Inside the Burning of the Amazon

Rolling Stone magazine is not what it used to be, but buried in the fluff pieces about the latest musical sensation they still manage to publish some amazing in-depth articles about politics and the environment,

The Lawless Frontier at the Heart of the Burning Amazon is the best piece of journalism I've read on the burning of the Amazon rain forests. I was just going to include it in the last We're Toast link post, but it's too good to bury it with a bunch of other links.

I’m on a highway called BR-163, a rutted road from hell that has been in some state of construction since Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship 40 years ago. I’m deep in the northern state of Pará — 1,500 miles from the Atlantic coast, and a three-day drive to Rio de Janeiro. For the past two hours we’ve been navigating potholes the size of moon craters and swerving around a caravan of tractor-trailers. Winding south through the Xingu basin, BR-163 starts in Santarém, a muggy port city on an Amazon tributary, and ends 1,000 miles south, in Brazil’s breadbasket, the state of Mato Grosso. Literally translated as “thick jungle,” Mato Grosso is where Colonel Fawcett disappeared looking for the Lost City of Z. Now almost entirely denuded, a lot of it looks like Kansas. 

The road we’re traveling points to Brazil’s future as a commodities superpower. No country exports more soy and beef than Brazil. We pass hundreds of trucks headed to the Amazon port, loaded with soy, where they will unload on tankers sailing for Europe and China. Ten degrees from the equator, BR-163 is a dividing line of sorts, a demarcation point between the natural world and what seems to be its destiny: an industrialized monoculture that creeps further north every year.

As a result, BR-163 has become notorious — few areas of the Brazilian Amazon have seen more rapid deforestation over the past 10 years. I’ve been told that if I want to understand the forces that are driving the destruction of the world’s most important curb against climate change, this is the place to go. 

It's a vivid, powerful article that avoids the sensationalism of some of the recent coverage and dives deep into the complexities of life in the Brazilian frontier. Fair warning: You may find it depressing. I did.