Street Cred

Michael receiving his press credentials upon entering the Xingu National Park Indian reservation.

I wanted to talk a little about the future of the Amazon because that's one thing I think I'm actually really qualified to talk about having covered it for the last 13 or 15 years. The Amazon has a lot of cache, like you say "Amazon" and everybody goes "oooh!" Even in Brazil, I remember one night I was interviewing this musician Siba, back when he played with Mestre Ambrosio and I mentioned the next day I was heading off to Roraima to cover the fires there that were spreading on the to Yanomami reservation and he was really interested. He was like, man, you have a cool job and that was kind of wild because I thought he was the one with a cool job. But it's not like it would be easy for Mestre Ambrosio to get a gig in Roraima, not a paying one. I guess he'll have to wait to shoot a video there _ like Sepultura who shot a video at the above mentioned Xingu national park. Anyway, people love the Amazon, in theory at least, and seem to want to save it as much as people tend to want to save the whales. People still think it's the lungs of the planet and so on and so forth. But over the course of time I was covering the Amazon, every once in a while a shrewd editor would ask so what? What happens if it all disappears? Er, well, we'd lose inummerable plant and animal species many of which have not even been catalogued by science. But, again, so what? It would probably wreak havoc on already instable weather patterns. But one scientist pointed out to me that all the forest in Europe has basically been cut down and the weather is well, still the weather. There's the much talked of cure for cancer or AIDS that's nobody's found yet. But like, er, nobody's found that yet. And all the untold rain forest products that our supposed to be worth so much, except for the lumber and minerals, nobody has had great sucess marketing them, except maybe for Acai, whose success in many cases means it's too expensive for the locals to buy because it's all going for export. Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of saving the Amazon, I'm just trying to work out a logical reason why. That's something I'll be grapple with in upcoming posts because now I have to take my son on school trip. That's life.