Fallen Martyrs, Felled Trees

Rob Nixon

The days stand like angels in blue and gold, incomprehensible, above the ring of annihilation.

—Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

EXIT WOUNDS

One fall evening, I was driving through Wisconsin’s soya fields, drifting along in the half dark, listening to the BBC World Service, when a voice emerged fromthe ether to galvanizemy attention. The voice started strongly in Spanish then faded as the interviewer translated the man’s words.

He had survived the massacre, he said. No, he did not want to give his name. Yes, he feared for his life. Yes, they will come for us again. They always do.

Beneath the translator’s dispassionate delivery, the faint voice of the unnamed man quavered as he spoke of the fallen—four indigenous Asháninka from the Peruvian Amazon, forest defenders, murdered by an illegal logging gang.

Then the Asháninka survivor said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Those people were dead to the eye before they were killed.”

Their apparently sudden deaths had been a long time coming. Before bullets pierced their flesh, before exit wounds wrenched them from their rain forest and from this earth, the killing of the four Asháninka men was already underway.¹ For some time, those forest defenders had been “dead to the eye,” shrouded in obscurity, consigned to a political and existential purgatory, hovering between life and the sustained threat of an always imminent assassination.

In the global resource wars, “those people” appear as expendable shadow beings, weighing almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. In the global resource wars, the going price for tropical hardwoods—and the land beneath—is higher than the going price for the lives of the indigenous and the poor. In the cold calculus of the global resource wars—which are always also local—the Asháninka were barely visible, barely audible cost-effective casualties.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MARTYR BELT

We are witnessing an epidemic of environmental martyrdom, particularly in earth’s vital but embattled tropical forests. Front-line forest defenders reside primarily in what we might call the environmental martyr belt that girdles the globe, the tropical midriff of the earth: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Brazil, Nigeria, Congo, Gabon, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. In the contested forests of these lands, adhering to the values that make life feasible can expose inhabitants to the risk of murder. The environmental martyr belt is pocked with shallow graves and traversed by ghosts; it is full of shadow places to which we’re all materially bound.

Activists invoke the idea of environmental martyrdom, but they do not invoke it in isolation. A chorus of other terms recur: environmental assassination, targeted killings, cold-blooded execution, murder, persecution, massacre, carnage, ecocide, the green murder epidemic, eco-criminal hot spots. Each word or phrase inadequate on its own, all necessary, as people reach for ways to give voice to an intolerable, ambient terror.

Martyrdom is direct action in extremis. Martyrs put their bodies on the line, risking, for the sake of principle and survival, not just a weekend in jail, but burial in the dead of night in a shallow grave. Some environmental martyrs remain anonymous, vanish unheard of outside their villages. But others achieve in their earthly afterlife a complex rallying power and an enduring force. For we are witnessing a pushback from endangered forest communities against unregulated plunder by men wielding guns and chain saws, men whose actions jeopardize local life and, incrementally, our planetary prospects.

To be a martyr is to become larger than life after your life has ceased. To be a martyr is to die for a cause in a manner that confers on your being posthumous power and purpose. When repressive regimes have shut their eyes and closed their ears to suffering, the martyr’s body—by shocking insensate senses back to life—demands that the inattentive pay attention. Where words no longer serve, the corpse silently conscripts witnesses.

Martyrdom is a resonant word, but it carries certain risks. The risk that the singular figure who ascends into the firmament of memory may become uncoupled from the broader social movement. The risk of sanctifying suffering and forbearance. Yet, amidst the current spate of forest martyrdom, one is struck by the recurrence of ordinary martyrs, people whose lives and deaths attest to the quotidian violence against their communities, both human and ecological.

The corpse personifies a raw brutality—directed against the individual body, against the body politic of besieged communities, and against the living body of the forest itself. The environmental martyr thus mediates between systemic injustice and specific suffering.

Over the past decade, we have seen environmental assassinations soar. According to Global Witness, between 2008 and 2018 some 1,427 environmental activists were murdered.² That’s nearly three every week—more than twice the rate of journalists killed, which has itself reached appalling levels. Hit men, security guards, private contractors, ranchers, and timber gangs—often abetted by the military or police—continue to murder defenders who try to hold the line against illegal logging, forest arson, unregulated mining, agribusiness, mega-dams, and associated land seizures.

All this while earth is hemorrhaging ten billion trees a year. The rate of deforestation has doubled since 2000 and the planet continues to shed trees like early autumn leaves. A forest the size of Italy goes under annually. As Global Forest Watch reports: “If tropical deforestation were a country, its emissions would be greater than those of the European Union.” In destroying forests, we’re destroying the planet’s most significant terrestrial carbon sink—only the oceans store more carbon. However we strive to rein in this runaway process, community-held lands—many in the environmental martyr belt—are vital to any solution. A survey of thirty-seven tropical countries found that community lands sequester fifty-five million tons of carbon, four times the world’s annual emissions.

Intrepid NGOs like GlobalWitness, Not1More, and Brazil’s Pastoral Land Commission play a critical role in keeping tally of green murders of indifferent interest to the corporate media. In mapping the distribution and scale of the killings, such NGOs do essential work. GlobalWitness, for example, insists on naming all the dead and, where possible, excavating their stories. Such stories are vital, for statistics in isolation can only get us so far as we seek to transform public attitudes and policies in the exacting pursuit of an elusive justice.

Metrics are indispensable. Yet metrics alone are insufficient for the task at hand. To bring numbers to life, we need ever more inventive forms of testimony that can infuse disembodied data with a bodily immediacy. How can story and image complement statistics with the quite different powers of nondata-driven knowledge? How can we summon the creative energies of witnessing to bring to the metrics of environmental suffering a granular specificity?

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter, makes this observation:

Racism is a visceral experience, that dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

Coates’s words apply with equal force to the indigenous communities and microminorities inhabiting the environmental martyr belt, where to take a stand for cultural and ecological survival can be a life-ending experience. The fate of such communities is twinned to the fate of the great rain forests in our age of climate breakdown, twinned to the future of forests where the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the soon-to-be martyred body.

Through the gravity of stories and images, artist-activists can bring a corporeal intimacy to the global environmental murder rate. And so we turn to them—these writers, photographers, filmmakers, street artists, oral historians, bloggers, video artists, and podcasters—in our quest to bring a vital urgency to a bloody epidemic. We depend on such witnesses to make visceral the algebra of a diffuse mass murder. For the dead deserve the vital specificity that is their due: names and faces and flesh to body forth the bare bones of graphs and charts. The suffering may be systemic but it’s never general.

Behind the numbers, people are living there. People are living there: behind the numbers, beneath the trees.

IF THE FOREST HAD FEET TO WALK

Before Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva and Zé Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva were ambushed near their home, the couple—Brazil nut foragers and artisans—had enjoyed a long, nonviolent relationship with the forest.

Before two men ambushed them on May 24, 2011, beside a narrow bridge, the couple had spent twenty-three years together. Year in, year out, they proved—to themselves and others—that it was possible to live off and with the rain forest, rather than treating the forest as an enemy hostile. This belief made them dangerous.

Before the two gunmen, strangers, unknown to the da Silvas, ambushed them around seven thirty on a Tuesday morning, the couple had borne witness to a life of possibility. They were agroforesters and small-scale farmers who forged a path of hope. They were idealists and pragmatists, who lived adaptively. They drew on customary knowledge of forest food ways, but were cognizant of a world of shifting values, in which Brazil nut products traveled to other continents, gathering value as they went. The couple was committed to surviving. They believed their survival and the rain forest’s survival were perfectly compatible if they approached the forest in a spirit of respectful inventiveness. They consumed and sold a smorgasbord of forest products, including brazil nuts, nut oils, nut creams, nut flour and bark, not to speak of produce developed from myriad other Amazon plants.

Before the ambush, the couple lived peaceably with the rain forest’s nonhuman communities. Humans were another matter. Maria and Zé Cláudio’s commitment to forest life and forest law made them a multitude of enemies. Zé Cláudio, in conversation with his friend the journalist, filmmaker, and scholar Felipe Milanez, struggled to enumerate all the people who wanted the couple dead: illegal loggers, illegal charcoal burners, illegal miners, beef and soya-bean barons, land-hungry settlers, politicians and police officers up to their necks in graft.

Before the ambush, near Marabá in the Amazonian state of Pará, the couple had no illusions about the region they were living in. They and their families before them were from around there:Maria and Zé Cláudio had first harvested Brazil nuts as children. Pará was now in the grip of such lawlessness that “extrajudicial”—including extrajudicial killings—covered almost everything.

Before the gunmen fired the first shot, the couple had learned to live with a sense of being shadowed. They explained to Milanez how you had to inhabit the mind of your as-yet-unknown would-be killer. You had to outwit this all-too-real imaginary enemy. You had to learn to vary your routes, traveling this way and that. If you dropped your guard and let a rhythm shape your days, it would be that much easier for your murderer to set a trap.

Before their killers had plotted the ambush, the couple had gained— depending on your perspective—local notoriety or local renown for seeking to uphold the law. Their method was intrepid. They lay in wait for logging trucks transporting their illegal bounty of hardwoods, including lumber from the much-coveted Brazil nut tree, which was officially protected. The da Silvas liked to position themselves on the crest of a hill, where they knew a logging truck would have to shift to a lower gear, laboring up the slope. Zé Cláudio would step forward, accost the driver, and inform him he was breaking the law. In the background, Maria would pull out her small camera and photograph the truck, the license plate, the driver. Then they would present their evidence to local authorities and demand action.

Before, just seconds before the hitmen fired the first shot, Zé Cláudio was on his motorbike, Maria riding pillion, hugging him tight from behind. They were negotiating a rutted road a few miles from their home. The gunmen had chosen their spot carefully. The road was terrible: full of potholes, deep puddles, and wandering cows. Any motorbike would have to slow to a crawl.

Before, over two millennia before that first shot entered Maria’s body, the Greeks coined the word μαρτυρέω (marturéo). The English word “martyr” and the Portuguese “martírio” owe a shared debt to the Greek term, which means “to testify or bear witness.”

Before a rancher dreamed of turning their rain-forest reserve into clear-cut cattle land and before he hired two hitmen, Maria and Zé Cláudio bore witness. They bore photographic witness to crimes against the forest. They bore witness to the possibility that existing laws could be actively enforced. They bore witness to a civic ideal by turning their reserve into an island of legality amidst a sea of lawlessness. They bore witness, through the arc of their lives, to the possibility of human and biotic communities successfully cohabiting. But through all of this they bore witness in a state of anticipatory martyrdom.

Six months before the hitmen completed the contract killing, Zé Cláudio traveled to an environmental conference in Manaus. There he declared: “I will protect the forest at all costs. That is why I could get a bullet in my head at any moment.” The strain was near constant. How do two people dwell in the present, pottering about on their daily tasks, while being thrust forward into a kind of hovering afterlife, observing themselves retrospectively after their near certain murder?

Before the ambush, in interviews with Milanez, Maria and Zé Cláudio speak openly of their fears. Her mental health is starting to suffer. Yet neither is prepared to forgo their principles. Zé Cláudio puts it this way:

If I say I’m not afraid, I’m lying, right? Because the almighty knew he was going to die, but he was coming back on the third day and he was afraid. I am afraid but I have obligations as a citizen: when I see an injustice, it takes away my fear. . . . It’s better to die trying than to die indifferent.

Before the ambush, a quarter of a century before, stands the figure of Chico Mendes. Maria and Zé Cláudio are intensely conscious of Chico’s fate, of the events leading up to his assassination in 1988. How could they not be, as they go poking sticks into those twinned hornets’ nests of rain-forest conservation and Brazilian land reform?

Six months before the ambush, Zé Cláudio declares: “The same thing they did to Chico Mendes in Acre, they want to do to me. Because I aggressively denounce the loggers and charcoal producers, they think I shouldn’t exist. I’m here talking to you today, but in a month you may get the news that I’m gone.” Asked if he and Maria should consider hiring an armed guard for protection, Zé Cláudio gives an emphatic no. Look what happened to Chico, he says. An armed guard, who accompanies you everywhere can easily be bribed and become a paid informer, increasing your risk of being murdered. For protection, Maria and Zé Cláudio choose to go everywhere together so that when death comes it will not separate them.

Before the ambush, Maria says: “The foundation of my whole story was inspired by Chico.” Like Chico, they believe that a more just system of land and labor rights, the defense of forest-dependent people, and the health of the rain forest are all facets of a single struggle. Chico is more than a personal inspiration. He has passed down to them a sense of structural possibility. For they’re living his greatest legacy: the extractive reserve, a notion Chico championed and helped institute. Under this system, the reserves are publicly owned but cooperatively managed, allowing customary inhabitants to harvest rain-forest produce and practice subsistence farming, tending the forest without exhausting it. Extractive reserves continued to gather force after Chico’s murder and they now comprise 13 percent of the Brazilian Amazon, creating a buffer against private development. The da Silvas see themselves as beneficiaries—but also custodians—of the system Chico has made possible. There he dwells, behind and ahead of them. From the afterlife, this is his bequest.

Fourteen years before their joint murder, Maria and Zé Cláudio had helped found an extractive reserve. Initially, four hundred families signed up for territory covering twenty-two thousand hectares. At that point, 85 percent of the rain forest in the reserve remained intact. But by the time of their deaths, only 20 percent of the native forest was still standing. And only a handful of families continued to practice agroforestry. Over time, Maria told Milanez, a collective, viable dream had become downgraded into a utopia.

A few months before the hitmen dragged Maria and Zé Cláudio into the forest and executed them beneath the canopies they adored, Maria reflected on the region’s history of foul play and land theft. Newcomers would offer cash for forest and logging rights. At first, many locals, Maria explains, dismissed individual land ownership as an exotic, improbable fiction. They’d never thought the forest was theirs to own; after all, the forest owned them. Thus, people found themselves dispossessed without grasping the principle of possessive individualism that underpinned the “sale.” Land barons intimidated locals into signing documents—with just a thumbprint—that in their illiteracy they couldn’t remotely understand. Land barons brought in indigent outsiders, promising work but then docking the workers’ entire salaries for board and lodging, trapping them in a kind of modern slavery.

But before the ambush, Maria and Zé Cláudio stood firm. With the help of the forest, they sidestepped the threat of peonage. After their testimony shut down illegal sawmills, some locals angrily dismissed the couple as “backward people, people from the past.” But they kept the future steadily in view. They had figured out that—if you were patient—a standing Brazil nut tree was worth far more, even in market terms, than a logged tree reduced to a one-off wad of cash. The da Silvas were in it for the long haul.

Before the ambush, in a series of lyrical interviews that Milanez conducts, Maria and Zé Cláudio make one thing clear: they won’t be bought. They’re emphatic on this point: the unfragmented parcel of forest in their custody won’t ever be for sale. They’re not budging, but sometimes they wish the forest had the power to move away from there. Zé Cláudio recalls a song that the rubber tappers used to sing: “If the forest had feet to walk, it would no longer stay, when it sees the danger it would speed away.”

Before the ambush, Maria and Zé Cláudio were not locally obscure: four thousand people turned up for their funeral. But the wider world would have known little of their philosophies of forest consciousness, environmental time, and social justice were it not for the prescience and persistence of a singular figure, Felipe Milanez, who became a fast friend. He recognized something special in their story of interspecies love, justice, dignity, and persecution. Something special but also something powerfully ordinary that spoke to the broader struggles of people pushed to the edge. So—in essays, on film, in podcasts, interviews, and TED talks—Milanez bore witness to their witnessing. And gave volume, a priceless volume, to the voices of these rain-forest martyrs and the values they upheld.

Before the gunmen murdered the da Silvas, Milanez had known the couple for just over a year. On their first meeting, Zé Cláudio invited him on a pilgrimage to pay homage to Majesty, “the pride of our forest,” the most gigantic, munificent Brazil nut tree in the reserve. As the two men walked, Zé Cláudio offered a running commentary on the ecological matrix of the rain forest—on edible plants and botanical medicines, on creatures, like the coatimundi, that are vital for dispersing Brazil nut seeds. When they reached Majesty, Zé Cláudio stood at her feet and flung out his arms in a posture of unjaded amazement and ecstasy.

Before the ambush, Milanez struggled to place his story of these agroforesters in the media. He weathered rejection after rejection. But he continued to believe. Finally, Vice gave him a venue. Then something happened that seemed almost preternaturally coincidental. On the morning of the assassination, Milanez posted the grim news on the Vice blog, including excerpts from the vibrant interviews he’d conducted with the couple. By fate or chance, that very day the Lower House of Brazil’s congress was debating some devastating cuts to the forest code, changes that would weaken the protection of the rain forest and the people it sustains. In protest, a member of the Brazilian Green Party got up and announced in front of the assembly: “Unfortunately, I’m standing here now to speak of a tragedy that happened today. I would like to read an excerpt from an interview conducted by Felipe Milanez.”What he read included these words, which went out to the nation:

Felipe Milanez: “When a tree is cut down does its sap remind you of blood?”

Zé Cláudio: “My friend, it exudes a smell when it’s being cut down and you can smell it. When it’s about to fall, you can hear it groan.”

Felipe: “Do you feel as if someone has died?”

Zé Cláudio: “I do. If you kill something it had to be a living being first.”

The ruralistas in parliament—the lobby of ranchers, loggers, soya overlords, charcoal barons, and property speculators—booed at these words. Their boos continue, echoing down the halls of history.

That was before the funeral, where a woman held up the placard “Majesty Has Been Orphaned.” Before a second woman shouted: “They’ve killed another and another. But they will resurrect, will resurrect, will resurrect.”

Before the ambush, Maria speaks to Milanez about her fears. The greatest one is this: if deforestation continues in a headlong rush, nothing will remain except the consequences—“And the consequences are very large.” As the rain forest recedes, a distance opens up between people and the little miracles of nature. Maria is aghast that at the local festival of flowers they’re now celebrating with artificial plastic blooms. What’s next? she asks. Here, in the Brazil nut heartland, children reconstructing the giant nuts out of Play-Doh because they have no access to the real thing? How can you put a market price on the loss of such small, sacred intimacies? Maria’s concerns are not hers alone. Kapka Kassabova, walking through the beleaguered forests of her native Bulgaria, frets over the pace of estrangement:

What remains sacred if a sacred mountain becomes a superdump? I felt strongly that within my lifetime, we may all become exiles. That we may all be robbed by devouring demons disguised as policy and industry, that we may all walk down some road carrying in plastic bags our memories of forests and mountains, clean rivers and village lanes.

Immediately after the murders, one of the hitmen pulls out his hunting knife, saws off Zé Cláudio’s right ear, and puts it in a plastic bag. Now he has evidence that the contract killing is complete. What stories that ear holds. It has listened to the groaning of great trees as they fell. It has heard the shrieking of macaws, the mewling of marmosets, the soft tread of feet moving across forest moss. It has listened to the wind rearranging leaves. It has listened to the thinning dawn chorus as the forest fractures and birdlife attenuates. It has listened as a new silence arrives, the silence not of peace but of environmental pain. It has listened for the vroom of illegal chain saws, ready to intervene. That ear has lived so long on the qui vive, in a constant state of readiness, awaiting, in the dead of night, the footfall of would-be killers. As Zé Cláudio tells Milanez: “I live with my ear standing on alert. We can’t sleep properly. When the dog barks you get vigilant.”

Tell me, when an ear finds itself severed from life, all bloodied in a plastic bag, how long can it hold on to the sounds it loves and fears?

THE BONFIRE OF REGULATIONS AND THE RING OF FIRE

Enter stage right—stage far right—Jair Bolsonaro, known to his detractors as Captain Chainsaw. An ex-military man, he fans—speech by speech, tweet by tweet—the flames engulfing the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Pantanal, and beyond. He boasts of his slash-and-burn mentality, as he wields a machete against the safety nets vital to environmental and human health.

Bolsonaro: a swaggering misogynist given to raw racism and xenophobia while possessing a passion for “opening up” public lands and native reserves to unregulated plunder. Like a president closer to home, Bolsonaro exhibits an anti-native nativism. He tramples on indigenous rights and territorial sovereignty while denouncing foreigners and native communities alike as threats to his sovereign nation. The sprawling fires of 2019 were likely set, he suggests, by frustrated leftwing NGOs.

Like many misogynists, he is eager to protect hymens: “Brazil is the virgin that every foreign pervert wants to get their hands on” (that sentence warrants an essay in its own right). When the G7 nations offered to help mitigate the Amazonian conflagration, Bolsonaro excoriated them for their “colonialist” mentality. His reasoning exemplifies what Anne McClintock calls the “victor-victim reversal.” For by condemning “colonial intrusions,” foreign and indigenous, into a sovereign Brazil, Bolsonaro suppresses a genocidal and near-genocidal history against native peoples. He hides from view the internal colonialism that has seen fires, yet again, weaponized for the purposes of pillaging native lands.

Bolsonaro presents native communities as inauthentically Brazilian, as devious aliens, as paradoxically less than native. They are the beneficiaries of land theft: “They don’t speak our language, but they have somehow managed to get 14 percent of our national territory,” he protests. “One of the purposes of this is to impair us.” By this logic, two sets of invaders—meddling foreign colonial “perverts” and internal colonialists aka the indigenous—are scheming together to subvert a sovereign Brazil’s right to raze the Amazon.

“The Amazon is ours not yours,” Bolsonaro insists. But his proprietary statement raises all sorts of questions. Who holds sway over the rain forest? Where does sovereignty reside? How much of the forest belongs to the species, to the nation, to the tribes who predated the nation-state by millennia? Is the forest the property of the ruralistas, the powerful landowners’ lobby? Does it belong to the agrobusiness mafia that views the rain forest’s infinitely complex biological cornucopia as an inconvenient roadblock on the march toward more monocultures, be they beef ranches fattened on deforestation or soya megafarms for feeding Chinese pigs?

What percentage of the Amazon belongs to the living, to the dead, to all those unconceived and inconceivable people yet to come? What claims to the forest can its more-than-human inhabitants exert? And how do we reconcile incompatible notions of what it means to belong to the forest and own—or be owned by—it? For Raimundo Mura, watching invaders set fire to his community’s protected lands in 2019, the fate of the forest and his people’s fate are one and the same thing. Standing amid the smoking relics of the Mura reserve, he laments the martyrdom of trees: “All of these trees had lives. They all needed to live, each in their own place.”

A rival politician described Bolsonaro as “the exterminator of the future.” Brazil’s president is certainly equal to our own as the would-be-exterminator of scientific facts, with a strong prejudice against evidence. He fired the head of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research after he made public satellite-derived deforestation statistics that Bolsonaro found unpatriotic. Bolsanaro has a habit of sacking government scientists whose positions hew too faithfully to the data—on everything from forest fires to climate science, which he disbelieves. Taking a leaf out of Trump’s playbook, Bolsonaro appointed a minister of the environment dedicated to dismantling both the ministry and the environment.

Between them Bolsonaro and Trump hold sway over a huge swath of this planet’s environmental future. But it would be a mistake to read their traducing of justice as mere expressions of their personalities. Both men are largely epiphonema, symptoms of a global trend toward blurring the boundaries between democracy and autocracy, a trend enabled by neoliberalism’s winner-takes-all-and-takes-it-now mindset. The world’s most populous democracies and quasi democracies—from Brazil and the US to India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, and beyond—are sliding toward authoritarianism; to different degrees, yes, but in ways that profoundly damage the integrity of environmental and human communities. Ecological erosion is twinned to the erosion of democracy.

We are witnessing the rise of strongmen within putative democracies, men hell-bent on expanding their executive powers, while weakening the civic sphere. They suppress voter rolls, rig elections, fire and hire judges at will, disenfranchise citizens, shrink the space for dissent, create politically expedient “states of emergency,” demonize, imprison, and even murder activists and journalists as agents of hostile foreign powers, while casting the shadow of paramilitary terror over everyday life. Their political bases are skewed toward rural communities where religious fundamentalism—be it evangelical Christian, Hindu nationalist, or Islamic—is wielded against minority communities vilified as national threats.

Deforestation, in this context, is inseparable from a broader dispossession. Deforestation becomes collateral damage in the paramilitary war against the poor. A neoliberal ideology that holds the managed commons—and the common good—in contempt has opened a chasm between the ultrarich and the uberpoor. Environmental suffering and economic pain get outsourced, off-loaded onto communities who are “dead to the eye before they are killed.” Indigenous reserves and public lands get converted, through burning, occupation, and assassination, into hot cash, free land, and speculative property. The cumulative wisdom of past practices, the empathetic constraints of future lives, be damned.

Rain-forest communities depend on thin margins of survival. As the forest fragments, such communities become vulnerable to fracture, are at risk of sliding into a divisive, degrading race for atrophying resources. A ploy used by one autocrat after another is branding as terrorists the very people most terrorized by the lawlessness of the law. Take the Philippines, another hot spot where environmental martyrdom and rain-forest destruction converge. President Rodrigo Duterte rules with an iron fist from beneath a semidemocratic veneer, shredding environmental laws and civil liberties while green-lighting extrajudicial killings. Nonviolent indigenous protesters (who often double as forest defenders) and dissenting journalists alike have found themselves in Duterte’s crosshairs.

Among those persecuted byDuterte’s regime is Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Tauli-Corpuz, a member of the Philippines’ Kankanaey-igorot tribe, has emerged as a globally significant defender of the kind of agroforestry that Maria and Zé Cláudio da Silva exemplified. She attests to the incalculable value of rain forests as carbon sinks. She denounces the fatal misperception of nature “as inert, dead manipulable matter that has value only as a commodity.” She berates governments around the world for “indigenous criminalization”—for how, to facilitate murdering and dispossessing tribal communities, regimes denounce them as backward, as squatters, as illegals, as terrorists. After Tauli-Corpuz condemned logging concessions that threatened Filipino rain-forest communities, the Duterte regime added her name to the national registry of terrorists.

Following this designation—and the regime’s incitements—Tauli-Corpuz has suffered full-spectrumdigital persecution, including rape and death threats. Nonetheless, she continues to testify against the forces of forest anarchy and the looting of indigenous lands. She testifies against “huge land concessions that come in with the ‘legitimacy’ to log, stripping us of our very culture and sustenance.” She testifies to the folly—the ethical, political, and biological folly—of shrinking rain forests to targets of short-term “market efficiencies.” She testifies against asphyxiating contractions of the idea of rain-forest worth—both metaphorically and physically asphyxiating when it comes to “the lungs of the earth.”

Bolsonaro is a huge fan of efficiencies, including the genocidal kind. Lamenting that “indigenous land is an obstacle to agribusiness,” he adds this (historically inexact) regret: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated their Indians.” Who can fault Brazil’s Indians, nine hundred thousand strong, as they hear such utterances and watch their reserves go up in smoke; who can fault them for suspecting that the ring of fire around their lands is a noose about to throttle the very possibility of indigenous existence?

Some years ago, writing of the Zapatistas, John Berger made this prescient prediction:

Neoliberalism disguises itself as the defense of a sovereignty which has been sold in dollars on the international market. . . . These indigenous people irritate the modernizing logic of neo-mercantilism. Their rebellion, their defiance, their resistance, annoys the powers that be. The anachronism of their existence within a project of globalization, an economic and political project that, soon, will decide that poor people, all the people in opposition, which is to say, the majority of the population, are obstacles.

In society after society—across the environmental martyr belt and beyond—the time Berger foresaw is coming to pass.

If Maria and Zé Cláudio are philosophers of environmental time, so too, in his way, is Bolsonaro.He cheers on neoliberalism’s rush toward monopoly, reducing the time that matters to the profitable instant, discounting ancestral time and the long, long time to come, neither of which is a meaningful source of wisdom or policy. To shrink time in this way is to devalue the ecological rhythms of retreat, recovery, and replenishment, rhythms that have proven vital to human survival, rhythms that we disparage at our peril. To shrink time so radically is to risk triggering, in the words of Cristiana Pașca Palmer, executive secretary of the UNConvention on Biological Diversity, the “cascading collapse of natural systems.” Such systems don’t have an “outside”; they don’t offerHomo sapiens the option of purchasing a special exemption from the cascading effects.

Research by Carlos Nobre projects that if the 2019 spike in deforestation persists, theAmazon is at risk of flipping from being earth’s largest terrestrial absorber of CO₂ to a net emitter. If the current trajectory continues, the Amazon Basin’s rainfall will enter a downward spiral. As dry inflammable grasses invade fractured forest, and as thinning forest morphs into savanna or is burned for ranches, the hydrological cycle will be further destabilized. Fifteen percent of the Amazon is currently deforested. According to Nobre, we’re now only twenty to thirty years away from reaching the 20 to 25 percent rate of deforestation that will tip the Amazon irreversibly into savanna, with drastic repercussions for the global climate.

To say that neoliberalism discounts past and future is to give the word “discount” a double valence. For discounting means dismissing past and future as sources of deep value, but it also implies discounting them in the sense of shortchanging, selling off past and future at the dollar store for cutthroat prices. One is reminded here of words from The Overstory, Richard Powers’s soaring, searing tree novel: “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”

In our age of mergers, monopolies, and martyrs, we are witnessing the breakup of nations through what Arundhati Roy calls “the vertical secession of the rich.” Driving this secession is the dream of a pure realm untainted by the indignities of participatory democracy. Bolsonaro salivates at the prospect of sweeping democracy aside: “I am in favor of dictatorship.” Not only does he favor it, but he has a precise nostalgia for the twenty-one years of military dictatorship that, from 1964 to 1985, squeezed Brazilian society in its iron fist, a period that saw hundreds tortured to death or assassinated or disappeared, a period that saw fifty thousand civilians detained and ten thousand Brazilians driven into exile. Bolsonaro’s fondness for that era, though, is not unqualified: “The only mistake of the dictatorship was torturing and not killing.” Expressing skepticism that elections can ever deliver the kinds of changes Brazil needs, he adds: “this country will only change on the day that we break out in civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn’t do: killing thirty thousand.”

Brazil’s indigenous peoples, its quilombolas (descendants of rebel slaves) and its ribeirinhos (who, like Maria and Zé Cláudio, have lived off gathering forest produce, off swiddens or fishing or tapping rubber), all of these groups may reasonably feel that the civil war has already begun, or has never fully ended, this war conducted in large part by environmental means.

We see this process unfold in the 2016 documentary Martírio (Martyrdom), which traces the plight of the Guarani-Kaiowá in the Brazilian south. Historically, the tribe has ricocheted from one violent displacement to another, returning and returning only to be evicted over and over. In the era of Bolsonaro-fanned fires, the Guarani-Kaiowá are raising their voices again. As one unnamed spokesman puts it: “If indigenous peoples become extinct, the lives of all are threatened. . . . Without forest, without water, without rivers, there is no life, there is no way for any Brazilian to survive.” Contra Bolsonaro, they are apt to take the long view: “We resisted 518 years ago, we fight in victory and defeat. . . . As long as the sun still shines, and while there is still fresh air under the shade of a tree, while there is still a river to bathe in, we will fight.”

Similarly, the Xikrin tribe of the northern Amazon—like other embattled communities—is refusing to accept the commandeering of their lands through the torching of ecosystems and the murder and starvation of ecosystem people. In Pará, the state in which Maria and Zé Cláudio resided, Xikrin warriors swept through charred lands in August 2019, expelling fire-emboldened invaders, and seizing their chain saws and machetes.

Always, the odds are stacked against them. But as the ranks of the excluded swell, Brazil’s rulers underestimate, at their peril, indigenous resolve and the resolve of all the besieged who refuse to disappear obligingly into some zone of nonbeing.

In Pará and elsewhere, 2019 saw farmers organize coordinated “fire days” for setting forest and brush alight. These festivals of fire celebrated the farmers’ sense that they were the beneficiaries of a systemic shift. What they were burning was more than vegetation. They were burning the very idea of limits, of regulations, of environmental finitude. They were writing in the sky, in hot orange lettering, personal permits to live without government oversight.

The journalist George Monbiot once questioned neoliberalism’s assumption that we can survive infinite unchecked growth, can survive what he called “the bonfire of regulations.” Monbiot meant that phase metaphorically. But in these incendiary times of jubilant fire days and choking air his phrase takes on a prescient materiality. Something has to give. Or beneath banners of progress, development, and growth we will reduce mighty forests to stumps and turn whole biomes into charnel houses of combined but uneven suffering.

THIS BRANCH WE’RE SITTING ON

Before two gunmen ambushed Maria and Zé Cláudio da Silva near their home—nine days before, to be specific—Arundhati Roy published a book about a very different forest conflict at the other end of the earth. Walking with the Comrades recounts Roy’s journey through the densely wooded states of central India, home to millions of indigenous people. She bears witness to a brutal contest over sovereignty: over who owns the forest’s wealth; over logging, land, mineral, and human rights; over who gets to dictate the terms of development; over the right of the forest itself to persist alongside the stigmatized cultures that the forest shelters. The story Roy tells is of a struggle that has spiraled into intractable violence.

On the book’s final page, Roy adopts amore philosophical mood. Her words are worth summoning at length, because they achieve a far reaching resonance:

If there is any hope for the world at all . . . it lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers, because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them. The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars.

Roy had never heard of Maria and Zé Cláudio. Before their murders and before Milanez took up their cause, they were little known outside their region. Yet Roy’s words speak uncannily to the couple’s “different imagination,” to the ideals they inhabited.

In their sylvan redoubt, in their disparaged “backwardness,” Maria and Zé Cláudio held to the longue durée of tree time, a time that encourages us to flex our imaginations and extend our ethical sight lines. They refused cul-de-sac definitions of development that paid little heed to past practices or future safeguards. They refused a neoliberal ideal of prosperity that is a kind of poverty. They refused to bow to a deified market that doubles as a looting spree. They rejected notions of individual sovereignty so fiercely self-interested that they become a suicide trap. They saw that the only survival possible is collaborative, one that acknowledges—and responds with creative vigor—to the rain forest as a community of being.

Their voices assume a special resonance in the world of 2019. The year not just of fires sweeping the Amazon, but of new research calculating that planting 1.2 trillion trees could cancel a decade’s worth of global CO₂ emissions. The year when ecologist Thomas Crowther declared trees to be “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change.” The year when Crystal Davis, director of Global Forest Watch, called forests “the forgotten climate solution . . . We’re always searching for these great technologies that will do it on a megascale, but the most efficient way you can pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere is with trees.” The year when Greta Thunberg said: “We’re sawing off the branch we’re all sitting on.”

Front-line green defenders—who are always also more than that—enjoin us to heed the bodies buried beneath scorched canopies of hope. Enjoin us to heed the violence in the smoke. Enjoin us, through their example and their exorbitant suffering, to honor the possibilities that remain amidst the precarious plenitude. They enjoin us to make common cause with the biological congregations to which our fates are bound. And to refuse the dynamics of desecration that threaten to sunder both the social fabric and the great web of life.

^{1. We now know the names of thosemen: Edwin Chota Valera, Jorge Ríos Pérez, Leoncio Quinticima Melendez, and Francisco Pinedo.}

^{2. The real figure is likely to be much higher: in some regions, like the Central African rain forests—subject to acute resource wars—no reliable statistics exist on the murder rate of activists.}

_{NOTE. For my reflections on Maria and Zé Cláudio, I have drawn on the films Toxic Amazon (2011, directed by Bernardo Loyola and Felipe Milanez) and The Crying Forest (2011, directed by Gabriel Elizondo). I have also drawn on writings about the lives and deaths and afterlives of Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva and Zé Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva available in English.}

_{But my primary, abiding debt is to the work of Felipe Milanez, above all the long interviews—by turns uplifting and wrenching—that he conducted with the couple during his friendship with them. Milanez transcribed and appended those interviews to his PhD dissertation, A ousadia de conviver com a floresta: uma ecologia política do extrativismo na Amazônia (The Audacity of Living with the Forest: A Political Ecology of Extractivism in the Amazon). Milanez’s book on this subject is forthcoming from Editora Elefante in Brazil, while the interviews will be included in a volume on Maria and Zé Cláudio’s work from Iguana.}

_{I was eager to read the couple’s words, to channel their voices, once Milanez described them to me as “containing a kind of poetry.” Although fluent in English, Milanez resisted hazarding a translation of the interviews: “even one phrase because of their Amazonian Portuguese.” When I asked Beatriz Oikawa Cordeiro whether she would attempt an English translation, she responded positively, but with a similar caveat: that she couldn’t hope to capture the depth and richness of the Amazonian Portuguese. Nonetheless, she generated a moving, creative (and as yet unpublished) English translation.}

_{This process reminds us what else is at risk when rain forest goes up in flames: whole languages and deep dialects and the cultures that sustain them.}

_{The third section of my essay claims to be nothing more than a set of reflections on an approximation. I have written it from a place of impossibility. That said, I wish to thank Felipe Milanez for his vision, his great generosity, and the integrity of his witnessing. I also wish to honor the necessity of attempting, amidst all the inevitable misapprehensions and failures, to reach boldly across barriers of meaning.}