1491 (60 page)

In the center of Santarém, telephone poles are made of cement, as is usual in tropical countries that can afford them. (Wooden ones get eaten.) At the edge of town, the authorities create poles by cutting down trees and propping them wherever needed; in a display of lethargy, town workers do not lop off branches, strip away bark or vines, or even remove termite mounds. After maybe a mile they stop using logs and just string the lines on tree branches. A little further the lines stop altogether. Beyond this the river is occupied only by hamlets on the bluffs at the water’s edge. The biggest building always seems to be the Pentecostal or Adventist church. After services whooping kids fill the red-dirt churchyard and fly kites. Sometimes they attach razor blades to the sides of the kites and in a war of all against all try to cut each other’s strings. Except for soccer, rural Brazil’s main sporting event seems to be Attack Kiting.

Between communities water traffic continually darts, hopscotching back and forth with the speed of gossip even though many boats are still powered by pushing a long pole against the bottom. At the river’s edge during flood season are small trees inundated to the tips of their branches. Thirty feet above them dangles the red fruit of tall kapok trees, each scarlet bulb reflected perfectly in the still water. People make shortcuts through narrow tunnels in the vegetation called
furos.
When I visited an old plantation called Taperinha, site of an earlier Anna Roosevelt dig, the man at the tiller abruptly turned the boat straight into the forest. We shot through a
furo
two thousand feet long and six feet wide. Some
furos
have existed for centuries, I was told. There have been water highways in the forest since before Columbus.

All of this is described as “wilderness” in the tourist brochures. It’s not, if the new generation of researchers is correct. Indeed, some believe that fewer people may be living in rural Amazonia now than in 1491. Yet when my boat glided into the
furo
the forest shut out the sky like the closing of an umbrella. Within a few hundred yards the human presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted. If what was around me was not wilderness, how should one think of it? Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what should be our goal for its future?

European and U.S. environmentalists insist that the forest should never be cut down or used—it should remain, as far as possible, a land without people. In an ecological version of therapeutic nihilism, they want to leave the river basin to its own devices. Brazilians I have encountered are usually less than enthusiastic about this proposal. Yes, yes, we are in favor of the environment, they say. But we also have many millions of desperately poor people here. To develop
your
economy,
you
leveled your forests and carpeted the land with strip malls. Why can’t
we
do the same? If
you
now want more forest, why don’t
you
tear down some of
your
strip malls and plant trees? Yes, yes, we are in favor of helping the poor, environmentalists respond. But if you cut down the tropical forest, you won’t be creating wealth. Instead you will only destroy the soil. Turning Amazonia into a wasteland will help nobody.

These dialogues of the deaf have occurred so often that the participants can almost recite their lines by rote. In a way, the words are curiously weightless, for the environmentalists tend to live in, or at least reflect views from, rich places like London, Berlin, or San Francisco. And the advocates of development are often from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, or Brasilia, cities that are thousands of miles away from the Amazon and culturally almost as remote as environmentalists’ cities. “You should see people’s faces here [in Amazonia] when we tell them we’re from São Paulo,” Eduardo Neves told me. “It’s like New Yorkers coming to southern Illinois, only worse. ‘My God, aliens have invaded! Kill them before they infect us all!’”

At the same time, the clash between environmentalist and developer cannot be dismissed. At stake, after all, is the world’s greatest forest. And similar arguments play out in a hundred or a thousand other places that need protection. Beneath the entangling personal motives, the debate is one of the oldest in the Western philosophical tradition, between
nomos
and
physis.
The ancient Greeks saw existence as a contest between
nomos
(rationality/order/artifice) and
physis
(irrationality/chaos/nature). In environmental terms, Thoreau, who saw the landscape as imbued with an essential wildness that could be heedlessly destroyed, embodies
physis. Physis
says, Let Nature be our guide; step out of the way of the environment, and it will know how to keep itself healthy.
Nomos
is the postmodern philosopher who argues that the entire landscape is constructed—that it has no essential, innate qualities, but is simply a reflection of chance and human action.
Nomos
says that no one ecological state is inherently preferable to any other, but that all of them are a product of human choices (even the ones with no people, since we will have made the choice not to go there).

Accepting the magnitude of the Indian impact on the landscape seems to push us toward the
nomos
side. In 1983 Cronon laid out the history of the New England countryside in his landmark book,
Changes in the Land.
In it he observed that wilderness as it was commonly understood simply did not exist in the eastern United States, and had not existed for thousands of years. (A few years later, Denevan referred to the belief in widespread wilderness as “the pristine myth.”) When Cronon publicized this no-wilderness scenario in an article for the
New York Times,
environmentalists and ecologists attacked him as infected by relativism and postmodern philosophy. A small academic brouhaha ensued, complete with hundreds of footnotes. It precipitated one of the only books attacking postmodern philosophy ever written largely by biologists. Another book,
The Great New Wilderness Debate,
published in 1998, was edited by two philosophers who earnestly identified themselves as “Euro-American men…whose cultural legacy is patriarchal Western civilization in its current postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.”

It is easy to tweak academics for their earnestly opaque language, as I am doing. Nonetheless the philosophers’ concerns are understandable. The trees closing over my head in the Amazon
furo
made me feel the presence of something beyond myself, an intuition shared by almost everyone who has walked in the woods alone. That something seemed to have rules and resistances of its own, ones that did not stem from me. Yet the claim that the forest was shaped by people does not seem to leave room for anything else, anything bigger and deeper than humankind.

Understanding that nature is not normative does not mean that anything goes. The fears come from the mistaken identification of wildness with the forest itself. Instead the landscape is an arena for the interaction of natural and social forces, a kind of display, and one that like all displays is not fully under the control of its authors.

Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its state in 1491, they will have to create the world’s largest gardens.

Gardens are fashioned for many purposes with many different tools, but all are collaborations with natural forces. Rarely do their makers claim to be restoring or rebuilding anything from the past; and they are never in full control of the results. Instead, using the best tools they have and all the knowledge that they can gather, they work
to create future environments.

If there is a lesson it is that to think like the original inhabitants of these lands we should not set our sights on rebuilding an environment from the past but concentrate on shaping a world to live in for the future.

Coda

The Great Law of Peace

Fleeing the Nazi conquest of Europe, the writer Vladimir Nabokov and his family took a ship to the United States in the spring of 1940. Although Nabokov was the scion of a Russian noble family, he detested the class-bound servility ubiquitous in the land of his birth. He was delighted when the lowly U.S. customs officers on the Manhattan dock failed to cringe at his aristocratic bearing and pedigree. Indeed, he reported, “when they opened my suitcase and saw two pairs of boxing gloves, two officers put them on and began boxing. The third became interested in my collection of butterflies and even suggested one kind be called ‘captain.’ When the boxing and the conversation about butterflies finished, the customs men suggested I close the case and go.” Their straightforward, even brash demeanor, with its implicit assumption that everyone was on the same social level, enchanted him.

Nabokov was hardly the first emigré to be surprised by the difference between Americans and Europeans—a cultural divide that Henry James, like many others, attributed to the former’s “democratic spirit.” As has been widely noted, this spirit has consequences both positive and negative. The sense that anyone is as good as anyone else fuels entrepreneurial self-reliance, but also can lead to what outsiders view as political know-nothingism. For better and worse, though, this spirit is widely identified as one of the Americas’ great gifts to the world. When rich stockbrokers in London and Paris proudly retain their working-class accents, when audiences show up at La Scala in track suits and sneakers, when South Africans and Thais complain that the police don’t read suspects their rights as they do on
Starsky &
Hutch
reruns, when anti-government protesters in Beirut sing “We Shall Overcome” in Lebanese accents—all these raspberries in the face of social and legal authority have a distinctly American tone, no matter where they take place. To be sure, apostles of freedom have risen in many places. But an overwhelming number have been inspired by the American example—or, as it should perhaps be called, the
Native American
example, for among its fonts is Native American culture, especially that of the Haudenosaunee.

A loose military alliance among the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and, after about 1720, the Tuscarora, the Haudenosaunee were probably the greatest indigenous polity north of the Río Grande in the two centuries before Columbus and definitely the greatest in the two centuries after. The evidence is unclear, but the ancestors of the Five Nations, neighboring bands of gatherers and hunters, may have lived in their homeland since the glaciers retreated from the Finger Lakes—the eleven deep, narrow lakes that lie like cat scratches across central New York State. Some time around 1000
A.D.,
the Indian agricultural trinity of maize, beans, and squash appeared in the area. Taking up agriculture, the Finger Lakes people, by now consolidated into five main groups, lined the region’s hills with farms. Population rose, as has happened time and time again when human societies make the transition from foraging to farming. The burgeoning cultures took to fighting with each other. Because the abduction, injury, or death of a family member had to be revenged, every violent incident led to a spiral of brutal, tit-for-tat skirmishes. From this brutal environment a heroic figure emerged: Deganawidah, the Peacemaker.

So little is known about Deganawidah’s life that archaeologists disagree about whether he actually walked the earth or belongs entirely to the realm of legend. Various traditions provide different accounts of his background, but most say that Deganawidah was not a member of the Five Nations. He was a shamanic outsider who was born to a virgin girl in a village far to the north. Abjuring his past, he floated from his home village in a canoe made from white stone and wandered the Adirondack and Allegheny forests, then a place of constant violence and, apparently, intermittent cannibalism.