What the Forest Already Knows

The election concerns the Amazon. What it does not concern, because the question was never put to them, is the long record of the people who have kept that forest standing while governments in Brasilia came and went like visitors who never take their boots off. In Roraima, at the northern edge of the country, there are Yanomami and Macuxi families whose grandparents held their ground against cattle, against roads, against men with mercury and dredges. They held it in years when the law was on their side and in years when it was not. That is the evidence. It does not change on Sunday.

On Sunday Brazilian voters go to a runoff, and the newspapers say the future of the rainforest and the communities that live there is at stake. I believe the newspapers. I want to look closely at the grammar, though, because the grammar gives the game away. In that sentence the communities are at stake. They are what is wagered. They are not at the table holding cards; they are the pile of coins in the middle. A reporter like Tom Phillips can write it plainly and honestly, and still the sentence tells you who is understood to be deciding and who is understood to be decided.

The strongest answer to me goes like this. Elections are not decoration. Who wins in Brasilia decides whether the environmental agents get fuel for their trucks and whether anyone flies over the illegal airstrips. It decides whether a land demarcation is signed or left to gather dust, and whether a miner who poisons a river expects a fine or a wink. Those who live in Roraima know this better than any columnist. Many of them will stand in line on Sunday because they know it. So do not tell them the vote is beside the point.

I do not tell them that. I tell you what that argument admits when you hold it up to the light. If the protection of a people’s land can be switched on or off by a margin of votes cast mostly hundreds or thousands of miles away, then what those people hold is not a right. It is a lease, renewed every four years at the pleasure of strangers. A right does not depend on the weather. This depends on the weather, and the forecasters are the pollsters.

There is a joke inside this, and the joke is the analysis. The country holds a grand national argument about whether the forest should be saved. Meanwhile the people who have actually been saving it, without salary, without helicopters, and often without the state’s protection, are cast in the drama as the endangered scenery. It is as if a town debated whether to keep the bridge, and invited every opinion except that of the family who has been holding up the far end with their own shoulders for a hundred years. The family’s testimony would be short: we are tired, and the bridge is still here because of us.

Consider one woman in a voting line in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima. I do not offer her as a real person with a name. I offer her as what the abstraction leaves out. She has buried relatives who sickened when the river turned bad. She has walked a child to a clinic that did not have the medicine. She knows which seasons the miners come back and which officials stop answering the radio. She is about to cast one vote, the same single vote as a man in a São Paulo high-rise who has never seen the river. The ballot treats them as equal, and in that one narrow sense they are. But only one of them carries an inventory of what the next four years will cost in her own body and her children’s.

So say it plainly. This election matters, and the fact that it matters this much is itself the injury. A forest that is safe under one government and burning under the next has not been protected. It has been gambled, and the people who live in it have been the stake every time.

When the counting is done on Sunday night, the commentators will announce what the result means for the Amazon. Somewhere north of Boa Vista, someone will already be up before dawn, checking the river for the grey sheen that means the dredges are back. That person will not wait for the analysis.