s going on in the Amazon today.
Transforming the Rainforest into Fields of Soy
A few days after watching Bolsonaro’s crusade to deregulate the lumber industry, I headed back up the river to Santarém. Roughly ten hours by boat. The Tapajós is a wide river, and the confluence where it joins with the Amazon and Arapiuns, in the so-called Lago Grande, has an oceanic feel. You are a speck in the middle of the sea, even while you’re in the heart of the largest rainforest on the planet.
Here, hammocks tend to get tangled on deck. Whenever there’s a storm, or when the wind picks up a bit, which isn’t uncommon, it’s important to hold fast to the gunwales or some other sturdy piece of wood. Otherwise, the to-and-froof the waves makes it all but impossible not to get tossed out. I usually take advantage of times like this where I’m more or less unplugged to chat with people, to sleep, or to read. This time, however, a strange burning smell had me on alert. I also thought I saw a bit of smoke coming from the other bank, beyond the Tapajós National Forest. At the time I had no idea of just how massive the fire actually was, spreading along the BR-163 highway, which connects Cuiabá, the state capital of Mato Grosso, with Santarém.
On board our boat, the smell of burning brush sparked a conversation, but from our point of view, traveling along a vast river from distant Indigenous villages towards the city, the smokiness in the air seemed like small-scale, controlled fires. A few days later, news of the increasing number of fires in the Amazon spread across the globe: a direct consequence of the incentives created by Bolsonaro’s criminal actions. Like smoldering embers left after a blaze, the hot spots on the radar were concentrated in an “arc of deforestation,” which stretched from the state of Rondônia to Santarém, passing through southern Amazonas.
The expansion of soy production in the Amazon can be seen as a transformational process for the relationship between people and plants. It’s about transforming the multiplicity of species in a rainforest environment into monochrome, single-crop fields. It’s not a natural change, it’s a sociopolitical one. A long process that involves economic agents (such as large farmers), local politicians, illegal actions (like buying land from traditional communities and protected areas), and, of course, fire. With the onset of the dry season, and the resulting drop in rainfall, the use of fire becomes the most basic means of destroying the forest.
Unlike other biomes such as the savanna, which regularly burns during the dry season as part of a recovery process, there are no natural fires in the Amazon. Once lit, they risk spreading well beyond the intended area. But every fire always follows the same life cycle: grow, spread, and convert the multiplicity of species into a single uniform substance— ash. Rich in nutrients, the ash now fertilizes the soil. The remains of the forest have become the perfect environment for the development of single-crop soy farming.
It isn’t only the Amazon that’s burning. In 2019, we witnessed astonishing destruction from wildfires in California, in Australia, and even in the unlikeliest of places, such as the East Siberian taiga. The idea, proposed by a number of scientists, of a new geological era known as the Pyrocene—when everything burns, from oil fields generating energy to tropical rainforests—no longer seems inappropriate.
In Tupinambá villages along the west bank of the Tapajós River, soy is considered “just” a threat. In Munduruku communities on the opposite side of the river, soy is a reality: what’s left of the forest is being smothered by fields of soy. There is a bleak game of mirrors going on between the Tapajós’s two banks, which are locked in step, so that what happens on the river’s east bank, which is easier to access by road, is likely very soon to happen on the western side as well.
Ezeriel, Pedrinho, and João, all of them Indigenous Tupinambá, are now engaged in marking the boundaries of their territory. As the government is generally unreceptive to their petitions, they have decided to take matters into their own hands. In 2017, we set out into the jungle together. Selfdemarcation consists of opening up the undergrowth with machetes and creating trails to facilitate inspections. As part ofthe team, my job was to operate the GPS device and to write about the undertaking in hopes of drawing some attention to it. I’d had some experience as a reporter, but was of little use with the GPS. The Tupinambá were guided by the movement of the clouds. Despite often asking them to explain how they did this, I never fully understood. All I can say is that the clouds have regular patterns of movement depending on the size of the river. This fluctuation was enough for the Indigenous people to establish their route, bypassing neighboring villages. “That way!” they would point. And I would be staring into a dense thicket, unable to imagine how we would penetrate that profusion of razor grass, weeds, and other “pernicious herbage” that, wrapped as it was around the trunks of larger trees, seemed to constitute an impenetrable barrier.
But that wasn’t always the case. “If you think about it, I was a deforester myself,” Pedrinho said to me. João, for his part, retains a certain pride in having hunted a lot in this jungle to feed workers at the Santa Izabel lumber company. He looks back on those days as the golden age of his youth, when he earned one salary cutting down wood and another as a huntsman. “I was the one supporting those workers,” he remarks while prepping manioc flour for sale in the city.
In fact, the entire Tupinambá village of Cabeceira do Amorim, and many of the surrounding communities, seems to have worked for Santa Izabel at some point. The Indigenous people have a distinct memory of how the company operated before it retreated from the region when the extractive reserve was created in 1998. They used to cut down large trees, including ipês, mandioqueiras, angelins, and melancieiras. But according to João, despite the logging company’s extracting trees for years, over two-thirds of that forest is still standing to this day.
It’s hard to picture anything more perverse than a private economic agent using a scheme of seduction to transform people who depend on a certain territory into their own predators.
Little by little, the Tupinambá began to realize that the forest was disappearing, and with it, the game. Despite the bit of money they earned working for the company, the devastation it was creating would soon make life in the region impossible for Indigenous people. They would depend more and more on the city for everything from food to medicine. And the disappearing jungle presented another problem: life in the city is expensive. The contrast between life in the villages and life in the urban areas was put in stark relief by cacica Estevina: “Here, the rainforest gives us everything: our food, our game, our garden. In the city, everything comes with a price. If you’re twenty cents short for a medicine, nobody will sell it to you.”
Along the meandering course of the Tapajós, the peoples, the rivers, and the rainforest have established a codependency, a relationship of mutual formation. These are not Indigenous people who happen to live in a particular territory, but people whose bodies are formed (to the extent that their bodies, too, constitute territories) by hunting, visiting relatives, planting, and healing through their herbalist. This process is evident in both the ancestral knowledge and the geological formations themselves, such as the ancient anthropogenic land known as the terra preta or “Indian black earth.”
Lacking income, and with the depredation of their forests, the Tupinambá were surely going to be integrated into modern Brazilian society. But this integration would take place at the lowest level possible. Megaron Txucarramãe is one of the most eminent Indigenous leaders in the country. A member of the Kayapó people inhabiting the Xingu basin,he rose to prominence as a staunch opponent of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam constructed in the northern part of the Xingu River. I interviewed him in 2018 during the Acampamento Terra Livre (“Free Land Camp”), which took place around the same time that Bolsonaro was gaining traction in Brazil’s presidential race. “If he integrates the Indian into white society, the Indian will be worse off than the people who live in the favelas, the people who have no land, no roof over their heads,” he said. “Many Indians have no training or education with which to support their family (in the cities). In the villages, on his own land, the Indian knows how to do the things he has traditionally learned and has continued doing to this very day. On his land, in his place.” The Kayapó cacique then offers a warning: “Integrate the Indian into society? The Indian will die, the Indian will cease to exist!”
In communities like Piquiatuba, which is on the east bank of the Tapajós River and within the Tapajós National Forest, reality is very different from what the Tupinambá are experiencing. Fields of soy surround the rainforest. Remerson Castro Almeida, a community leader responsible for running the local inn and cleaning the school, rightly fears that what’s left of the forest will eventually be replaced by soy. “It’s much hotter here than it used to be, and we’re starting to see insects in the community that we’ve never seen before,” he says, suspecting that the use of pesticides is driving wildlife out of the jungle and into the villages along the river. In an ever hotter world, soybean fields are true heatproducing machines. Increasing temperatures sweep across the roughly fifty kilometers of forest that separates Remerson from the fields, making routine outdoor work more difficult, which in turn reduces production. Before, they could work the land until noon; today, by ten thirty, nobody can stand the heat.
The Tapajós National Forest was created by Decree No. 73,684, on February 19, 1974, during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). Spanning 527,319 hectares, it encompasses the municipalities of Belterra, Aveiro, Placas, and Rurópolis, all in the state of Pará. It therefore harbors roughly 5,000 residents, of which about 500 are Indigenous. The government had a single goal: to clear the forest of people; to make the sexist western image of a “virgin forest” into a reality. The military wanted to ship all the Indigenous people living there off to the Cachimbo Mountains like cargo—and did exactly that with several Indigenous populations elsewhere in the Amazon.
Seu Milton remembers in great detail the struggle to remain there, although he does regret that, with the creation of the Conservation Unit, he can’t sell his land to large corporate farms. On the other hand, he calls attention to the abundance of fauna that once lived in the forest: “There was a lot of hunting back then, mostly deer and small game. There was a lot of fishing, too, both with rods and by bow-and-arrow. Now, I don’t think there’s a single peccary left. They all ran away from the falling trees.” Seu Tarcilo, who was also active in the movement to keep residents in the jungle, today finds himself more aligned with the Bolsonaro administration. To him, Brazil’s Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) “did a lot of harm—a whole lot of harm—to the development of the people living along the Tapajós. Everything came grinding to a halt!” He goes on to talk about the fines for environmental crimes, which Bolsonaro denounced as an “industry” that needs to be shut down, and he believes that, without the National Forest, people would be much better off with open fields dedicated to agriculture. I was especially struck by one thing he said: “When the light comes in, you stop having those old visions.” The ghosts have gone.
I am determined to reflect on the destruction of myriad forms of life in the Lower Tapajós River Basin, starting with the relationship between people and plants. Plants aren’t just there to be used according to human interest. Plants make worlds. They are creators of realities. The Indigenous people in this region have established a tightly-woven relationship, a true sphere of kinship, with the vegetation around them—not merely a utilitarian one. Their practices, the mutually reliant arrangement they have with the land, call into question the concept of human exceptionalism, of people as separate from the world around them, which is theirs to dominate. In fact, the plants themselves offer a mediation between the land and the people; the plants alone make it possible for the two old opponents to coexist, imposing on our language the challenge of describing their relationship as between nonopposing parts.
There is a geopolitical aspect to soy, distinguished by its colonizing momentum. But there is also a cosmopolitical war over soy, one capable of creating and destroying people, and even worlds. Pure fields of grain don’t exist in nature. Whether accidental or planned, the ancient tradition of farming and harvesting grain is now part of a political strategy that exacerbates the concentration of power. It benefits both parties: the farmers’ wealth increases, and the reproduction of the selected crop is guaranteed to a dizzying degree. Along the Tapajós, this desire for multiplication is transforming the landscape. A shipping port and related infrastructure is required, including the dredging of river bottoms to make shipping the harvested soybeans possible. This destroys breeding grounds for fish. Soy craves land and requires the destruction of other species. Once tamed, it will tame others. Without places for fish to spawn naturally, commercial fish farms flourish. Soy is in constant conflict with humans. Large-scale farmers will, at any cost—and the costs are very high indeed—try to bend and conform it to their commercial objectives, managing it with toxic chemicals in order to defend it from all that may stand in their way. From a pesticidal point of view, insects, Indigenous people, and traditional ways of life are equal: they are no more than obstacles to be surmounted.
The Indigenous struggle is not merely for existence but for a different existence: not to let themselves be absorbed into an all-encompassing white culture. The “mono” of soybean monoculture must be taken seriously as a political bid to eradicate all difference. In this sense, the rainforest emerges as the Indigenous peoples’ greatest ally.
Elegy to an Amazonian River
Sometimes I find myself thinking of this text as an elegy. But not for long. An elegy is a farewell, an expression of regret in the name of someone who has gone—whether dead or distant—leaving behind the person who is writing. To call this text an elegy to the Tapajós River would be like signing its death certificate … which is not within my power.
But there is no shortage of reasons to suspect that the river is dying. Or, rather, that it’s being murdered. Hydroelectric plants, gold mining, deforestation, and dredging, to name just a few. As a landscape, the Lower Tapajós River Basin is as natural as any human construct.
Dona Teca, one of the oldest residents of Piquiatuba, can see the river from her home. We enjoy the sunset together fromher wide-open kitchen overlooking the waters. At night, we sleep, rocking to the rhythm of the waves. In contrast with the serenity of the moment, she laments the effects hydroelectric dams have had on the river and on her life. She fears an increase in diseases and the departure of local fish populations. “The river has changed color,” she remarks. “It’s darker.” No response comes to mind. I remain silent.