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rainforest soil isn't any good; after about 20 inches of good topsoil you hit rock. Grass takes hold for a season or two before it can't be regrown or replanted. At that point, the soil has been hammered down by the cattle, there's no shade left and what you have is a sandy desert in the making. This is a long way of saying that the rainforest is not a renewable resource. It doesn't regrow itself, it changes, erases-permanently and forever. So after annihilating one patch of forest, these new roadside immigrants turn to the next and the next and the next, all the while ruining plant life and busily hunting animals, because, well, we all gotta eat. As for the oil men, they do find oil. They find so much that it seems like a good idea to spread it around. In the twenty years these oil men have been hauling their rigs around and spreading the gospel, 16.8 million gallons of oil have been dumped in the Amazon alone. A volume exactly 8.4 rnillion gallons greater than the spill Exxon managed to dump in the Valdez spill. Millions of gallons have spilled down the Napo and into the Amazon and then into the Atlantic. And, as far as I know, there's not one creature alive designed to live in oil, so all the wildlife that this 16.8 rnillion gallons has encountered along its way is no more. The rainforest reshapes the way you think of life on this planet. It does this through the languid process of continual amaze ment, a process that feels a little like being repeatedly struck in the face by a waffle iron. There's something that happens to peo ple when they are transplanted out of their principle environment into one that exists slightly beyond all irnagination. It is a strip ping away of cultural referents; nothing you see, hear, smell, taste or touch bears any real relationship to your day-to-day life. Everyone has the same limited inforrnation base to draw upon. Which is why, when we first head up the Napo via dugout canoe, I turn to Katherine, our naturalist guide, and do what every American tourist who has sat on the bow of a dugout canoe and gone down river has done. "Hey Katherine, have you ever seen Apocalypse Now?" "No, but I've heard a lot about it." There's a standard checklist for Amazon adventure designed to give you an experience to write home about: eat lemon ants; see poisonous snakes, frogs and insects; see non-poisonous snakes, frogs and insects disguised as poisonous snakes, frogs and insects; continually confuse the two categories; have the really big bug experience; ride on a dugout canoe; make stupid Apocalypse Now references. Then there are the other things, things noticed along the way, things that rnake us stop and reevaluate and reshape what it is we hold as basic and fundamental about life on this planet. Think of a chicken. Now picture a chicken in its natural environment. Think barnyards and holding pens but remember this is not the natural environment of the chicken. This is only our human-made use-value of a chicken. The natural environment of a chicken is the jungle. Despite the fact that I have spent years seeing chickens in various jungles I never once stopped to think feral chickens. Not until I encountered a hoatzin. In truth it is not related to a chicken, though at first glance it looks related to a chicken. But it also looks related to pheasants, cranes, pigeons and certain rnembers of the Sex Pistols. Adult hoatzins are about fourteen inches long and dark brown with white mark ings. Their wings and legs are short, feet large, tails long and wide with big patches of yellow on the outside feathers and a striking, iridescent blue mohawk that runs atop their heads. These birds are molecularly closest to a cuckoos. Hoatzins are lousy flyers (thus earning the nickname "flying cow") and awful to taste (thus earning the name "stinking bird")-but they're pretty unreal to see. They hop around large trees positioned above bodies of water. This is because, though they can barely fly and hopping around isn't the world's finest defense mechanism, they're phenomenal swimmers. So when dan ger comes, they drop out of the tree, into the water and swim away. None of this makes the bird special, it just makes the bird well adapted to its environment and, up until now, safe from extinction. What makes the hoatzin special is that the young are born with functional claws on the second and third digits of the forelimbs which atrophy as the bird grows wings. The hoatzin is the bird that tells us that reptiles evolved into birds, meaning the hoatzin is one living piece of a gigantic evolutionary puzzle. The Ecuadorian rainforest has yet to be fully explored. There are still many, many far stranger things than the hoatzin hidden beneath that dizzy canopy. These aren't lessons unlearned, these are lessons unknown. In her wonderful book of bugs, Broadsides From the Other Orders, Sue Hubbell draws a chart illustrating the evolution of a flea into a human being. Never mind that this chart is pure biological fantasy. It does, in fact, depict a scenario that could occur given the slightest of variation in the slightest of moments in geological time. Certainly the sentient creature at the end of that chain would not look like us or think like us or move like us, but some form of intelligent consciousness would have arrived. This is the true secret, the true treasure of the rainforest, beyond the beauty, beyond the near endless potential for new medicines and new foods and new use-values the jungle always provides. If the rainforest vanishes, so does our biggest foothold in the world of possibility . •