Twelve by Twelve Read Free Page B

ecotourism, sustainable timber, nontimber forest products, shade-grown organic coffee, political organizing and advocacy. In the end, the logic goes, if the rainforest pays, it stays. If these folks earn their living from it, they’ll protect it from the multinationals coming to cut it down, whether for mahogany, for soy and sugar plantations, or for iron, gold, and diamond mines.
    I have helped create rainforest-protecting municipal reserves, indigenous areas, and community forests that have successfully resisted logging, mining, and industrial farming. But these efforts have been trounced by the global trend. Have I been merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic ? From 1998 to 2008 theworld’s rainforests have disappeared at a rate of an acre every two minutes, approximately 1 percent a year. At this rate, in forty years we will have destroyed the last of them.
    When I fly over the rainforest into these places, I feel the irony. Planes spew dangerous global warming gasses into the stratosphere that hasten the desertification that fuels rainforest decline. I don’t want to get on the plane, and yet, I have to get on the plane.
    I get on the plane. Below, there’s West Africa’s Upper Guinea Rainforest. There’s the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon, Central Africa’s Congo River Basin Rainforest, Central America’s Monte Verde cloud forest, and the final remnants of India’s forests collapsing under the weight of a billion people.
    Still, it’s marvelous that we have some rainforest left. Sometimes, especially in the so-called megadiverse nations like Peru, Bolivia, and Indonesia, the strange green animal below stretches 360 degrees as far as I can see, bulging slightly in the middle distance, then softening out to the thin line of the horizon. That olive and lime green pelt sometimes looks so exquisite that I ache to reach down from the air and stroke it. It’s like the back of an enormous animal we thought extinct but that still lives, reclining below in soft curvature.
    But when this animal’s side comes into view, I see the burns in its fur — ten-acre clear-cuts fed by logging roads like snaking arteries thick with virus. Sometimes fresh fires still burn, but I can’t hear the monkeys’ screams of terror under the plane’s engine. When the fires are gone, there’s a pure black deadness to the skin — and it’s time to land amid the charcoal, the stumps. A million species flee or die; only one species moves in.
    “ ON THE HILLSIDES OLD CROPS DEAD AND FLATTENED … murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneledamong the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”
    Granted, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was probably the worst possible thing to read during my reentry to America. But there I was anyway, a few days later, reading the novel in my parents’ condo parking lot. I recalled that McCarthy suggested his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel is not about some distant future dystopia; it’s really about the present time.
    Boy, did I need some comfort food. In the supermarket across the road, I walked down an endless ice cream aisle and finally found it: Ben and Jerry’s, something I never see in Africa or Latin America, and a real treat. But something was different. On the back of the pint of Phish Food was one word: Unilever. The Vermont duo had sold their erstwhile eco-company to the world’s biggest food conglomerate, responsible for denuding the Brazilian rainforest and poisoning field laborers with chemicals.
    I put the pint back. As I walked through that windowless, sterile mega-market, with piped-in music, the exit seemed to recede into the distance. I finally reached the door, only to escape into the sprawling parking lot. I