Feature: MSU Researchers Search for the Forest Tipping Point
It was a showdown at high noon, but not with Gary Cooper facing outlaws in the Wild West. No, this time it was couple of MSU researchers, namely us, and we'd just discovered Amazonia's new logging frontier...the hard way.
In front of us, the logger had parked his pick-up truck across from the big one with the loogs. Behind us, blocking retreat, sat his enforcer on a motorcycle. There was buy one way to go, through the narrow gap the logger had prepared for us. I glanced at my colleagues, Eugenio Arima, PhD '06, and MSU doctoral candidate Rita Pereira. I hoped to see them again, someday.
Our trip had been more adventurous than we'd bargained for. We had started a little over a week before in the Xingu Basin, where British explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared in 1925 searching for the lost "City of Z." Ours was not a quest for lost civilizations, however, but a field campaign with support from the National Science Foundation to study how loggers build roads into the virgin rainforest, thereby opening the door to agricultural colonization. This has huge consequences fo rthe global environment since most of the world's biodiversity is stored in teh Amazon, whose forest ecosystem--"the earth's lungs"--also absorbs vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby mitigating global warming. So far, about 17 percent has been lost following development programs, mainly Brazil's. Our research is meant to help policy-makers understand the challenges they face in conserving teh world's largest tropical forest.
But to study loggers you have to find them. That's not easy because Brazil has recently cracked down on illegal logging. In the Xingu Basin, we found the next best thing--the Kayapo Indians, who allowed loggers onto their lands, then regretted it once logging brought ecological change and tribal conflict. They've become staunch environmentalists. Even film director James Cameron of Avatar fame, has declared solidarity with the Kayapo in their struggle to stop the damming of the Xingu River.
We learned a great deal from the Kayapo Indians. It probably helped that they mistook me for James Cameron, not so hard to dd when you're the only gringo in town and James Cameron is one of the gew gringos they'd ever heard of. As much as we learned, it wasn't enough, so we continued with our plan to drive the entire western Transamazon Highway, 700 miles of muddy dirt that would take up to Labrea, the terminus of the road that perhaps more than any other symbloizes rainforest destruction. It was a good bet we'd find the logging frontier; plus, we didn't know anyone who'd actually done the trip, which stimulated our spirit of adventure. After five days in teh Xingu basin we flew to Santarem to pick up our vehicle and driver, Paulo.
Although no one knew if the road was passable to Labrea, we left Santarem anyway, arriving late that afternoon on the banks of the Tapajos River, nine miles across in places. A 30-minute ferry ride put us in Itaituba. There wasn't logging here, so the next morning we left for Jacareacanga. The terrain was hilly, with carpets of forest rolling to the distance. In the ravines, Acai palms formed dense stands, their lime-green fronds like kites stuck atop impossibly thin stems. At one point, we drove through clouds of yellow butterflies. I tried to see how long they'd accompany us, but lost interest after a mile. As evening approached, the forest opened with pastures and humble dwellings of the poor: Jacareacanga.
We didn't observe any sawmills though, and conversations with locals confirmed their absence. The next morning we headed for the next town west, Apui. In fact, we were interested in Apui for another reason entiresly--its gold mine, Eldorado do Juma, the largest in the Amazon.
Just out of Jacareacanga, the terrain flattened. A strip of pasture pushed the forest back a couple hundred yards, blackened stumps indicating new clearing. Forest alternated with wetlands of Buriti, a palm with a thick trunk and big shaggy fronds. After an hour, the green monotomy began to daze me, but just as I nodded off, Eugenio shouted "macaws!" Paulo stopped and we got out beside a pond of dark water full of Buriti palms, some with their crown knocked off, their smooth trunks pocked with holes. Husky squawks drew my attention to a rotting tree. On top stood a majestic blue macaw, its chest feathers giving a burst of yellow against the steel-blue sky. Just below, another bird clung with claws and beak, inching up to join its mate. As they squawked at each other 50 yards from us, more macaws flew from the forest.
On watching the macaws, I felt the magic of nature with a child's eyes, and understood there would always be a much larger world than the one I inhabited. I wanted to shout for joy, to express myself in raw-wonder. Instead, I lifted my camera and started shooting, one macaw, then another and another. After 20 minutes, I stopped, and saw that Eugenio and Rita had also finished. We left, leaving the birds behind, probably tired of us as well.
In Apui we found rooms at Hotel Guarani, owned by a couple of German descent, Ivo and Ana MAria. We confirmed the absence of logging again, but now the trail was hot, and led to a village further west, Vila Santo Antonio Matupi. Yes, there was logging there. Yes, you had to watch out for the gunmen working for the loggers. In truth, logging had become somewhat of a distraction for us now, because Ivo said he'd take us to the gold mine. I didn't believe him, until he found us at breakfast the next day and said, "Let's go." Visiting a mine isn't so easy to do. Nor is it an exceptionally bright idea. In the Amazon, they're notorious for violence, malaria and every imaginable form of human degration.
But the temptation was too great. It was a three hour drive from Apui to the one-vehicle ferry at teh Juma River. On the other side, we entered the shanty town providing the mine with food, drink and specialized services like gold merchandising and prostitution. After making our presence known to community leaders, we were allowed to visit. We drove to where the road ended, and the forest revealed gigantic pits, surrounded by a raggedy wall of trees. It looked like meteors had struck here, blasting the earth open, cauterizing the surrounding soil into cracked orange tiles. We parked and got out.
I paused to grasp the enormity of the scene, then hurried after Eugenio and Rita, who walked along an earthen ramp between craters. The openness of the landscape miniaturized them into stick figures against the sun-scorched waste. Ahead to the their right stood wood shacks, tilting off kilter from the sloping clay terrain. To their left, two hoses sank inot an opening in the ground. I caught up with my colleagues beside a pump that brought water down one hose and sediments up the other. These were filtered through a primitive sieve, near the houses about to collapse into one of the pits. Twenty feet down the newly opened hold, two men manned the hoses, kee deep in water. One blasted the clay, while the other sucked up for the sieve what geology had taken millennia to create. Wrapped in ponchos, their faces covered by protective goggles, the miners looked like road-warriors attacking a post-apocalyptic landscape. I got my camcorder out, on loan from the Big Ten Network, and filmed how the world might end one day by our failure to treat nature like the sacred gift it is. We left in time to avoid evening mosquitoes with malaria--yet another of nature's gifts.
The next day, we continues on our way, excited at the prospects of finding our elusive loggers. In a couple of hours, we reached the Aripuana River. Waiting for the ferry a mile on teh other side, I could make out a large truck boarding. It seemed suspicious as we'd seen hardly any vehicles since Itaitube other than those for road mainenance. As the ferry approached, we confirmed our suspicions. The truck was carrying sawn wood. It had to be off-loading nearby, at a port on our side of the river a few miles north. Indeed, once we crossed, we observed a regular convoy of logging trucks coming from the opposite direction, from Vila Santo Antonio Matupi. On driving into town, we felt ironic relief seeing all the sawmills. At last.
It was another tiring day, so we searched out accommodations and food, then made our plans. They were simple: we'd stay here as neccessary to conduct our interviews...which hadn't turned out so good: the very first road we'd driven down showing evidence of logging had brough us to our Amazonian stalemate.
Paulo put the truck into gear and moved ahead gently, I prepared to smile, realizing what a splendid target my teeth would make. The logger in the pick-up--and crouched behind him in the cabin his companion with a shotgun--wouldn't have worried about shooting an American because it never would have occured to them that Americans could be in their midst, much less university professors on a research expedition funded by the National Science Foundation. But, this was to be our lucky day. The logger let us pass, probably just as worried about our intensions as we were of his. We decided to take advantage of our good luck and head for Librea, with a night in Humiti on route. At least then we could say we'd done the entire western Transamazon Highway, no mean feat. We'd have to think about how to get that information from the loggers though.
Can you jump from a frying pan into the fire? The answer is yes, on the western Transamazon Highway. After the hospitality of the logger, we faced Indians and the rage of bad road conditions, which may be why no one has done this whole route before. We've been warned about the Indians, but there's only one road in and out. If the Tenharim peoples decide to block it and make few who pass pay a toll or hold them for ransom, who's to stop them? So, at the primitive wood barricade, we paid the $12 fee and continued through the wildest terrain we'd seen yet, the virgin forest so close at roadside you could almost touch it. As for road rage, we endured this on the final stretch to Labrea, so the road disintegrated into muddy slicks with ruts two to three feet in deep places. Paulo slowed and put the traction on. Then, he plowed forward, betting one side of the road against the other, pushing the wheel hard to correct the sliding, digging through the slop and zigzagging as necesary to avoid the cul-de-sacs of mud and slides into the swamps at roadside, but always moving forward, mile upon mile, without a moment's rest or mistake, until we got there.
As we had but one night before returning home via Porto Velho, we drove immediately to the edge of Labrea, and walked across the floodplain to the Purus River. My first impression was of mud and vultures, of ugliness and gray skies from lingering rain. But it was beautiful too in its raw natural power, the wide sweep of muddy watter, the current at its surface, the cut-banks on the other shore rising 75-100 feet, looking as if someone had chopped off pieces with a knife, the trees standing there, much taller than the banks, the openings between them leading to the purest forest of the Amazon, to tribes that refused contact with the modern world. We'd come to the edge of civilization, and the end of the road.
The next morning before we left, I walked to the top of our hotel to watch the sunrise over the Purus River. Upstream, the separation between water and mist blended as a continuous sheen spreading from bank to bank, a water world in vertical dimension. It got me thinking about what we'd observed on the western highway. Sure, we'd seen huge tracts of virgin rainforest, intact with bio-diverse riches and stocks of carbon. But more impressive was the water, the water in the rivers, the swamps, the mists, the clouds, the rain. The Amazon was a water world, one sustained by the cycling of water between forest and sky.
This was the real question, the one that ultimately motivated our research. Would devlopment break this cycle and push the magnificent Amazonian forest past its tipping point, to a wasteland of scrub vegetation? I recalled a large ranch we'd just seen in the Xingu basin, with 100,000 head of cattle.
It stretched for 10 miles along the road and its pastures appeared to have changed the climate. The trees weren't there to suck water from the soils, so the vapor wasn't there to form the mists, which couldn't form the clouds or the rain, leaving the sky a desert blue. The Transamazon Highway had cracked the basic and funneled pastures and savannah winds deep into the Amazon. As I gazed across the Purus River, it was good to know that Labrea remained wet and unaffected. Not enough forest had been lost to reach the tipping point, the ecological equivalent of a nuclear explosion.
But what about the future? The drive of soybeans and cattle herds into deeper forests? One thing was certain, the battle for the tipping point would be won or lost along the western Transamazon Highway.
Yes, we'd reached the end of our trip. It was time to go home and spread the word about what we'd seen. There was hope in the vast, undisturbed forest that remained in the west but it would have to be resolutely defended. We'd learned a lot, including the fact we'd have to return. WE still needed to talk to the loggers, despite their lack of hospitality.
Seven hundred miles of muddy dirt, is a road that perhaps more than any other symbolizes rainforest destruction.
Robert Walker is a professor of geography. He received his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been on the MSU faculty since 1999. He travels to the Amazon most summers, and has logged thousands of miles on dirt roads through the forest.