Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier
by Geoffrey O’Connor
Penguin Books
Ah, the Amazon. Quite the place. It’s being worked on though, and won’t be around forever.
Geoffrey has taken it upon himself to endure the heat, bugs, lack of proper infrastructure, and all the rest of it, just so he can tell us what’s going on down there.
Basically, what’s going on down there is that people are fucking the place up. The interesting thing is that EVERYBODY is managing to fuck the place up, not just the gold miners and the Brazilian government. On your little list of fuckups, you can add the indigenous people who live there. The Indians. That came as a surprise to me at first, but after considering it for a bit, the surprise disappeared. After all, Indians are people, aren’t they? Ditto well-meaning environinnies like Sting and all the rest of that crowd. People just have a god given knack for fucking things up, and that’s pretty much all there is to it, good intentions notwithstanding.
So whatever’s gonna happen is well and truly gonna happen, and there don’t seem to be a thing that anybody can do about it. And besides, in a million years or three, you and me, and everything we know and love is just gonna be an inch thick band in some rock somewhere anyway. So why get all pissed off about it?
Geoffrey tells a good story. Enjoy Amazon Journal for that, and don’t worry about all the rest of it. Who knows, while entertaining yourself, you just might learn something. Like it’s gonna do any good, right?
