Chapter 3: Figure and Ground
45 - Figure and Ground (Intro, Part Two)
Sulistkrowski is a big, square-framed man in his seventies, solidly built with long hair and pale eyes that show a sharp intelligence. He came to the Amazon in 1976, as an award-winning filmmaker then working for Warner Brothers. While flying the area looking for locations, he spotted an old Portuguese plantation house down along a river. It intrigued him and he approached the owners, who eventually succumbed to his repeated offers. He has lived here ever since.
It is a special place, and not only geographically. The very different chemistries of the two rivers on opposite sides of the peninsula give rise to quite different ecologies on their separate shores. Then inland, at the peninsula’s center—where those two different realms collide—they produce a riot of intermingling life forms that makes even the abundance of a rain forest seem politely restrained.
“Once I had a chance to walk around in the forest,” Sulistrowski says, “I fell in love with it.” Little wonder. There are trees on this peninsula that twenty people with arms stretched wide could scarcely girdle. Black and multicolored jaguars live here, along with some two hundred varieties of birds. It is an area unique in all the Amazon basin for its diversity—a fact attested by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, which has commended Sulistrowski and acknowledged the importance of the forest his work preserves.
While he sees his main work as saving the forest, he also encourages research on the area’s biological and genetic diversity. Beyond that he tries to be a force for good locally. He encourages fishing methods, for instance, that don’t involve dynamite, and agriculture that doesn’t involve burning trees. And he works to promote, he says, “a better knowledge of the splendor and importance of the Amazon and of the need to preserve its ecology,” adding that the best way of doing that is “not by building a Chinese wall around it but by living in harmony with nature, by harvesting the fruits of nature without destroying her.”
Sulistrowski thinks ecotourism is one such solution. With that in mind he has joined forces with another facility an hour upriver to create the world’s largest ecotourism resort. Called Ariaú Amazon Towers, that other site is quite different from his. Where Terra Verde is very much on the ground, integrated with the forest through paths leading from shoreline into deep forest shadows, Ariaú is essentially a collection of tree houses strung through the high canopy, interconnected by a rambling network of skywalks.
Closing the door quickly behind visitors, a staffer there smiles and explains, “The monkeys are very wicked.” In fact the monkeys are everywhere, whole troops of them swinging through the trees and hanging out by the various cabins and facilities of the Ariaú complex. People who leave clothing out to dry on a windowsill may find it gone in the morning. If someone has a camera that looks interesting, one monkey may act to distract him while another grabs the camera and hightails it into the bush.
Ariaú is owned by Brazilians. No trees have been cut down to build it, waste is carefully isolated from the environment, and 90 percent of the staff are locals. Its ramshackle charm has drawn prominent visitors from around the world to see the Amazon. Ranging from bestselling Brazilian author Lair Ribeiro to Jacques Cousteau and Bill Gates, from Isabel Allende to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, they come to be harassed by the monkeys, go piranha fishing, or take moonlight boat rides to view caimans, the small crocodiles that live in the Rio Negro’s tepid waters.
Ecotourism has grown rapidly in popularity in the past few decades. Throughout the world there are now agencies and destinations specializing in it. Some observers complain, and justifiably, of the effect a resort like Ariaú has on such things as the natural habits of the local monkey population, or of the polluting jet travel typically involved in getting people there and back. But compared with the vast and ruthless violation of the forest by timber companies, or with a slash-and-burn death by a thousand cuts, ecotourism marks a hopeful step forward. It’s a more interactive view of the relationship between individuals and their environments.
The expansion of Manaus into the fertile Amazon basin is the story of machine age logic in the jungle, but it symbolizes a deeper relationship, too: the elemental tension between figure and ground, parts and wholes; between active elements and the larger patterns they act within. That tension is at the heart of work by Sulistrowski and a generation of activists like him, who feel we have to be more responsive to the natural world that surrounds us, and from which we draw life.
Wherever they carry that argument, beyond pragmatic issues, they also run up against the popular image of heroic individuals conquering their environments—a notion ingrained in our culture. For that reason, while it may be just a coincidence, it is nonetheless an interesting one that a similar contest of views underlies theories about what happens during the growth of a fertilized egg.
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