Sleeping in the Amazon jungle isn’t restful. Once you’ve lashed your hammock to trees so you don’t have to sleep on the ground with the bugs, you create shelter. Rain is a big concern. It comes up fast. First you notice the wind pick up. Then the clouds cover. A thunder clap. Then it’s heavy downpour. This all occurs within a few minutes. And the rain is blinding: you have to be prepared for it.
There’s a lot of work to do.
There’s fire; it wards off the animals– jaguars, wild boars, etc. (and that’s a big etc.)–who might traipse through camp. That means gathering wood. Then there’s dinner.
On this outing we had no provisions. The idea was to live off what nature provides. That means more foraging through the jungle. A felled palm tree. Berries. Roots. Nuts. Sap. A stream. These all make for dinner ingredients. My guides caught fish. (I failed.) These are the things we ate and drank.
My experience living off the land in the middle of nowhere, well, technically miles from any other human existence and tens of miles from any sort of community, was to see how we humans are ravaging the land. Natural resources are dwindling. Food crops are low–at their lowest levels in 30 years, I’m told–which has the World Food Program nervous.
Amazonia, Brazil, the site of my jungle expedition, is suffering from deforestation. That means people are being displaced, and the areas natural resources are being pillaged. No resources to live off of, people are forced to urban areas. Urbanization, of course, unfolds new strains on natural resources–concentrating effects. As it stands, The Amazon’s rate of deforestation is thousands of miles of rainforest per year. Since just the year 2000, more than 60,000 square miles of rainforest have been lost. Lost too are all the natural resources that go with it.
Here there can be found chewing gum (chicle), printing ink (copal), cashew nuts, coffee, chocolate, insect repellent (camphor), beef (cattle), sugar, vanilla, rope (jute), furniture (bamboo/rattan). There’s an assortment of fruits and medicinal herbs to be had, and aloe for lotions. There’s even natural Viagra.
Use any of the above, or their derivatives and your footprint makes a big mark here too. As for me, I step cautiously through the jungle. I was pricked and stung. I starved and stumbled. The rules of the jungle are to survive. But the jungle itself is having a difficult time because we aren’t imposing enough laws of our own to keep it intact.
Thomas M. Kostigen is The New York Times bestselling coauthor of