Natural & Human Endgame In The Western Amazon Forest - NYT

[hatrack]

"Far western Amazonia is, in every sense, the end of the line. For impoverished Brazilians seeking a new life, it offers a last chance at economic survival. For the region's few surviving Indian tribes, it is a vanishing homeland, stripped and burned by farmers, rubber tappers and cattle ranchers. For untold species of flora and fauna, the western Brazilian rain forest is an ever-shrinking reservation where humankind and nature play out a grim endgame.

It is also breathtakingly beautiful and shockingly profuse, a paradise of biodiversity where the philodendrons grow as tall as a man, spiders can reach the size of a dinner plate and, after a rainfall, you can hear the stretching and bending of broad-leaved cecropia trees as they grow. It is a land of marvels, marvelously described and movingly evoked by the botanist David G. Campbell in "A Land of Ghosts." Mr. Campbell has been making the long, slow canoe trip to the headwaters of the Rio Juruá, near the Peruvian border, for more than 30 years. Working with a Brazilian team, he painstakingly maps and inventories the plant species growing in neat 100-yard squares, hoping to explain what he calls "one of the great and enduring conundrums of nature": how the many species of the Amazon have evolved, and how they manage to coexist.

It makes quite a change of scenery for Mr. Campbell, who, in "The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica," explored a land "where form and light are distilled into a few simple, evocative phrases." Antarctica, he writes, is a "biological haiku." The Amazon, by contrast, beggars the imagination and exhausts the resources of language. Just one of Mr. Campbell's squares contains 20,000 individual trees belonging to about 2,000 species, three times as many species as there are in all North America, and each tree constitutes its own world, an interdependent system of lichens, ferns, flowers, fungi, reptiles and mammals.

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If the forest seems beleaguered, its human inhabitants hardly fare much better. They have the power to destroy but not to tame. Working his way up the river, Mr. Campbell meets the survivors of past efforts to colonize and exploit: the miserable rubber tappers working for feudal plantation owners; the ill-adapted farmers from eastern Brazil hoping to wrest a living from soil that is rich in rare, extravagant plant forms but poor in food crops. It's a haunting tour of human misery. The Amazon, so rich in plant and animal species, has been cruel to its chief tormenter. It's not at all clear which one will outlast the other, but the forest is disappearing fast. In "A Land of Ghosts," Mr. Campbell offers what feels like a lover's last, lingering look."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/books/09grim.html

[phusion]

1. wow...

Sounds like a wonderful book.

"He has a sneaking suspicion that there is a connection between the lack of language and the destruction of the forest by outsiders. "It's hard for people to love a place that is not defined in words and thus cannot be understood," he writes. "And it's easy to give away something for which there are no words, something you never knew existed.""

:( See it while you can...