Trip to the Amazon

Just got back from a trip to Brazil - went to Manaus in the heart of the Amazon, and then Rio de Janeiro.

The Amazon stays on my mind - both the destruction and the concept of living without the crutches of civilization holding us up. Many of the natives have had to leave the jungle and get jobs in cities because their food - animals and fish - is disappearing due to deforestation. We saw very little wildlife there - most had been killed off. The Amazon river was at a 60-year low, and many side rivers were a small stream that a canoe could barely go up, causing vast areas upstream to be cut off from food and medical supplies from the city, since the river is their mode of transportation. We were told the drought is caused by changing weather patterns due to global warming. They also had a hurricane in southern Brazil - I believe the first in recorded history - due to global warming. The dolphins in the river are dying because the water is too warm. It may be in our life time that the way of life humans have known for millions of years will finally be eradicated from the planet, and our industrial life of the past few generations will take over, further destroying the infrastructure that was our birthplace. The life forms that took 60 billion years to produce human beings are being wiped out in a few human generations. We are killing our mother. And who knows if we really have what it takes to survive without her.

I still think about the offer from the native to go live in the jungle for a while. There are still an estimated 60 tribes in the Amazon that have never even been contacted by the outside world, still unpolluted by our ways. Tobias Schneebaum, author of Keep the River on your Right, went to live with the canibals in the Amazon some 40 years ago or so, and ate human flesh with them. He went back recently to produce a movie of them, and found them sitting around watching satillite TV. It will not be long before Coca Cola and Sony will become necessities of life for everyone in the world, and the corporations will have succeeded in totally destroying our connection with the mother earth in return for increased dividends. When will I ever have an opportunity again to find out what humans really need to live and be happy, before civilization convinced us we needed more?

I asked one of the natives who is now living in the city at Manaus and who had not been back to his village since he left (it is two weeks upstream), if he missed anything about the village. He said life was much easier there. Here he has to work 40 hours a week or more just to make ends meet. There he was with his community while he worked, instead of at a place of employment, and it did not take so many hours in order to provide what they needed to live. An easier life in the jungle? That sure challenges my view of things.

So I'm back in the world of computers, cell phones, PDA's, cars, polution, the "source of modern civilization" - America, from where corporate interests have spread world-wide, changing and destroying cultures and traditions thousands of years old, changing social and religious structure perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old. Technology, which in one tick of the clock has split the atom, traveled to other planets, modified our dna, produced artificial foods that we eat, allowed us to cram together into cities with no possible way of supporting the food and heat that we need to survive.

Yes, it is a way of living. But we do not know if it is viable. People cut down the forests because they want money like us - they want TV's and cars and computers and other "good things". Is there room on this planet for every poor person to have a car? Would our atmosphere survive it? Have we created a world where we can't allow the poor to rise to our level because our planet won't survive if they do? Is Iraq the beginning of the fight to horde the fuel of technology as we go rushing towards some crisis point? Our lifestyle is not viable in the long run. Our society is not sustainable. We have created a civilization based on the assumption of infinite resources, but now they are quickly dwindling. What happens when they run out? How many of us are prepared to go back to the jungle and live simply again? And if we did, would there still be fish to eat?

So, these is my ponderings from my trip. There is much more, but it will have to come out another time.

Comment posted by Anonymous
at 10/29/2005 10:24:00 PM
Hi, Gene,
Welcome back!
Your account of your experiences in Brazil, in the "real world" as well as Rio, tells me that our planet is in worse shape than I had realized. What a shame, that our way of life in the USA is harming innocent people in other countries because we are so carried away in chasing the dollar sign (it's hard to not be part of it even if one is living simply), polluting, consuming non-renewable resources, destroying natural habitats. Part of it is global warming apparently, caused by atmospheric changes which in turn are caused by pollution. Humanity is becoming a cancer on the planet, like someone said, and this planet is the only planet we've got.
On the positive side, Rio must have been a lot of fun, and I get the impression that your trip and your experience as a whole was a good learning and fun experience.
I'll be out of town from this afternoon until I return Sunday PM from a weekend Sufi Dance Camp (Dances of Universal Peace and related activities) and the last day of the Maryland Renaissance Festival.
Andy