Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25120
Everyone knows what the BOOM is, but no one wants to talk about it. They're fishing with dynamite now. Everywhere the indigenous are losing fingers and toes. Locals buy full boom-boom sticks from oil men in the area and chop the charges into thirds with machetes. They're using vines and leaves and little balls of waxy string to make makeshift fuses if they can't buy those too. They wade out into the river, wade right out into what was once their native fishing grounds and heave-ho. What was once a complicated process has broken down. The old ways-the making of delicate traps, the mixing of biotoxin to make fish groggy, the slow harvest that doesn't deplete or pollute the river- well, they're mostly gone. Not as many folks want to listen to the shaman anymore. Who cares about the old ways when there's television and argyle socks and dynamite? So they're fishing with dynamite and their timing is for shit. Some of them are spending the rest of their lives as burn victims and as amputees and are destroying the major tributary of the world's greatest resource along the way. After all, we're only talking about ground zero for biodiversity and all the possibility such diversity brings. What's a few lost digits in the name of progress? These days there are six major types of world travelers: rocks people, animals people, people people, party peo ple, sportspeople, and been-there-done-that people. Rocks people go in for archeology and geology, they head out to places like Machu Picchu and Ankgor Wat and Egypt. They favor huge piles of stone and vanished civilizations. People people evolved from rocks people, but instead of vanished civilizations they want living ones that are about to vanish. The names of indigenous tribes flow from their lips. Animal people want wildlife. Most are particular in their wildlife-they want mammals or birds or butterflies. Party people could give a shit for the great outdoors, they want exotic cities and hot nightclubs and local drugs and brews and radios playing all night long. Sports people go places to run rivers or climb mountains or hunt game. Been-there-done-that people come in two sub-species. The first is The Great Tourist-Fodors in hand, sharpies at the ready. To them travel is a checklist: pack twenty sites into an afternoon and head back to the air-conditioned hotel by dinner. The other sub-species suffer from a Star Trek Complex: they want to go where no man has gone before. The harder the trip the better. To be fair, most travelers tend to occ,upy more than categories, which means I want to go surfing on a beach that's only reachable by a five day uphill climb through a tropi cal jungle full of extremely rare poisonous snakes. And if that can't happen I'll go to Ecuadorian rainforest. Which is where I went, which was better than surfing, which may, in fact, have been better than anything I have seen before and I have a pretty severe Star Trek Complex. So, sure, I'm not the first man to hike through this rainforest, but if things keep on as they've been going, I may very well be among the last. one ni It's going to go away, not in the distant future, not because of meteoric cataclysm or natural cycle, it's going to disappear soon, maybe before your children can see it, maybe before you can see it. According to the Rainforest Action Network, the global.rate of rainforest deforestation hovers around 149 acres a minute. In Ecuador that comes out to 3,000 square kilometers a year. This means that every year Ecuador loses an area larger than San Francisco.