You can hear the boom best in the afternoon
That’s when the jungle is too hot for most noise; the birds aren’t chirping, the insects are quiet, the frogs haven’t started their nightly chorus and whatever few mammals around are hidden, waiting for darkness. You can hear the BOOM rolling down the Napo River, just west of Misahualli, seven hours from Quito - just the other side of the Andes really - in a part of the Ecuadorian rainforest that is more than sacred, or a national treasure or even a world treasure.
See, this part of the earth is one of a kind, a swath of forest that holds the highest level of biodiversity on the planet. Think about that for a moment, an area smaller than Manhattan and within it live more creatures and critters and plants than anywhere else in the world.
Everyone knows what the BOOM is, but no one wants to talk about it. They're fishing with dynamite now. Everywhere the indigenous are losing fingers and toes. Locals buy full boom-boom sticks from oil men in the area and chop the charges into thirds with machetes. They're using vines and leaves and little balls of waxy string to make makeshift fuses if they can't buy those too. They wade out into the river, wade right out into what was once their native fishing grounds and heave-ho. What was once a complicated process has broken down. The old ways-the making of delicate traps, the mixing of biotoxin to make fish groggy. the slow harvest that doesn't deplete or pollute the river- well, they're mostly gone. Not as many folks want to listen to the shaman anymore. Who cares about the old ways when there's television and argyle socks and dynamite? So they're fishing with dynamite and their timing is for shit. Some of them are spending the rest of their lives as burn victims and as amputees and are destroying the major tributary of the world's greatest resource along the way. After all, we're only talking about ground zero for biodiversity and all the possibility such diversity brings. What's a few lost digits in the name of progress?
These days there are six major types of world travelers: rocks people, animals people, people people, party people, sports people, and been-there-done-that people. Rocks people go in for archeology and geology, they head out to places like Machu Picchu and Ankgor Wat and Egypt. They favor huge piles of stone and vanished civilizations. People people evolved from rocks people, but instead of vanished civilizations they want living ones that are about to vanish. The names of indigenous tribes flow from their lips. Animal people want wildlife. Most are particular in their wildlife-they want mammals or birds or butterflies. Party people could give a shit for the great outdoors, they want exotic cities and hot nightclubs and local drugs and brews and radios playing all night long. Sports people go places to run rivers or climb mountains or hunt game. Been-there·done-that people come in two sub-species. The first is The Great Tourist-Fodors in hand, sharpies at the ready. To them travel is a checklist pack twenty sites into an afternoon and head back to the air-conditioned hotel by dinner. The other sub-species suffer from a Star Trek Complex: they want to go where no man has gone before. The harder the trip the better.
To be fair, most travelers tend to occupy more than one niche. I fall into the animal-sports-Star Trek-complex categories, which means I want to go surfing on a beach that's only reachable by a five day uphill climb through a tropical jungle full of extremely rare poisonous snakes. And if that can't happen I'll go to Ecuadorian rainforest. Which is where I went, which was better than surfing, which may, in fact, have been better than anything I have seen before and I have a pretty severe Star Trek Complex. So, sure, I'm not the first man to hike through this rainforest, but if things keep on as they've been going, I may very well be among the last.
The Ecuadorian rainforest is going to go away.
It's going to go away, not in the distant future, not because of meteoric cataclysm or natural cycle, it's going to disappear soon, maybe before your children can see it, maybe before you can see it. According to the Rainforest Action Network, the global rate of rainforest deforestation hovers around' 49 acres a minute. In Ecuador that comes out to 3,000 square kilometers a year. This means that every year Ecuador loses an area larger than San Francisco.
Ecuador has the highest rate of deforestation in South America and if this rate continues, there are 15 years of rainforest left. This is why, when I decided to head to Ecuador. I chose to visit Alinahui, the Butterfly Lodge, owned and operated by the Ecuadorian-based Jatun Sacha Foundation and the Caljfornia-based Health and Habitat. Together they own and manage about 350 acres of the rainforest. This may not sound like a lot-and isn't really a lot but at least it's something.
Health and Habitat built Cabanas Alinahui, a collection of eight cabins inspired by indigenous homes and complete with hammocks, toilets, showers. cots and rooms protected by a barricade of wire mesh meant to keep out the mad marathon of insects. In theory, mesh is a great idea. But these insects want every last drop of your blood.
So, screens or no screens, repellent or no repellent. this is the Amazon and the first rule of the Amazon is that insects will not be denied. Health and Habitat is trying to support an indigenous-based ecotourism that doesn't decimate the forest. Unlike the nearby Swiss Lodge, Atinahui has no television, no phone, no swimming pool and no 15-foot wall surrounding its perimeter to remind the locals know just how poor they realty are.
Alinahui is a biological preserve so it is protected, at least in theory, for a little while longer. Which isn't to say that it has a chance. Not really. Not if the Ecuadorian government gets its way. According to the law, Health and Habitat only owns the land above ground. The government owns everything below ground and has the right to authorize oil men to drill and test and nibble and scratch away. Should they find oil on your property, never mind biodiversity or endangered species, it's no longer your property and maybe they'll compensate you for it. See, the Ecuadorian government is so oil greedy that in 1992 it dropped out of OPEC because they didn't want to subscribe production quotas. They claimed economic hardship as their reason. They claimed need-whatever that means. The fact of the matter is, they wanted to be able to produce more oil than OPEC allowed, meaning that the government of Ecuador got greedier than OPEC.
What happens when an oil company finds oil is very simple: they build a road. They don't respect property or animals or anything. They draw a straight line between here and there and begin hacking. So what's the big deal, a swath of land no more than thirty feet wide gets clear cut, so what? Well this brings us to the Field of Dreams law of jungle survival: if you build it, they will come. A road means immigration. A road means that whatever poor folks from around the country who have had enough of starving in that patch of dirt over there will come try this patch of dirt over here. The first thing migrants do, after setting up camp alongside the new road, is begin chopping down trees. Rare hardwoods go first because they bring in the most coin. The softer woods follow and then, when there are no more of those trees, they burn whatever is left and plant grass to raise cattle. The problem is, the rainforest soil isn't any good; after about 20 inches of good topsoil you hit rock. Grass takes hold for a season or two before it can't be re-grown or replanted. At that point the soil has been hammered down by the cattle, there's no shade left and what you have is a sandy desert in the making.
This is a long way of saying that the rainforest is not a renewable resource. It doesn't re-grow itself, it changes, erases-permanently and forever. So after annihilating one patch of forest these new roadside immigrants turn to the next and the next and the next, all the while ruining plant life and busily hunting animals, because, well, we all gotta eat.
As for the oil men, they do find oil. They find so much that it seems like a good idea to spread it around. In the twenty years these oil men have been hauling their rigs around and spreading the gospel, 16.8 million gallons of oil have been dumped in the Amazon alone. A volume exactly 8.4 million gallons greater than the spill Exxon managed to dump in the Valdez spill. Millions of gallons have spilled down the Napa and into the Amazon and then into the Atlantic. And, as far as I know, there's not one creature alive designed to live in oil. so all the wildlife that this 16.8 million gallons has encountered along its way is no more.
The rainforest reshapes the way you think of life on this planet. It does this through the languid process of continual amazement, a process that feels a little like being repeatedly struck in the face by a waffle iron. There's something that happens to people when they are transplanted out of their principle environment into one that exists slightly beyond all imagination. It is a stripping away of cultural referents; nothing you see, hear, smell, taste or touch bears any real relationship to your day-to-day life. Everyone has the same limited information base to draw upon. Which is why, when we first head up the Napa via dugout canoe, I turn to Katherine, our naturalist guide, and do what every American tourist who has sat on the bow of a dugout canoe and gone down river has done.
"Hey Katherine, have you ever seen Apocalypse Now?"
"No, but I've heard a lot about it."
There's a standard checklist for Amazon adventure designed to give you an experience to write home about eat lemon ants; see poisonous snakes, frogs and insects; see non-poisonous snakes, frogs and insects disguised as poisonous snakes, frogs and insects; continually confuse the two categories; have the really big bug experience; ride on a dugout canoe; make stupid Apocalypse Now references.
Then there are the other things, things noticed along the way, things that make us stop and reevaluate and reshape what it is we hold as basic and fundamental about life on this planet. Think of a chicken. Now picture a chicken in its natural environment. Think barnyards and holding pens but remember this is not the natural environment of the chicken. This is only our human-made use-value of a chicken. The natural environment of a chicken is the jungle. Despite the fact that I have spent years seeing chickens in various jungles I never once stopped to think feral chickens. Not until I encountered a hoatzin.
A Hoatzin is a bird so strange that most people can’t even spell it.
In truth it is not related to a chicken, though at first glance it looks related to a chicken. But it also looks related to pheasants, cranes, pigeons and certain members of the Sex Pistols. Adult hoatzins are about fourteen inches long and dark brown with white markings. Their wings and legs are short, feet large, tails long and wide with big patches of yellow on the outside feathers and a striking, iridescent blue mohawk that runs atop their heads. These birds are molecularly closest to a cuckoos.
Hoatzins are lousy flyers (thus earning the nickname "flying cow") and awful to taste (thus earning the name "stinking bird")-but they're pretty unreal to see. They hop around large trees positioned above bodies of water. This is because, though they can barely fly and hopping around isn't the world's finest defense mechanism, they're phenomenal swimmers. So when danger comes, they drop out of the tree, into the water and swim away. None of this makes the bird special, it just makes the bird well adapted to its environment and, up until now, safe from extinction. What makes the hoatzin special is that the young are born with functional claws on the second and third digits of the forelimbs which atrophy as the bird grows wings. The hoatzin is the bird that tells us that reptiles evolved into birds, meaning the hoatzin is one living piece of a gigantic evolutionary puzzle.
The Ecuadorian rainforest has yet to be fully explored. There are still many, many far stranger things than the hoatzin hidden beneath that dizzy canopy. These aren't lessons unlearned, these are lessons unknown. In her wonderful book of bugs, Broadsides From the Other Orders, Sue Hubbell draws a chart illustrating the evolution of a flea into a human being. Never mind that this chart is pure biological fantasy. It does, in fact. depict a scenario that could occur given the slightest of variation in the slightest of moments in geological time. Certainly the sentient creature at the end of that chain would not look like us or think like us or move like us, but some form of intelligent consciousness would have arrived. This is the true secret, the true treasure of the rainforest, beyond the beauty, beyond the near endless potential for new medicines and new foods and new use values the jungle always provides. If the rainforest vanishes, so does our biggest foothold in the world of possibility.