AMAZONIA IN FLUX

I made my first trip to the Amazon in 1991. I wanted to take my son on an adventure trip to clebrate his graduation from college. I was able to arrange for a personal expedition deep into the Venuzuelan Amazon and obtained a special government permit to explore the territory of the Yanomamo Indians, a "stone-age" lifestyle tribe that exists in inaccessible parts of Brazil and Venezuela.

Our expedition was conducted by boat and consisted of two guides, a boatman, a friend of mine, my son and me. The three-week long expedition also took us inside Columbia and turned out to be one great adventure. We stopped frequently to take hikes in the jungle and spent most nights sleeping in hammocks under leantos by the river banks. Our guides also got several village chiefs to let us spend the night inside vacant huts in exchange for some sugar, flour and Crisco.

I fell in love with the Amazon. I returned seven more times, exploring additional parts of Amazonia in Peru, Ecuador and Brazil. I loved trecking through the jungle. It is so beautiful and so peaceful. Camping out at night in the jungle is unlike any camping experience in the good old USA. The only thing that has stopped me from returning again and again is that my age finally caught up to me - physical limitations made the hikes too difficuilt for me.

The Amazon rain forest is about 1.6 million square miles in size, covering about 40 percent of South America, including parts of Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia, Peru and Ecuador. Much has been written about the ecological threat of deforestation. It is estimated that 20 percent of the Amazon rain forest has already been razed.

Amazonia is in a state of flux. Slash-and-burn horticulture, the lumber industry, exploration for oil, gold mining and even Christian missions have all contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest.
It is easy to for us to sit back here at home and criticize the slash-and-burn habits, the cutting of trees for lumber, the exploration for oil and the mining for gold because even our poor are well-off compared to those who live in or on the edge of the Amazonian jungles.

Even the primitive Yanomamos slash-and-burn parts of the jungle to grow a few crops and to cut down the trees they need to build their shabono, the single communal hut inside of which the whole village lives. They hunt monkeys and rodents for food. And because the also rely on fish, their shabonos are put up next to river banks during the dry season. During the wet season they have to move their villages to higher grounds where the slash-and-burn process starts all over again.

As for the lumber companies, the cutting of trees provides a source of badly needed income for the people living in or along the edge of the jungle. I have personally seen some good schools and some impressive jungle lodges for tourists that have been built and given to the Indians by the oil companies. The Amazon gold miners are no different from the American miners who went to seek their fortune during the 1848 - 1864 California gold rush.

The South American governments are largely to blame for whatever ecological damage is being done by the lumber and oil companies. Those industries are merely taking advantage of the absence of effective environmental regulations in that part of the world. The lumber harvesting sites have taken out huge chunks of the rain forests. The oil exploration sites require a lot of clearing and are quite messy with their drilling rigs, crew quarters, oil storage tanks and loading docks for tanker truks or oil barges. And the transportation of heavy equipment, and of oil and lumber, require the building of roads through the jungle.

The missions present an entirely different set of problems. Our expedition stopped at three missions. The evangelical mission at Tamatama and the Catholic mission at La Esmeralda, both along the Orinoco River, have cleared a large section of the jungle, with each having built an aircraft landing strip. The evangelical mission along the Padama River is closest to the Yanomamo's territory and has also cut out a large chunk of the jungle. But it is their debilitating effect on the indigenous people that is of the greatest concern.

The missions exist for the purpose of Christianizing the heathen Indian population. The missions are also providing an education and badly needed medical services to the Indians. That is all well and good. But what happens to the Indians after they've been converted and educated. They leave the jungle and head for the cities to seek employment. Unfortunately for them, jobs are few and far between and they find themselves in surroundings far different from their former jungle habitat.

I spent a few days in Puerto Ayacucho, the state capital of Venezuela's Amazonia territory. It was sickening to see what the Christianization of the mission Indians has done to them. Just as with our American Indians, alcoholism runs rampant among the former jungle inhabitants. I saw hundreds of drunken Indians, quite a few passed out on Puerto Ayacucho's sidewalks and in its street gutters.

The missions have not succeeded in converting the Yanomamos. They are still a war-like people and do not cotton to strangers. As a matter of fact, the military in Tamatama warned us that we would be at some risk by venturing into their habitat. We were able to visit two Yanomamo villages without mishap. In one of those villages most of the Yanomamos were suffering from malaria, with several infants and adults near death. The missions and shrinking jungles offer hardly any threat to the Yanomamos. But, they are seriously threatened with extinction by malaria.

There is probably no way that the deforestation of the Amazon can be stopped. Even the enactment and enforcement of good environmental regulations will have little impact on the search for lumber, oil and gold. The best that can be hoped for is a better management of the environment around the tree cutting, oil drilling and mining sites so that the ecological impact will not be too devastating.