It’s a dirty business, saving the planet
March 2008
by David Logie
Two gunmen. Six bullets. Point blank range. The victim – a 74 year-old Roman Catholic nun. She had held up her Bible in front of her murderers in a forlorn attempt to protect herself. The bullets had ripped it apart. Her body was found face down in the blood red Amazonian mud.
During the five years I lived and worked in the Amazon jungle I witnessed many tragic events, but perhaps this story encapsulates the problems of the region more than the rest.
Sister Dorothy Stang had lived in Anapu for 27 years. A godforsaken town on the Western stretch of the Trans-Amazonian highway, a road which in places is nothing more than a single lane dirt track, passable only with a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Dorothy had originally settled there in order to help the poor and vulnerable.
In time she had realised that to complete this mission she needed first to help preserve the forest. The forces that destroyed the forest were the same that caused misery for those who depended upon it for their livelihood. Whether it be loggers, ranchers or land-grabbers, the weaker forest dwellers were the ones displaced (often at gunpoint). Dorothy had become an environmentalist. She was killed by loggers.
A few weeks earlier, Dorothy had called the Greenpeace office in Manaus to ask for help. She knew that in the past we had helped other community leaders under death threat by providing safe houses. Unfortunately, our office had been closed for the Christmas break.
News of her death reached us quickly and as operations manager for Greenpeace in the Amazon I was quick to mobilise our resources to the area. The largest remaining tropical forest in the world, the Amazon rainforest is as large as Western Europe and with poor infrastructure, the logistics of getting around are a challenge. Fortunately Greenpeace has diverted a large chunk of its resources to combating deforestation in the region and I had some amazing tools at my disposal. Apart from watercraft, such as a 10-metre jet boat, we possessed a fleet of off-road bulletproof Toyotas. But the most useful tool of all was a Cessna 208 Amphibious. We used the plane not only for transport to remote locations, but also as our eye in the sky. In a region where misinformation, rumour and remoteness were the norm, the only way to see what was really happening below was to fly over it.
Together with my bush pilot, Fernando, I spent hours flying over the endless green canopy, mapping illegal logging roads or illegal clearances. Sometimes the weather would turn unexpectedly and we would be forced to put down on a remote airstrip or stretch of river to sit out the storm. Flying in the Amazon is no picnic; there is no radio coverage in many areas, no back-up search-and-rescue teams on standby. And tropical storms can close airports suddenly. Many planes come down every year with tragic consequences, perhaps most commonly because they aren’t carrying enough fuel to divert to some other airstrip during a storm. While fuel is expensive, life over there is cheap.
We arrived in Anapu the next day. It was a town typical of many that lie on the tracks of desolation that thread their way through the Brazilian rainforest (90 per cent of Amazon deforestation occurs within 30 miles of these roads). Perhaps comparable to America’s Wild West around 200 years ago, ramshackle buildings skirt the dusty streets, tumbleweed dances in the wind and shifty glances greet you from the roadside bars. Perhaps the most notable thing about the town was the number of vendors selling chainsaws and guns. The tradition of conquering and settling Brazil’s huge wilderness still persists. Since the 1970s around a fifth of the forest has disappeared – an area bigger than the landmass of France.
Dorothy’s murder was becoming big news, both nationally and internationally. Reprisal killings on both sides had begun. In the evening a pick-up pulled up beside me and the driver asked me if I was the police.
“Nao, porque?” I replied and he motioned with his head to the back of his truck where an outstretched body lay with a neat nine-millimetre hole in its forehead.
We had set up our satellite communication equipment earlier in the day and started to send out video, photos and emails to the news wires to alert them to what was happening. The minister of the environment in Brasilia, Maria Silva, responded by flying straight in with a fleet of helicopters together with 1,000 soldiers to quell the growing unrest. It was like being in a Vietnam War movie as the choppers came in. It was a tense time. Some light relief came when one of the military commanders asked if they could borrow my satellite-phone as they were having problems with their communications and Maria needed to make an urgent call to President Lula!
Working together with the authorities was not an uncommon event. After discovering an illegal logging operation we would often have to transport the police to the area so that they could make arrests or seize the wood. Often they simply did not have the money or capability to get to remote places on their own. Their trucks would have bald tyres or their helicopter would be out of service. Corruption was also rife, so by being on the scene we were actively coaxing them to take action.
I started with Greenpeace back in the mid-90s, working on projects closer to home. As a volunteer I played a minor role in the Brent Spar campaign to stop oil companies dumping their unwanted platforms on the sea bed. From there I went on to campaign about overfishing on The Wee Bankie, off the coast of Dunbar. For two months we hassled Danish industrial fishing boats who were hoovering up sand eels – a vital fish for puffins and other sea birds, not to mention providing an important food source for bigger fish. It seemed crazy to me that they could get away with doing this without regard for future fish stocks, even more so when you consider that they were overfishing this minnow just for chicken feed. The fishermen didn’t see it that way, of course, and we got used to the sharp crack and whiz of rocket flares aimed at our inflatables.
To a certain extent being at sea was is my blood. My great-grandfather William Caie had been first mate on a fishing boat out of Aberdeen, and his father before him. I hoped my fate would differ a little from theirs, as both had died at sea. William’s boat, the Star of Peace, sank 200 yards off Cove a few days after Christmas 1932, hitting Mountainhead Rock. It had eight men on board.
In 1997 Greenpeace ‘invaded’ a different rock. The 21metre-high uninhabited Rockall lies 300 miles off the coast of Scotland and is significant due to the mineral wealth (oil and gas) surrounding it. Many nations, including Britain, Denmark, Iceland and Ireland, dispute ownership of the rock and the lucrative sea bed around it. We decided to claim it for ourselves in a protest about global warming. By staying on the rock longer than anyone else – 42 days – we hoped to draw attention to the fact that we don’t need to look for new oil reserves, because if we burn all the oil we already know about the climate will change catastrophically.
My task on the mission was to land and re-supply the occupation team on the rock. I had learnt most of my boat-handling skills at the Maritime Rescue Institute, based at Stonehaven. The North Atlantic swell around Rockall certainly put those to the test.
Of course climate change is not caused only by burning fossil fuels. Destruction of forests produces about 20 per cent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, making conservation of intact forest regions such as the Amazon or the Congo crucial to limiting rises in global temperatures. There is no doubt that climate change is the biggest challenge ever to face humanity.
Greenpeace estimates that we have only around 100 months, or about eight to nine years, to drastically reduce our CO2 output. If we fail to see a decline by the end of 2015, then our chances of restraining climate change to within the two degrees ‘safety line’ will diminish day by day thereafter. Scientists warn that a rise above two degrees will spiral the climate completely out of control. We will reach a tipping point in the planet’s regulatory system, whereby events such as the release of methane from thawing Siberian permafrost or vast species extinction will compound the problem further.
It is a daunting task, but we owe it to people like Sister Dorothy to make the effort. We also owe it to our children. It should not take martyrs to point the moral compass for us when the road ahead is so clearly marked.
David Logie: “Living in rural Scotland has given me a close connection to the natural world and the fragility of our relationship with it. I have been working for Greenpeace all over the world for 13 years, although I now work as a freelancer specialising in remote logistics. Most recently I have been working in Congo and Romania.”
This is an article from the March 2008 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.