“At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon Rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.”
—Chico Mendes
Over the course of two years, between March of 2016 and May of 2018, I traveled between two of the most important ecological regions in North and South America, those being the Amazon Rainforest and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The next three stories are about these travels, and this particular story is about the people whom I met in the Amazon Rainforest. There, I saw how a warming, changing climate combined with invasive, extractive capitalism has radically altered their way of life. My observations are firsthand, where I saw these changes personally, and I have seen directly that we are on the brink of something cataclysmic if we are unable to preserve these last bastions of pristine wilderness. If we do not, our planet and our survival are gravely at risk.
I’ve visited the Amazon three different times over the last 15 years, and when you see the rainforest with your own eyes, the intensity of the jungle hits you very deeply, causing you to become extremely awake and alert. It can also be quite dangerous if you are not. That’s how I’ve felt every time I’ve gone there, starting in 2004, 2016, and recently in 2018. The Amazon is an enormous and highly complex river basin, immensely diverse, and the jungle canopy is crucial to its survival. This is because the falling leaves of the trees become a natural fertilizer for the rainforest itself. But when clear cutting and slash and burn techniques are employed by the oil, timber, and cattle industries, they literally destroy football field-sized chunks of the forest, many times over in a single day. This destruction must be stopped as soon as possible, because at the current rate, the entire Amazon Rainforest will be gone in fewer than 20 years. There is so much at stake here, both for South Americans and North Americans, but also for the health of the entire planet.
I first visited the Upper Peruvian Amazon in June of 2004 when I worked with the indigenous Shipibo tribe, and my experience in the Amazon became the inspiration for much of what I have written on the importance of preserving our last great wildernesses. On that first trip in 2004, I worked as the sound recordist and ethnomusicologist for an album and documentary film about the music of the Shipibo, who reside in the Upper Ucayali River basin, near the headwaters of the Amazon River.
My parallel academic assignment was to record and document the healing songs of the Shipibo shamans, the indigenous healers who work with plants, herbs, and other natural medicines, which they cultivate in their rainforest gardens. The Shipibo are also known for their exquisite singing, which uses a unique kind of healing song known as an Icaro. These Icaros, of which there are perhaps thousands throughout the Amazon basin, are visually represented as complex fractal patterns, which are woven into their clothing, painted on their pottery and homes, and even on their faces and bodies. It is a remarkable example of synesthesia, in which the mind cross-maps different senses, in this case, song (sound) and pattern (vision). Thus, I set out to record as many of these sacred Icaros as I could find, and collect as many of the song weavings as I could afford. My work was certainly cut out for me, and I loved every bit of it.
It was typical anthropological fieldwork, which meant a lot of slogging recording equipment through often muddy and rainy conditions, but it was also extremely rewarding. I also recorded natural soundscapes from the rainforest, as well as stories from elders about the old way of life, including well over 100 different Icaros during my time in the rainforest. The final product we created was the album, “Woven Songs Of The Amazon” and our work still stands as one of the best musical and visual documents of Shipibo culture. All of the proceeds from the album go directly to the shamans we worked with, and you can find this, as well as our 2019 follow up, “Woven Songs Of The Amazon II,” on all the digital music sites around the world. Both albums feature the exquisite singing of the Agustin-Flores-Fernandez family of shaman/singers.
As a result of their growing profile on the global stage, the Shipibo are finally being recognized for their immense wisdom and powerful healing abilities. There is a renewed interest in their exquisite textiles and pottery, and eco-tourism is bringing people directly to their villages. In other words, it is a fine example of the Shipibo managing their cultural economy in a way in which they choose to do it.
What I also took away from the experience was a deep realization that the Amazon Rainforest truly belongs to the people who live inside of it, and not to the global corporations who view it as a personal treasure trove to be exploited by cutting down the forest, drilling for oil, grazing cattle, and otherwise destroying the landscape. Having the financial capital that these corporations possess does not inherently grant them the right to do such abhorrent things, and this is the larger point of my story. Because even though we have been doing these things since the colonial era, it does not mean that we should continue to do so when our planet is on the brink of environmental collapse. At some point, rational thinking must take over and we must stop our codependent addiction to these industries.
In March of 2016, I visited the Brazilian half of the Amazon Rainforest. I’ve been to Brazil a few times over the last 20 years to do musical work, and I’ve spent several months at a time in the country. Brazil can, on any given day, be a truly magical place, but the problems that Brazil is now facing, with its unstable currency, a chronically corrupt political system, and a growing realization that the government doesn’t really know what it’s doing—all of this does not bode well for the protection of the Amazon.
I was in the northern Brazilian state of Amazonas once before, back in 2000, when a music tour took me right up to the border of the rainforest. I remember seeing black smoke rising on the horizon from the slash and burn technique that clears the forest, leaving ash nitrate behind as fertilizer. The problem with slash and burn is that Amazonian soil becomes very acidic and the ash nitrate only lasts for a couple years, after which the soil degrades into a desert-like sand where nothing else can grow.
On the 2016 trip, I flew north to Manaus over the very middle of the Brazilian Amazon. My flight left from Rio de Janeiro early in the morning and as we flew over the rainforest, I could see the devastation of the clear cutting and the slash and burning that left giant swaths of brown nothingness. This is the result of very little, or non-existent environmental law in the rainforest—the lawmen have all been bought off by the very corporations who extract the illegal resources.
This abominable pattern of destruction has been at work since the dawn of the rubber boom back in the mid-1800s, except now it’s much more rapid with the advent of modern machinery. The destruction goes something like this: the logging companies go in first to extract the rare hardwoods by helicopter or boat, and then they slash and burn the remaining trees to create the ash nitrate fertilizer. Short-term grassland can be grown this way, which is when the cattle barons move in their herds to graze on the temporary grassland. This is where most fast-food hamburger comes from—cheap South American beef raised in the Brazilian Amazon. After the grassland has been destroyed by the cattle herds, the land will be further ruined by oil and gold speculators, the tailings of which destroy what ever remains, leaving a lifeless, toxic void where once stood a forest tens of thousands of years old.
If anyone protests these illegal activities, whether they are indigenous Indians, concerned Brazilians, or journalist/activists, the executives of these different industries will hire hit men, often from the local military or police force. They assassinate the activists and dump their bodies where they will never be found, in the deep forest of the very thing they are trying to protect. Occasionally, however, their bodies are found, but the local judicial authorities never prosecute the murderers or the corporations who hired them because they too have been bought off.
On top of this ecological devastation, the Brazilian government is literally paving the way for more destruction by building a highway through the middle of the rainforest. It’s called the Trans-Amazonian Highway, or BR-230 as it’s formally called, and it’s being built right now to expedite the extraction of the rainforest at an exponentially faster pace.
When I landed in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon, I could see that things were much different than the other Brazilian cities I had visited. Manaus used to be the wealthiest city in South America, the result of that first rubber boom in the 1800s. They made so much money from the rubber trees that they built a marble opera house near the banks of the Amazon River, and they hired Gustave Eiffel (architect of the Eiffel Tower) to build a public market in Paris and then ship it by freighter to Manaus. The stories of luxury in the rainforest are legendary—clothing imported from Paris, ornate jewelry made from the local gold and emerald mines, and all manner of luxury goods imported from Europe. Now, however, Manaus is a gritty, working- class city of 2 million people who work in various industries. It has become the manufacturing capital of Brazil, where freighters ply the river with manufactured goods and rainforest extractions, which are moved downstream to the coast. Despite all that it produces, Manaus is a very poor town where the people labor and toil, just as they did for the rubber barons over a century earlier.
I spent a full week on the Brazilian Amazon in small charter boats, exploring an abandoned rubber plantation, venturing up some small tributaries, and even interacting with a large anaconda, a tree sloth, and a pod of pink dolphins. It was reassuring to see wildlife still existing here, but with each passing freighter and the lurking smell of toxic chemicals in the air, any sane person can see that it’s only a matter of time before a major ecological disaster happens. Perhaps it already has, but the Brazilian government will never let us know—the journalists have all been killed.
And here’s the paradox of the entire mess: The most important product that the Amazon Rainforest gives us is not what is extracted or manufactured there. The most important gift of the rainforest is its pure oxygen, which is about 25% of the world’s oxygen supply. That’s why it’s known as the “Lungs Of The Planet,” because for every 4 breaths you take, one of those breaths came from the Amazon Rainforest. It’s trees breath in the carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and other garbage gasses that we keep pumping into our atmosphere, and the rainforest exhales pure, clean oxygen. At its most basic level, the Amazon Rainforest is an enormous air filter for the entire planet, scrubbing our atmosphere of dirty gasses and giving us fresh, clean oxygen to breathe. It also contains the largest biodiversity of plants and animals on the planet, many of which are currently being studied for their medicinal properties, something the Shipibo shamans know quite a bit about. The biological and cultural value of this is priceless, but it’s all at risk from the dirty oil we burn, the cheap beef in our fast-food hamburgers, and a forest that is being burnt to the ground.
In the time it took you to read this story we have lost another football field of rainforest, and in the time it takes you to finish this book, another journalist, activist, or indigenous person will have been murdered by lawless men. The Earth’s air is getting dirtier by the minute, the atmosphere is dangerously warming from all the carbon gasses, and the ocean level is rising daily as a result of the Arctic ice melt. These are scientific facts, it is not conjecture, and every activist, environmentalist, and scientist worth their salt knows this.
As I departed Manaus and flew over the Brazilian Amazon, I looked down from the window of my plane and watched as the rainforest disappeared into a haze of smoke and eventually, clouds. I wouldn’t see the Amazon again for another 2 years, because I was on my way to the opposite end of the planet—the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.