Entangled Edens by Candace Slater, University of California Press,
£19.95, ISBN 0520226410
WE ALL have our image of the Amazon. For some it is a romantic place where
the world’s greatest river, its largest rainforest and its most diverse
ecosystems coexist in primeval harmony. For others, it is a place echoing to the
sound of chainsaws, turned to ashes by slash-and-burn farmers and defiled by
mercury spewing from gold mines. As Candace Slater admirably shows in
Entangled Edens, the Amazon has always been a repository for our
dreams and our nightmares.
For Europeans, the Amazon dream began with tales of the man-eating female
Amazon warriors and the huge wealth of El Dorado. It inspired the building of
the Manaus Opera House in Brazil, endless searches for isolated tribes and
Daniel Ludwig’s modernist vision of an industrial kingdom carved from the
jungle. It lives on in modern preoccupations as the “lungs of the planet” and as
a crucible of environmental destruction.
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Slater has collected oral histories and stories drawn from the Amazon basin’s
inhabitants and visitors over five centuries: native tribes and conquistadors,
gold miners and biologists. Slater argues, successfully I think, that the
mythology is as vital to understanding the place as any tract on its ecology or
politics. And, of course, rather like Charles Marlow’s journey a century ago up
the Congo River in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Entangled
Edens is ultimately about ourselves.