Descent into Broccoli
From the air, which is of course not how Maia first saw it, it's a pale scar, quivering ragged-edged through thick green fur, splintering off in meandering veins into the horizon. This is a landscape etched through dialogue between land and water, an elemental geography. Whichever dominates this season decides the shape of the map. (Or indeed this millenium, as whole sections of river slice off to become oxbow lakes - is that what they're called? So much for O level Geography - or, further back in geological time, as the Amazon switched its whole oceanic allegiance from West to East, flipping its mouth from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It's nearly the end of the rainy season, so the banks are fuzzy-edged - the water has now covered almost all the land it will take this year.
What landmarks I can make out are not the work of humans. No human endeavour: no building, no pattern of cultivation can be made out as we fly over the forest. I know that's not the case everywhere, however. But such mammothness does make some of the rhetoric about poor, vulnerable Amazonia feel strange. How could something this vast not dominate? What could humans do to something so beyond our scale? Yet of course like other giants, this one is threatened, and seriously. Perhaps that very size is part of the challenge - the Moby Dick effect; the big quiet guy in the bar jumpy little homo sapiens has to pick a fight with to prove itself. Knock this down, nothing is bigger than you. Maybe, although I suspect we'll find out the economics have more to do with it than my airborne species psychology.
What landmarks I can make out are not the work of humans. No human endeavour: no building, no pattern of cultivation can be made out as we fly over the forest. I know that's not the case everywhere, however. But such mammothness does make some of the rhetoric about poor, vulnerable Amazonia feel strange. How could something this vast not dominate? What could humans do to something so beyond our scale? Yet of course like other giants, this one is threatened, and seriously. Perhaps that very size is part of the challenge - the Moby Dick effect; the big quiet guy in the bar jumpy little homo sapiens has to pick a fight with to prove itself. Knock this down, nothing is bigger than you. Maybe, although I suspect we'll find out the economics have more to do with it than my airborne species psychology.
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