The Land Down Under: Yamashita's New Perspective on Earth Vs. People

These days it is hard to imagine a pre-environmentalist culture. Since we have become aware of the possibly irreversible effects we are having in our home planet, the arguments and counterarguments have grown ever more numerous and impassioned. The lifestyle maintained by the vast majority of those in the global north is exploitative by nature; how much can we change without hurting more people than we help? The efforts to strike equilibrium between our needs and the needs of our sustaining Earth have been proverbial baby steps. Where do we go from here - and is it too late?

Ramachandra Guha, in his book Environmentalism: A Global History, states that these questions and their answers will ultimately unite the two disparate halves of the globe. The northern hemisphere, which has the biggest financial pull of the two, is also responsible for much of the damage to the Earth. The southern, however, is just as affected by the damage - worse, if we attempt to cap our harmful emissions now, they may never have the chance to industrialize and conquer their rampant poverty and disease. A difficult choice is now placed before our leaders. Do we risk further damage to our home in the name of bettering life within the next decade, or do we effect dramatic lifestyle changes to protect the environment, which will hurt those who don't have the means to recover from such an alteration, those who barely have a sustainable existence now?

In her novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Karen Tei Yamashita sets this classic conflict in the southern hemisphere rather than in its traditional place up north, where we have argued about Earth versus humanity for decades. The appearance of a mysterious sheet of plastic-like substance underneath the Brazilian rainforest, dubbed the Matacão, brings millions of people together in a common plight that ends with a tragic choice between humanity's well-being and the preservation of nature.

It all starts, like most tragedies, innocently enough. A Brazilian peasant named Mané da Costa Pena is forced into farming by government clearcutters; the rubber and nut trees whose resources he casually tapped for subsistence are taken away, and when the rains come, there is nothing to protect the soil from disappearing. When it does, the Matacão lies shining in its place. It is impossible to penetrate by traditional means, and no one is sure how deep it goes.

The Matacão immediately becomes a tourist attraction. Mané and his family are herded into low-income housing as people flock from all over to get a tan on the mysterious field. Some attribute religious powers to the Matacão; a young man named Chico Paco even makes a pilgrimage there on behalf of his friend's crippling illness, and when he builds an altar there that the government attempts and fails to knock down, the Matacão's amazing pseudo-magnetic properties come under scientific scrutiny. J.B. Tweep, an inexplicably three-armed businessman, decides that the Matacão is the perfect site for a new branch of his corporation. Through his influence the substance is more closely studied, and its diverse uses are gradually discovered. Matacão plastic can, in fact, be used to manufacture a completely realistic replica of absolutely anything. Calorie-free food, completely realistic theme parks, and a million other things that had only been dreamed of before suddenly become commonplace.

Meanwhile, upon the illness of one of his children, Mané discovers the unprecedented healing power of feathers. He becomes a celebrity in his own right, giving seminars explaining that different kinds of feathers rubbed on the ear in different ways can cure diseases, addiction, and simply help people relax.

Predictably, these two phenomena meld. Birds are being poached and feathers stolen from museums; how to solve the problem? Plastic feathers, of course! It seems like the perfect solution to the problem of supply and demand, until it becomes evident that the Matacão feathers can cause dangerous hallucinations and pseudo-religious mania. Worse, the use of real feathers begins to spread a new, tenacious breed of typhus that the feathers cannot cure. As it rapidly covers Brazil, the government begins to realize it will not stop. People in the global north, however, remain skeptical.

Just as the disease would not remain with the poor, it would not be confined to the Matacão. It had become a national disaster. For the moment, most people assumed that it would confine itself to the Third World. Europeans, Asians and Americans eager to see the Matacão simply rearranged their vacation plans that year. Wait until they find a vaccine, they thought. Epidemics, plagues, drought, famine, terrorist, war - all things that happened to other people, poor people in the Third World who cavorted with communism and the like. When we travel, we don't drink the water, some said. Terrorists shouldn't be negotiated with either, others said (Yamashita 184).
In a cruel stroke of fate, Mané, who only wanted to heal the world with his amazing discovery, dies of the typhus himself. Like the other victims, he perishes over a period of a week or so, in terrible pain, after already losing all of his children to the disease.

Finally, the government decides that if people are to be truly protected from the typhus, simply banning the recreational use of feathers is not enough. All birds must be cleansed of the disease as well, by spraying them with DDT to kill the lice that carry it. Batista Djapan, who runs a successful carrier pigeon business, protests this action, even going so far as to test the spray on some of his own pigeons. None of them survive. Forced to make the choice between nature and humanity, the government sprays for lice. All over Brazil, birds drop to the ground in mid-flight, dead.

This latter-day fable, reminiscent of Rachel Carson's battle cry in Silent Spring, shows the natural progression when nature is exploited. By setting the story in the global south, Yamashita shows that, whoever may have created the problem initially, we all share a common future of either fixing it, or suffering the consequences. Guha laments:

The philosophy of 'in the long run we are all dead' has guided economic development in the First and Third Worlds, in both socialist and capitalist countries. These processes of development have brought, in some areas and for some people, genuine and substantial increase in human welfare. But they have also been marked by a profound insensitivity to the environment, a callous disregard for the needs of generations to come (145).

The death of the birds in Through the Arc of the Rainforest, like in Carson's Silent Spring, symbolizes the death of nature. Even given the holocaustic nature of the government's action in the novel, it is hard to condemn; thousands of people are dying, and doubtless thousands more will die unless something dramatic is done. What is perhaps too-easily forgotten, both in the narrative of the novel and in real life, is the origin of the problem: the exploitation of nature.

But can anyone really be blamed for this? Like our predecessors who industrialized the world, Mané wanted only to improve life, and could never have foreseen the disastrous consequences of his simple discovery. When, at the height of the feather craze, he is faced with the problem of indiscriminate harvesting, he remains diplomatic:

Mané Pena, however, was simple enough to recognize the moral dilemma raised by the use of the feather for human well-being and the human avarice related to the destruction of thousands of beautiful and rare birds...as the Father of Featherology, Mané Pena had to take an official stand: he and his institute opposed the senseless killing of birds for their feathers for purely decorative uses, such as in costumes, headdresses or on hats, and supported efforts to create laws for stricter control of the commercial production of feathers. (The few Indians left living in the forest were, of course, excluded from these restrictions.) However, Mané Pena, the official statement read, continued to support the use of feathers for the greater cause of science and human health (Yamahista 154).

At this point, when the threat it towards nature rather than humanity, Mané takes the classic moderate stance. He believes he can and will strike a balance between the needs of his own species and the needs of another - the needs of the very planet that sustains him. When nature's interests are the only ones at stake, everyone seems willing to take baby steps towards maintaining this balance - no massive laws or decisions, no "urgent actions," as Al Gore has often called for in his fight against global warming. Guha notes this phenomenon as it relates to the environmental movement:

All through history those who have commanded power have shown a conspicuous disregard of limits on their behavior, whether toward the environment for towards other humans. Capitalists have exploited workers, socialists have suppressed citizens, bother have dominated nature in the belief that it cannot speak back. In their own belief, and often in their practice, Greens are marked rather by restraint: as manifest in the wonder and reverence with which the wilderness thinker looks upon the wild, or the gentleness with which the rural romantic caresses the land, or, indeed, the statistical means by which the scientific conservationist seeks to maintain nature's capital by using only the incremental growth to its stock (145).

But nature can speak back, and it is speaking now. We all finally realize that it cannot and will not be ignored; the question is what we are willing to do about it. Through her narrative, Yamashita reminds us that the intentions of those who put us in this situation are no longer relevant. They did what they did blindly, and in the name of progress. It doesn't matter how we got here; what matters is how we are going to get out. We are willing to take dramatic steps to save ourselves, but not, apparently, to save the planet on which we live. Whether north or south, First world or Third, we all share a common home; the only question that matters now is what we are willing to do to preserve it.

WORKS CITED

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman, 2000.

Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through the Arc of the Rainforest. Minneapolis: Coffehouse Press, 1990.