Walter Lamberson Can Survive in The Jungle OR The Amazon Is Incredible!

I lived! Seeing the Amazon was one of the most incrediable experiences in my life. Spending five days in the Amazon should be some kind of minimal requirement for having strong opinions on enviornmental degredation, sustainable development, the assimilation of indigenous cultures, how dirty you can be, and how big cockroaches can get.

I wish I could aptly describe the Amazon. If I could put pictures online that would help, but I don't know where the start. Wikipeida says that one square kilometre of Amazon rainforest can contain about 90,000 tons of living plants. That is meaningless to most people who are reading this because it in units of kilometers and 'tons of living plants'. But it sounds like a whole lot. It's unfathomably diverse. After five days I needed not do more than open my eyes to find vegetation I had never seen before. It's a weird way to feel. I have some expectation of pattern recognition that had to go unfulfilled. However, in selva segundaria (rainforest that is not virgin, or has been deforested in the past (read: used to be a farm)) the biodiversity is much, much less.

Among the things that shocked me was how much of the forst had been deforested around this area. Most of the forest that was on 'dry' land was formerly a farm. Starting in the late 1800s people went nuts to farm the Amazon. IT's a good farm for a few reasons: stuff grows quickly and it is functionally an international port (I didn't realize that ocean-going ships can take the Amazon up to Iquitos, Peru--it's that big). The farm land is rather poor as it is not the minerals in the soil that allow the Amazon to host all that it hosts. The amazon is such a forest because of the abundance of fresh water from the Andes and the sunlght present near the equator at a low elevation. Evolution acts quickly in such an environment. In the absence of trees falling and rotting all the time, there is nothign to fertalize crops and after one or two years the farms are basically infertile.

Most of the land which is dry year-round had been deforested at some point, and after a while I got good at identifying selva segundaria. It is not as diverse, the trees are smaller and all of about the same height and, interstingly, the trees are straighter as opposed to curved. The curvature of the trees in selva primaria is incredible becuase the dense canopy of trees makes it very difficult for new trees to find sunlight so they grow in the direction where it is present, making them interesting, curvy things. The selva segundaria had very few Ceibas, my favorite tree in the forest (everyone's favorite tree in the forst) because of it's enormous size (they can get to be 150' tall). They are so large they host an ecosystem of their own. Trees grow within them, mamals and birds nest in their branches, and there is an infinitude of insects that live in and under their bark and roots. They are, quite simply, the grandest trees in the world. They are rather endagered. I climbed one with rock climbing equipment. It was one of best things I've ver done. I can't wait to see the pictures I took from above the canopy of the forest. (you might remember these trees from the Sean Connery film 'Medicine Man'. I believe in that movie they cure cancer.).

About 25 years ago the Colombian government started buying a lot of farms from the indigenous (for, and I asked some indians, very low prices). They allowed these to grow back into rainforest. So there are few farms now, but there is a lot of selva segundaria wherever there is dry land.

Fortunately, there is not much dry land. Or not much land that is dry year-round (including this month). I had a notion that the Amazon Rain Forest was something through which one could walk. I did not do as much walking as I expected but I did a lot more paddling. Along most of the river one would have to paddle ten Km in either direction to reach actual dry land. How there the place where the river ends is not the river bank, and how there are islands that are not made of land is hard to explain. There is dense, dense forest (think swamp) whose base is underwater for most of the year. The land that is 'inundable' was impossible to farm because, well, it spends most of the year under water. So it's virgin forest. Only in the summer when the water levels drop can one walk through any of it. Here you can see what the land used to look like. It is incredible.

My guide, who is really more of a nice guy with a boat than a professional tour guide, is from an indegenous village called Moncagua about four hours by slow boat from Leticia. This is where I spent two nights. I say it is indigenous for the reason that the people who live there are of indigenous ancestory. I don't know what else makes it indigenous. Most of them speak spanish, and they live, while in relative poverty, in the same way many mestizos in Leticia do. They have some electricity (sometimes), access to cities like Leticia and they work to sustain themselves each day by catching fish, picking bannanas, and growing some crops (yuca). They use currency to the extent that they have to (not much considering there is no real division of labor) but many possessions are the property of the community as a whole. I thought this was interesting. The community owns cows and there is a Curaca (a word I was surprised to hear and remember from Latin American civ class) who regulates community labor, which each family (there are about 50) must provide. Only males must perform community labor. I was very glad to have stayed in Moncagua.

People like the 400 residents of Moncagua, whom I like very much, constitute a significant threat to the Amazon. There are laws to protect the Amazon and in most of the seven countries where it florishes they are quite strong. The problem is with enforcement. Laws are good at protecting the Amazon from multinational corporations--paper mills etc--because it is realatively easy to enforce such laws. It is much more difficult to prosecute a tribe of indigenous people who farm the land to grow food, especially when these people live in abject poverty relative to most Colombians or Brazilians. They are not starving, most of them and right now. But there are things they want that can get by cutting down rain forest, like Yuca, a big root food that is very important to them. I watched a community labor force led by the Curaca of the puelo destroy about an acre of rainforest in under an hour. I don't know how I feel about this.

For a lot of people, their poverty justifies the descruction of the forest. And they are poor but it's hard to know how poor one must be to destroy the rainforest. First, because there is a very misleading notion of a 'minimum standard of living' in conversations about such things. There is no such thing as a bare minimum of food or money or calories that allow people to live below which they will die. There are degrees to which people aproach life and approach death all the time. More food improve peoples quality of life and it's absence degrades it, but nature did not do us the service of deliniating a line below which man cannot survive. Some of the people go to sleep hungry and little have any money at all but some of them have televisions. Almost none of them have medical service or cars (or roads) or pluming or bread but some of them have DVD players and all most of them have plentiful access to fish. (I have eaten nothing but fish and fruit for the last three days).

So it's complicated. And I don't know how I feel. But I have a few thoughts. The first is that the American environmental movement is really quite misguided. The forests of North America are beautiful and we should dedicate resources to protecting them by paying people not to farm them, pollute them, log them or hunt in them. But they are not the only forests that need protection. The Amazon is one of the most beautiful things in the world and no one dedicates nearly enough to protecting it (I don't have any numbers at all, can you tell?). I would guess that that acre of Amazon we spend well under one-onehundredth on environmental protection that we spend protecting each acre of National Forest in the U.S. We should not spend anymore protecting some of the more banal national forests of Missouri, but rather reallocate to protect something that is beautiful and in dire need of protection. I say this not only because I think the Amazon is more beautiful than Missouri but we spend more protecting Missouri, but also becaust it would be SO EASY to protect the Amazon. I watched twenty boys destroy an acre of forest in an hour with Machetes to grow Yuca (a crop that really has no U.S. equal) for two years before they have to destroy more to grow more. I don't know much about Yuca, but I'm going to guess that the amount 400 people use in two years is a pretty small price to pay for an acre of Amazon.

My second thought involves the Ceiba and how few of them there were in the selva segundaria (none) relative to how many there are in the Primavaria. They were cut down for wood. It's pulp, like the pulp of many trees, can be used to make paper. Not fancy furniture. Paper. And there were a lot of them--according to Estaban's father--until forty years ago. Forty years ago they were sudenly able to import electrical saws to cut them down. They cut them all down very quickly. He said back then paper was very cheap.

There are a couple of problems that allowed people to destroy the Ceibas. It reminds me of the Buffalo that no longer live in North America. They disappeared when settlers and railroad workers came through, killing them for their hides and leaving the meat to rot. The price of hides was low but people shot buffalo because, first, if they didn't someone else would (there were no property rights over buffalo) and second, because they could make more money doing it than not doing it. The second part would not have been true if people had access to credit. At any reasonable interest rate people could have done better borrowing money, buying buffalo, and saving them for later when the hide or meat was more in demand (how much would people pay for one buffalo today?). But settlers had no access to credit, just like the people in Moncagua. So they do not buy trees and wait for a true shortage of trees or timber. They cut them down and sell them or whatever they can get.

Anyway, enough of that. There were a lot of comments about insect repellent and there is more to the story! When I met Esteban on Tuesday he told me to buy a certain kind of insect repellent, a wax which he said worked better than anything else. It was, the box said, super strength. (Colombians are really into maximums, supers, and ultras. There are lots of ultra-marts, super-tiendas, and mega-bodegas). So I bought it. I go into the jungle armed with an array of insect repellents. My battery includes Nopix, a self-purported super wax, and that maximum-repellant from the Bogotá airportm Nopter I think it was called.

I did what anyone truly curious would do and set up a controlled experiment. I applied one to the left side of my body and one to the right. The repellent burned like hell and the wax primed me for skin cancer under the equatorial sun. I figured after one night in the Amazon, even under an misquito net, I would know which was the best. I would count the stings on the left side of my body and then count those on the right. I even made an effort to put both sides and similar risks for stings, keeping both near the water equally and making sure to roll both sleves equally. Simple.

When I woke up I was excited to know the results of my controlled experiment. I looked at my left arm and I had a hell of a lot of misquito bites. Then I looked at my right arm, where I also had a hell of a lot of misquito bites. I looked at my legs and they told the same story. Both Maximum and Super strengh insect repellents do the same crap job in the Amazon. It didn't matter though becase when I saw the size of Amazon bugs I was not so worried about them biting me as I was them stealing my wallet.

Before I left Anisha, who shares all my fears, tactfcully e-mailed me to let me know that cockroaches in the Amazon can get to be more than 15" long. She was not wrong. I don't think I saw any that were 15¨ long but I did see one that was as long as my forearm (I'm going to say that's about one foot). This was pretty traumatic. But after a while you get so muddy, wet, bug bitten, and smelly that you feel like nothing else can happen to you that you would really care about. This indifference is comforting becasue it means you don't care if you fall into the mud or the river. You stop giving a damn about rain and getting out of it. Being dry is unimportant. It's the only way to enjoy the amazon or the outdoors more generally. There is nothing pretty about it, but it's very comfortable.

Speaking of which, I think I might have malaria. My malaria medicine made me very tired, but now I feel sort of loopy like thoughts are repeating in my mind and I'm quite cold despite the fact that leticia is hot as hell. I'm not sure what I have but I have something and it came from the jungle. I would say it's malaria but for a conversaton I had about Malaria with someone from South Africa who had Malaria four times. I asked him 'how do you know if you have malaria' and he said 'you'll know'. And that's the thing, I don't know. So I'm not sure what to do except drink water.