Publication of John Hemming's history of the Amazon has coincided with the release of photographs by Brazil's indigenous affairs department of a rainforest tribe uncontacted by outsiders and with the resignation of the country's environment minister amid strains over development policies.
Tree of Rivers highlights themes that have long shaped the fate of the Amazon rainforest and river system - the irresistible desire to explore a wilderness, and the strains generated by the compulsion to exploit its natural riches.
As a breathtaking reminder of its size, Hemming points out that there may still be 40 to 50 uncontacted tribes. That is plausible because, even after decades of destruction, the Amazon forests with those of the adjacent Orinoco and Guianas extend to nearly 2m square miles.
The river system discharges a fifth of the water that flows into the oceans from all the rivers on the planet.
A consummate explorer and former head of the UK Royal Geographical Society, Hemming has done much to nurture an interest in Brazil's indigenous peoples.
But his book is much more than a thrilling account of the derring-do - and foolhardiness - of determined explorers.
It is an economic history of a region coveted - despite the relative poverty of much of its soil - by outsiders for its capacity to yield in abundance all the factors of production: land, labour and capital.
Tree of Rivers traces journeys by explorers, adventurers, slavers, biologists, soldiers, rebels and opportunists up and down the Amazon river and its tributaries since the first incursion in 1500 by a Spaniard, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón.
It stops along the way at moorings that permit forays into the dark stories of unspeakable cruelty that have been played out beneath the forest canopy.
Thinking he had sailed up the Ganges, for example, Yáñez provided an ominous portent - seizing 36 indigenous men as slaves.
The author describes with moving authority the decimation of indigenous peoples by the outsiders through murderous enslavement, overwork and imported diseases and avarice.
Just as it was the territory's fate to be squabbled over by Spain and Portugal, it was also its lot to be plundered.
In subsequent centuries, a long list of real, or imagined, tradeable goods would lure outsiders: gold, slaves, turtle meat, spices, quinine, cacao, rubber, hardwoods and, most recently, land for colonists, cattle ranchers and soya producers. Even scientific missions often had a commercial imperative.
The 19th-century rubber boom is, perhaps, the most well-known period in this story but, today, land for ranches and farming is the new commodity driving development - and deforestation.
The Amazon has also been a fertile source of dreams - it germinated tales of El Dorado and of what Hemming calls the "legendary tribe of sexually liberated women" after whom the river itself is named; it fuelled the radical ideas of the Enlightenment and of the noble savage; it nourished bizarre racist theories, then buried their inventors; it legitimised the colonising zeal of General Emílio Médici as a "land without people for a people without land"; and, today, it ventilates green politics everywhere as the "lungs of the world", a vast carbon sink essential for the survival of the planet.
It provided a ready supply of souls for theocratically inclined Jesuits, and was a haven for runaway slaves, esoteric cults and all the most significant South American guerrilla movements.
While there will always be optimism that a middle way between extraction and conservation can be found, it is a measure of how so much, yet so little, has changed since the 15th century that the story Hemming tells is one pregnant with the inevitable conflict between wonder at the discovery of new worlds, and our capacity to ruin them.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6b0b8bd6-4c88-11dd-96bb-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
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