In Amazonia (30 page)

One obvious way in which such productivity occurs is as ecologists write places in the act of narrating nature.
⁵⁹
By describing a stripped-down, geographically situated space in which the social is excised from a world of nature, natural scientists working in Amazonia have brought places into existence as the imagined sites of functional natural processes.
⁶⁰
Moreover, through the conventional scaling-up of the specificities of the site, such places, in turn, have come to represent larger landscapes, and, not infrequently, the entire region. In relation to the work of cultural ecologists—those anthropologists working in the tradition of Julian Steward—the significance of such representations of Amazonia, in which the consequential ecological distinction has been between
várzea
(fertile floodplain) and
terra firme
(nutrient-poor upland forest), cannot be overstated. In contrast, a non-equilibrium focus on patchiness has helped bolster pre-existing fine-grained analyses of ecological heterogeneity.
⁶¹
In the social sciences, however, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points out, such shifts can lead, without contradiction, merely to a more differentiated ecological determinism.
⁶²

In the south of Pará, the field site itself is already explicitly humanized through histories of logging and fire. Distinctions between nature and culture on the ground are therefore less secure, the contamination of data is more profound, and the narration is of a damaged landscape, a suitable case for salvage. Paul argues in response that he is working in a “management unit,” not a forest. I understand this as a zone of regulation, a revisioning of nature that effectively converges with the policy nexus through which environmental politics becomes a key location of transregional governmentality.
⁶³

Such ecological narratives are central to understanding how it is that Amazonia continues to be so strongly associated with particular natures. But socio-spatial relations are made in ways additional to writing. Unexpected combinations arise through the coming together of human
and non-human histories and practice in the effort to create and maintain the FMP. In fact, too much is made here for one narration: conjunctural political alliances, new lives for the Wood of Woods, houses and chainsaws for Luiz and Jaime, a bleeding heart for Ana Almeida, a place on a map, a reconfigured locality. New experiences, possibilities, and dilemmas for us all.

M
OACYR

Ana, who never seemed afraid of anything, told me she was scared to death when she took this job in the forest. Like any Amazonian I ever met, she didn't want to be stuck out in the woods, a sitting target for who-knows-what wild beasts of the imagination. She didn't much want to leave her three young children home in the
colônia
all week with her mother. She didn't want to be the only woman out here with a work crew of men. She also wasn't crazy about cooking and cleaning or about hanging around the whole day with no company but the radio and no means of transport out of here except a bicycle.

But her sister walked out after the first week for a job in town, so the position came open and Ana needed the money. And, after a short while she realized this life had its pleasures. When we first met and I couldn't help admiring the perfection of hersítio and the orderliness of the camp, she told me without hesitation that all of it—the Project, her house, her garden—was due to Moacyr.

As Paul is the first to say, Moacyr built the FMP, working through the long rainy seasons under terrible conditions, setting up experiments, improvising technologies from plastic tubing and wooden stakes, molding a team, drawing on his fifteen years' experience as a field assistant for visiting U.S. and Brazilian scientists. And it is Moacyr who continues to haunt the FMP, his name spoken twenty times a day as we pass the trees he marked, read the maps he drew, follow the trails he cut, or shower with the comically ingenious gravity-piped water system he invented. Moacyr. I had been hearing about him for years: a phenomenon, a research assistant who designed experiments and managed projects, who understood the logic of science, who could motivate a work crew like no one else, whose storytelling could enthrall a room, whose physical endurance knew no bounds.

One night, I stayed at Ana'ssítio. We had finished eating and were
sitting outside in the warm darkness. The children were asleep and we talked quietly, the oil lamp throwing shadows across her garden, glinting on the red of her bleeding heart. Ana fetched an album and slowly thumbed through her photos of the two of them together, laughing at her outfits and his gravitas. Moacyr was strong and wiry, older, more contained. Ana looked happy and excited, full of expectation.

I took another long bus journey, this time to Paragominas. Moacyr and I met that first evening, found a café nearby, and sat drinking Cokes. Ana had warned me about his charm, and she was right. He told me how his life had been tied to the history of this small town, somewhere that, along with Redenção and a few other centers, had been the very eye of the storm that swept through eastern Amazonia in the 1980s. Back then, when the sul do Pará was still reeling from the opening of the BR-316, Moacyr would go into the forest to cut timber by hand and bring back logs to the sawmills for which Paragominas was becoming famous. It was during those years that he came to know timber, establishing that familiarity the scientists were now trying to recover.

The next morning, Moacyr found a couple of bikes and we rode up the dusty red hill and out of town in the full sun to Fazenda Maria. Some critical research had been carried out at this site in the early 1990s, demonstrating (against the entrenched orthodoxy of shallow roots and a tightly closed nutrient system) that Amazonian trees and pasture grasses can have deep tap roots reaching down to the water table.
⁶⁴
The site is mostly a relic now and the camp lies abandoned, mildewed photos pinned behind plastic sheeting: clowning researchers, arms entwined. The shafts that made this place famous are still here and still studded with electronic monitoring equipment, the exposed roots visible in the darkening depths where giant toads now sit, trapped and helpless.

Moacyr and I were meeting at a difficult moment in his life, and the account he gave me of his career reflected that. When researchers first arrive, he said, they have little idea of what it means to work in the Amazon. Their language skills are often poor, their ability to walk in the forest doubtful, they know the soils and plants only from books, they don't understand how to negotiate social relations. Such experts rely on people like himself to leaven their
teoria
with
prática
: to interpret their initially garbled Portuguese, to guide them through the materiality of the forest, to translate their tidy blueprints into functional experiments, to mediate their relations with the work crew, to steer a course through the opacity of Amazonian difference.

There are a number of standard experiments Moacyr can put in place independently—biomass and productivity measures, for example. Otherwise, he works through the specific problem, trying to determine as precisely as possible what is wanted and thinking up an appropriate experimental design. If the researcher comes with clearly drawn diagrams, so much the better; Moacyr can just go ahead and prepare the plot or build the necessary structures.

But from the first day the irony begins to unfold. The more successfully he teaches, the faster the visiting scientist learns to be independent. Within a couple of years, the project is established, the team is trained, the area mapped, the replicates in place, and everything has settled into a secure routine. Once indispensable, his skills are no longer needed. And his price, which has risen steadily over the years, is too high.

There was no more of this work available for Moacyr, and he no longer put his faith in science. He seemed to have outgrown the expected relationship, chafing at the imposition of discipline and testing the limits of his mediating role, exploring his charisma. He suspected that experienced researchers preferred to work with other, more deferential assistants and that they were advising their junior colleagues to do the same.
⁶⁵

When we met, Moacyr had left the FMP and Ana, and he had no money to get back to Redenção. Paul, who lists Moacyr as co-author on all Project publications, but who was exhausted by the struggle of wills, had no more work for him. Moacyr told me he had had enough of working with foreigners. He looked back on his fifteen years with the research community and bemoaned his failure to get the formal training that would allow him to demand a salary proportionate to his skills. If he only had a degree, if he was an
Engenheiro Florestal
…. Instead, he was adrift, kicking his heels and conjuring schemes to extract cash from the ever-more-distant forest. My visit only seemed to deepen his isolation. Had I seen the pineapple he'd planted in Ana'ssítio? he wondered. Was the
cajú
fruiting yet?

B
EYOND (A TOWN CALLED)
R
EDEMPTION

I knew they were pheasants, although since dreams usually transform things, they had long tails covered with iridescent eyelike spots similar to those of peacocks or rare birds of paradise….
In the brilliant sunshine they made the most splendid pile imaginable, and there were so many of them there was hardly room for the steersman and the rowers. Then we glided over calm waters and I was already making a mental list of the names of friends with whom I meant to share these treasures.

—Goethe
⁶⁶

As memories fade into the past, they often become dreamlike, anchored only by embodied, deeply embedded details. Dreams likewise gain the materiality of memory, blurring our sense of the real, haunting our days, and driving us on.

Goethe's iridescent vision is a yearning for a rarer, more dazzling, less mediated, more intimate, and fuller nature, simultaneously wild and tame, autonomous but domestic. Yet, it is also a modern fable: the peacock-pheasants in his splendid pile are dead, killed by “natives” for his pleasure. Such profoundly historicized environmental narratives—still colored with Romanticism—now travel that highly charged stretch of the oneiric that runs between Utopia and Apocalypse, a track along which dreams and nightmares meld and morph, feeding each other in co-dependency, afflicting politics with the exigency of crisis.
⁶⁷

The scientific dreamlife of ecology eschews ambivalence for the security of teleology, a meditation in a sacred forest free from the gloom of moral ambiguity. Yet, no one who knows the first thing about the culture and practice of this field science even slightly believes such public fantasies—least of all, of course, those contemporary naturalists whose daily task is the management of natural-cultural excess. Conducted under the sign of methodological purity, however, ecology necessarily reproduces its own fictions. As a knowing aspect of a pragmatic realpolitik, this paradox is at least functional. But it should not obscure all those ways in which scientific practice remakes people and places, bringing them face to face in new and transformative ways.

The FMP has created more than Ana's bleeding heart. But by ignoring that experience and the dreams to which
it
points, traveling science condemns itself to bringing into being an Amazonia that is potent, deeply troubling, and already familiar: a site for salvage and the redemption of the modern.

As Ralegh, Bates, and Paul could all attest, there is, though, a realm of affect and encounter which breaches the divide between the human and natural sciences. Paul, a level-headed romantic who thinks of himself
as a natural historian, understands this well. In the margins of his scholarly production he is compiling his most satisfying work: a field guide to the trees of the FMP. It is an important contribution. In some ways the opposite of normal science, it limits its claims to what the trees make possible. If their range is restricted, so is the guide. Such handbooks are almost non-existent for the Amazon.
⁶⁸
Perhaps the task is just too daunting.

Like Henry Bates in the final pages of
The Naturalist
, Paul is exploring the possibilities of his science from a place saturated with the instabilities of the field. Each of his trees comes to life with a situated identity and a sociality. He begins his description of
farinha seca, Licania
sp., a Chrysobalanaceae, by telling us about
farinha
, “coarse manioc flour that is the true staple of the Amazonian diet, eaten ‘seca'—dry—by the handful or heaped on top of rice and beans.” This tree, however, is certainly not edible, its name instead an ironic play on the word
seca
, which, when used in relation to a container of food or drink, means empty or finished. Like that of Vicente Chermont de Miranda, Paul's dialogic natural historical glossary is a mark of familiarity with both trees and people, an intimacy: “If you swipe [the tree's] lower stem with a machete a cloud of fine bark-dust bursts into the air, and with some imagination you might think of tossed farinha and feel hunger pangs a great distance from the nearest meal.”

Taperebá
, a tree that produces a much-prized regional fruit, presents a mystery the solution to which enrolls multiple actors: “Why is it that this species … is so vastly distributed across the neotropics? Taperebá is a tree that moves about the landscape easily—not only people savor its fruit—and is probably an opportunistic colonizer for which ‘ideal' regeneration conditions are quite broadly defined.”
Cupania scrobiculata
, a Sapindaceae, had no local name. “We named this tree ourselves from its generic moniker, which is odd considering how common it is, especially in upper-slope sandy clays. Providing people neither goods nor services, cupania never needed a local name before.”

There is a seed of possibility here. Despite all the asymmetries of continents, knowledges, disciplines, and locations, there is affinity emergent in misrecognition and forced accommodation. With the domain of environmental politics so circumscribed by emergency, where else but in the lived intimacies of such practices can the recuperation of the wide worlds of a bleeding heart begin?