Acorns in the Amazon

     

Our little metal boat cut through the river waters and powered forwards, and I leaned with it; breathing in the fresh air, I felt that my lungs reached all the way to my toes. I was surging up the Rio Negro in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the very ecosystem that produces 20% of the world’s oxygen.  It is no surprise the Amazon basin is known as the “Lungs of the World.”

As I sat perched in the boat, the river surged forward with such elegant confidence it was hard to imagine that once the river flowed in the opposite direction.  The Amazon and a few of its tributaries used to actually flow towards the Pacific-- but that was fifteen million years ago. Since then, tectonic plates shifted and the Andes mountains rose up, blocking the river’s passage and forcing it to flow east into the Atlantic, like it does today.


My adventure began in Manaus, the capital city of Brazil’s Amazonas state. It is the largest city in Brazil’s north and got it’s name in the late 19th century when the city was seized by the craze for the  valued rubber tree. But the boom only lasted until the rubber seed was smuggled outside of Brazil, and then the city fell into poverty. Today, the looming Opera House is the best standing example of Manaus in it’s glory days.




So that was Manaus. But for six days, I lived in the jungle. Take a bus two and a half hours north, walk 20 minutes to the Urubu River, take a boat 40 minutes down the river, and then hike 3 hours into the woods-- and that is where we set up camp.  I picked the Caju fruit and ate it straight off the tree, and I saw the bearers of the cupuaçu and acai fruits growing peacefully at the edge of the grove.  I walked through a mandioca farm, and saw pineapples poking out of the spiky shrubs. I even tasted the bark that yields quinine, the jungle’s cure for malaria.

And the forest was filled with animal life. Yellow parrots flew by, green lizards pitter-pattered through the grass, shiny honeybees buzzed around their sticky nest. The baby caimans lurked at the edge of the river, and the piranha fell for our trap of raw chicken, and made a very fresh and tasty dinner. Both the pink and grey freshwater dolphins even shot out of the river to make an appearance-- which was special, I knew, because by the time I visited China’s rivers a few years ago the freshwater dolphins of the Yangtze were already extinct.

As I sit here in urban Buenos Aires, I can still remember what it felt like to be embraced in a hammock, eyes lightly closed, waiting to hear the sound of a bird’s wings as it swoops through the forest overhead.

I felt lucky to have had this experience, especially because half of the world’s rainforests have already been burned or mowed down to create cow fields.  The remaining half is threatened to be gone within 40 years if destruction simply continues at its current rate.  One in ten known plant and animal species in the world live in the Amazon.  These statistics startled me-- could I do anything to preserve this sanctuary any longer?

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”  In this spirit, I went to AmazonWatch.com and donated to the cause of preserving what’s left of Brazil’s Amazon. I also signed the petition to stop the construction of a massive damn on the Xingu River, one of the Amazon’s tributaries. For today, that is my acorn. I hope I will plant more in the future.