The Ballot and the Chainsaw

On Sunday, Brazilian voters will walk into polling stations and perform an act of consent that the whole country has agreed to treat as the only one that counts. Somewhere in Roraima, the next morning, a man at a riverside fuel depot will fill plastic drums for a boat heading upriver. He will perform an act of consent too, and nobody will call it a vote. Coverage of the runoff, including Tom Phillips’s reporting on what it means for the Amazon and the people who live in it, rightly says the forest’s future is at stake. My concern is with where that future is supposed to be decided. We say it is decided at the ballot box. That is true. It is also the most convenient half-truth a society can tell itself.

The convenient part is that it puts all the agency into one office. If the forest falls, the president allowed it. If the forest stands, the president saved it. Everyone between the palace in Brasilia and the riverbank becomes weather, things that happen to the forest rather than things people choose to do to it. The man filling the drums is not giving anyone permission. He is just at work.

The opposing view deserves its full weight, because it is mostly correct. Presidential power over the Amazon is real. The executive funds or starves the environmental agencies. It appoints the people who decide whether an inspection team gets a helicopter. It signals to prosecutors, to the federal police, to the ministries that grant land titles, whether the law will be enforced. Brazil’s recent history suggests that forest loss rises and falls with these signals. An essay telling Brazilians the runoff is beside the point would be foolish and also false.

I am not arguing that. I am arguing that the president’s power over the forest works almost entirely through other people’s habits, and that what Sunday really decides is which habits will be tolerated.

Look at what a president can actually do in Roraima. They can sign nothing that fells a tree. Felling takes a crew, the crew needs fuel, the fuel needs the depot owner, and the depot owner needs a buyer upriver who pays in gold or cattle or timber. Gold needs someone to buy it without asking where it came from. Cattle need a slaughterhouse that doesn’t check which pasture the animal grazed on. Timber needs paperwork, and paperwork needs a clerk willing to stamp it. None of these people answer to the president. Each of them takes a cue from the president.

That word, cue, is the key to the whole arrangement. A permissive government doesn’t command destruction. It just shows that refusing to take part will earn you nothing and taking part will cost you nothing. A protective government doesn’t stop destruction by decree. It makes the clerk hesitate over the stamp, makes the slaughterhouse worry about an audit, makes the gold buyer wonder whether this is the season the federal police finally turn up. Seen this way, enforcement is the state organising the withdrawal of consent all down the chain. Permissiveness is the state reassuring everyone in the chain that their usual way of doing things will be left alone.

This is a guess about incentives, and there is a fair alternative. Many people in the chain are not making choices so much as surviving. A boatman in a state with little legal work does not feel he is consenting to anything. He feels he is feeding his children. I accept this, and it is exactly why the habit matters more than the decree. Coercion would be easier to fight. A habit sustained by ordinary need goes on running whoever wins on Sunday, unless someone gives every person in the chain a reason to stop, a reason that pays.

There is something almost comic in the national ritual. Millions of people queue to decide who will be blamed, then go home and keep buying the beef, banking the gold and stamping the papers. Responsibility is concentrated in one office so that it can be thinned out everywhere else. Whoever wins inherits a forest held up, or cut down, by people who have already decided the matter is out of their hands.

On Monday the drums will be full by mid-morning. The boat will push off. Whether the boatman glances at the riverbank for an inspector, and whether he finds one, depends on the vote. Whether he gets on the boat at all was never on the ballot.