Amazon Rainforest Fate Decides in Brazilian Election

The Forest Doesn’t Get a Ballot

Well, Brazil holds its presidential runoff on Sunday, and everybody agrees the future of the Amazon rainforest is on the ballot. That’s a mighty big thing to put on a ballot. I’ve seen ballots with a dogcatcher on them and felt the voters were stretched thin. Now they’re being handed the biggest forest on earth and the folks who live in it, and asked to settle the matter between breakfast and the afternoon football.

Here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud: the forest doesn’t vote. The trees can’t register, and most of the people who live under them are a long way from where elections get decided. Brazil’s votes pile up in the big cities on the coast, where the Amazon is something you see on a calendar or hear about on the news. So the most important environmental decision in the country will be made mostly by people who will never smell it burning. I don’t say that to blame them. A man in a city apartment worrying about his rent isn’t a villain for worrying about his rent. But it does mean the forest’s fate is likely to be decided as a side effect, the way a cow’s fate gets decided when somebody wants a hamburger and isn’t thinking about cows at all.

A newspaperman named Tom Phillips went up to Roraima, way up in the north, which is about as far from a coastal polling place as you can get without a passport. Roraima is where the talk about the Amazon stops being talk. People there don’t experience the forest as a cause. They experience it as a neighbor, a livelihood, a threat, a home, depending on who you ask and what they do for a living. You can find folks who want it left alone and folks who want to make a living off it, and both are standing on the same ground the rest of the country is arguing about from a safe distance.

Now, the strongest case against my shrug goes like this: presidents matter. A president decides whether the people who enforce the law out in the woods get money, boots and a helicopter, or get a budget cut and a pat on the head. That’s true, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But follow that a step further. What changes on Monday isn’t the forest. What changes is the signal. Everybody out there with a chainsaw, a cattle permit or a mining claim reads an election result the way a farmer reads the sky. They aren’t waiting on a law. They’re waiting to learn whether anybody’s going to come looking. That’s my guess at the incentive, anyway. It could be that most of them just keep doing what they were doing either way and the election changes less than the speeches claim. Either way, the forest is governed less by the man who wins than by whoever actually shows up in Roraima on some ordinary Tuesday.

Both sides understand this, and both sides do the same thing with it. One camp talks about the Amazon like a treasure that has to be guarded. The other talks about it like a pantry nobody’s allowed to open. Each one promises the communities out there a better future, and each one makes that promise from a stage a long, long way off. I’ve noticed that politicians love a forest the way some fellows love a horse they’ve never had to feed. It’s easy to have strong opinions about an animal that’s always somebody else’s chore.

So Sunday is a real choice and a serious one, and I hope Brazilian voters take it seriously. But they ought to know what they’re really picking. They aren’t choosing the forest’s future. They’re choosing which kind of person gets sent up the river afterward, and whether that person has gas money.

Somewhere in Roraima on Sunday night, somebody will hear the result on a radio that sputters in the heat. They’ll nod, or they won’t, and then they’ll go out the next morning to the same trees, the same river and the same neighbors as before, and they’ll wait to see who comes up the road first. That’s when they’ll find out who really won.