1975 Amazon River This is the Father of all rivers; the mightiest river in the world, and the jungle sprouting from its breath is the last lung on this planet. The adventurous and the avaricious have flocked to Amazonia since the first Europeans who came this way discovered Indians with reversed feet, who walked backward instead of forward over these lands promising prodigious fortunes. Since then, all business in Amazonia starts with a massacre. At an air-conditioned desk in Sao Paulo or New York, a corporate executive signs a check which amounts to an extermination order, for the initial job of clearing the jungle begins with Indians and other wild beasts. They give the Indians sugar or salt mixed with rat poison, or bomb them from the air, or hang them by the feet to bleed to death without bothering to skin them, because who would buy the hides? The job is finished off by Dow Chemical's defoliants, which devastated Vietnam's forests and now Brazil's. Blind tortoises stumble about where trees used to be.
