Lost Worlds Read Free Page A

Panama, on the edges of the almost impenetrable Darien Gap jungle (see Chapter 5). I was talking with members of a campesino (peasant) family. In the distance the ancient rain forest was in flames. From another direction huge trucks were emerging from the deep darkness of the jungle laden with freshly felled trees.
    “I thought the government had banned tree-felling in these forests,” I said.
    “They have,” replied the wife.
    “So why are these trucks here?”
    Shrugs all around.
    “And the burning,” I said. “I thought the government had banned the burning of the forest.”
    “They did,” said the wife again.
    “So why the burning?”
    “To make a farm.”
    “For whom?”
    “For us—for our families. We have to make a living.”
    “But in other parts of Panama, this hasn’t worked. The soil is no good for farming. After four or five years there’s no farm left.”
    “Yes,” said the woman’s son, “but in four years we will have a video machine….”
    A few days later, after an arduous journey through the Darien jungle by canoe and on foot through some of the hardest—and hottest—hiking territory on earth, I entered a small Cuna Indian community high in the mountains. I was far from the burning and logging frenzy to the north and sat talking with the chief’s son in the shade of huge forest trees. The Cuna are one of the last tribal groups in Latin America to withstand the scourge of conquistadors, colonialists, and modern-day capitalists in a relatively unscathed state. They have been labeled by anthropologists as the last original democracy on earth and still conduct their affairs in the heat of community debates. They resist progress in the Western sense and regard their rain forests as sacrosanct:
    “We believe the forest is part of the Golden Time,” the chief’s son told me, “a time of balance. The forest is our home, our pantry, a place for our medicines. Yet every year it is threatened. There have been so many plans to take our trees, make our islands into places for tourists, build roads through our forest, and bring cattle into the lowland along the coast.”
    He went on to explain that after laborious petitioning of the government and with the help of U.S.-based institutions, the Cuna have so far managed to safeguard their sacred forests and maintain their traditional way of life. Western scientists now work with the tribespeople to study the ecological cycles of the Darien rain forest and the medicinal properties of plants unique to this region.
    “You see,” the chief’s son told me, “there are many things in our forest which may help other people. We do not have to destroy it. We can live here. The balance can be kept.”
    Hence my optimism. I believe we are beginning to learn to appreciate and maintain fragile balances. Also, in questioning many of our own modern-day mores, in realizing the complexity of the problems we have created for ourselves, and in looking again at the knowledge, cohesion, and balance of so-called primitive societies, we are becoming far less myopic in our thinking and possibly more modest about our once-bombastic sense of endless change and progress.
    And a final reason for my optimism. The journeys undertaken for this book and its precursor ( The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of the Earth , HarperCollins, 1991) have made me realize just how wild and unexplored much of our planet remains. My wanderings through “lost worlds”—places seemingly untouched by the horrors of mindless decimation and the hyperbole of the “end-of-the-earth” doomsayers—reinforced my faith that we, and these places, will survive. Just to know that such “lost worlds” exist at all—untouched, unspoiled—is succor for the spirit of wonder in each one of us. It is my hope—my optimistic hope—that these journeys will help a little to rekindle that spirit and reinforce our efforts to maintain and protect the great wildernesses of our earth.
    We are