Earth Odyssey by Mark Hertsgaard

Author:Mark Hertsgaard [Hertsgaard, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48408-6
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 1999-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

How Population Matters

The tendency to see in population growth an

explanation for every calamity that afflicts poor

people is now fairly well established in some

circles, and the message that gets transmitted

constantly is the opposite of the old picture

postcard: “Wish you weren't here.”

—AMARTYA SEN,

economist, Harvard University

Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with houses on stilts, and wispy blue skies. Shoeless brown children waved back from the shoreline, the equatorial sun in their eyes. Behind them the trees of the Amazon rainforest swayed in the afternoon breeze. Slender as lampposts, they crowded together, a wall of light purples and greens.

As Joao turned the boat toward the open river, the violet water beneath us met the green-brown current of the larger channel. For nearly ten minutes the colors flowed side by side, as distinct as oil and water, before the violet finally gave way without a trace. We were in northern Brazil, on the Uatuma River, one of the countless tributaries that drain the massive Amazon Basin. The nearest link to the modern world was twenty hours back up the Amazon, in Manaus, a ghost town of the nineteenth-century rubber boom that rainforest tourism had recently helped to rejuvenate. But we were heading downstream, to the isolated village of Urucara, to attend the party of the year.

Joao piloted this boat with his wife, Margarita, and today their kids were with them, too—eight girls and a boy, the oldest nineteen, the youngest a year and a half. A girl of about five beamed with pride at being in charge of the baby, but in an instant of inattention disaster nearly struck. Drawn by the foamy water rushing past the boat, the toddler made a sudden dash for the side. She was about to topple overboard when her mother swooped over to grab her. Calamity averted, Margarita folded her hands back in her lap and good-naturedly shrugged me a smile. Judging by the lines on her rounded brown face, she could not have been more than forty. She had given birth approximately every two years since she was a teenager, yet she was the picture of serenity, her beatific smile radiating a calm, joyous warmth as she watched over her brood.

Joao and Margarita operated this boat for the local Catholic mission, represented on board by Father Ron, a young Canadian with chestnut hair and twinkling eyes who liked the rock and roll of U2 and R.E.M. Ron had been the local priest for five years. But as he teased and giggled with Joao and Margarita's three teenage daughters in the front of the boat, the foursome looked more like a bunch of gossiping high school students than a priest with his charges. Ron called back to me that the girls wanted to know whether I was married. The nineteen-year-old was looking for a husband, and everyone agreed she and I would make a lovely couple. Everyone except her sister's friend, that is, who had been flashing me smoldering glances behind the others' backs from the moment we boarded the boat.

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