Ecology and Development
The Amazon is far more than just a river. Its catchment basin contains, at any one moment, over one-fifth of all the world's fresh water, and the rainforest it sustains covers an area of over six million square kilometres, stretching almost right across the continent and forming the largest tract of forest on Earth. The Amazon forest is a vitally important cog in the planet's biosphere controls. There are over a thousand tributaries (several larger than the Mississippi), whose combined energy potential is estimated at over 100,000 megawatts daily (an endlessly renewable supply equivalent to five million barrels of oil a day). Eletronorte, the region's electricity supply company, today produces around 20,000 megawatts from Amazonian hydroelectric power. Although in 1639 Pedro Teixeira travelled 2000 miles up the Amazon and claimed all the land east of Ecuador for Portugal, the Portuguese really gained control of the Brazilian Amazon, in a political sense, through the Treaty of Madrid in 1750. Four years later, Governor Mendonca Furtado was appointed Boundary Commissioner and began his tour of inspection in the Amazon. He saw the prosperity of the Carmelite missions on the Rio Negro and initiated the Directorate System of controlling "official" Indian villages which were essentially labour camps. Having seen how effective the Carmelite missionaries had been in manipulating native workers, the governor was determined to do the same. Some Indians, remaining free in the regions upstream on major tributaries, tended to gather in villages at portage points like difficult rapids where they acted as guides and muscle-power for traders. Others retreated deeper into the forest. The region was only integrated fully into the Brazilian political scene after Independence in 1822. And even then it remained safer and quicker to sail from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon than to Manaus. Within a few years of Independence the region was almost lost to Brazil altogether when the bloody Cabanagem Rebellion overthrew white rule and attempted to establish an independent state. When things had quietened down a little, in the mid-nineteenth century, US Navy engineers were sent to the Amazon to check out its potential resources. They reported that it was wealthy in forest gums, fruits, nuts and excellent timber, and provided with a ready-made transport network in the form of rivers which gave direct contact with the Atlantic. Within a few years one of those forest gums - rubber - was to transform the future of the Amazon. Until Charles Goodyear invented the rubber tyre, the Amazonian economy had ticked over at a bare subsistence level, sustained by the slave trade and lumber. But the new demand for rubber coincided handily with the introduction of steamship navigation on the Amazon in 1858, beginning an economic boom as spectacular as any the world has seen. By 1900 both Manaus and Belem were extraordinarily rich cities, and out in the forest were some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world at that time, beyond the reach of the newspapers, conscience and worries of nineteenth-century Europe: men like Nicolas Suarez, who earned a reputation as an autocratic ruler of a rubber-tapping region larger than most European countries. Controlling the whole of the region around the upper Rio Madeira and into modern-day Peru, he was a legendarily harsh employer even by the standards of the day. When the rubber boom ended, almost as suddenly as it had begun, following the success of rubber plantations established in the Far East (with smuggled Brazilian seeds), development of the region once again came to an almost complete halt, relying on the export of the traditional products of the forest to keep the economy going at all. There was a brief resurgence during World War II, when the rubber plantations in the Far East were controlled by the Japanese, but it is only in the last thirty years or so that large-scale exploitation - and destruction - of the forest has really taken off, along with a massive influx of people from other parts of Brazil, the Northeast in particular, in search of land
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