Waking up in the jungle is blinding. It’s truly a feeling of having popped into somewhere, an existence, consciousness. There isn’t a slow awakening. Nope. The light hits you and the surroundings shake you into a heightened state of curiosity right away. You have to then work to remember where you are and what the *#@!+ you ARE doing in the middle of nowhere. So you look around and try immediately to figure things out. Fire: Out. How long? Anything traipse through camp? My stuff still there? Anything crawl on me? Where is everyone else?
Here in the Amazon jungle there are lots of questions. Curiosity abounds, in fact. Perhaps it’s because you’re so exposed, so raw, so…”in it.”
Down at the small creek where we find running fresh water to drink, one of my guides is looking at a track. “Animal,” is all I can make out from what he tells me in Portuguese. Then my translator comes along and says it was just a tapir. It must have come through camp at night.
Tapirs are the cutest little guys in the forest. They’re large, but pretty harmless. They’re about 7 feet long and three feet high. They look like a small elephant with its trunk cut short. They are defenseless except if they turn their pudgy bodies around and try to kick you with their small hind legs. They could bite you, but they are very shy. Tapirs feed on fruits, berries, and leaves. They’re also great prey for jaguars.
Here there is no forgiveness or sympathy. The law of the jungle prevails. We humans take that rule to new levels: We dominate the jungle itself and conquer it along with everything in it. The regard for other species is very much lost. We are, according to the famed biologist EO Wilson just one out of 1.6 million identified species on the planet. There may be as many as 100 million species, he estimates. Yet we have no clue about our impact on them and what that does to the planet never mind what we do ourselves to the Earth. Land is being lost, species are being displaced and we never connect the pieces of paper in our drawers and on our desks to that ravaging. Nor do we consider other affects…like beef.
Brazil is now the largest beef exporter in the world, responsible for 25% of the world’s supply. Cattle take up a lot of land too. One recent report exclaims that fast-food hamburgers are wreaking havoc on the Brazilian rainforest. Unconsciously we order. Unconsciously we eat. Unconscious are we of the effects of all that we do…until we arrive in the land of our consequence. Then we feel uncomfortable and out of place. I wonder why.
