Knowledge and wonder, innocence and experience:  the worlds of Oregon and Amazon encompass every aspect of humanity’s relationship with nature.  In the Amazon, people are still surrounded by the wild.  Despite the horrific destruction that has occurred in certain areas, 80% of the Amazonian rainforest is still intact.  There are no bridges over the Amazon River, no dams on its main flow, almost no roads connecting the towns on its banks.  The people of the Amazon, no matter what their culture, are under no illusions about their relationship with the environment: they depend on it, absolutely.  This intimacy is not always successful, but it is a real relationship, born of and sustained by necessity.

 In Oregon, on the other hand, nature is surrounded by people.  Here, even the biggest roadless area can be walked across in a few days, and the most remote wilderness can be reached in a few hours of driving.  Most of us live lives thoroughly insulated from nature, and our relationships with the environment are misbegotten as a result.  The knowledge and respect for nature that comes from daily life lived with the wild are all but lost, replaced by attitudes that are too often simply projections of our own dreams and fears.

Such fantasies are difficult to sustain in the tropics.  The Amazon’s intricate dance of life and death is endlessly fascinating, but romantic it is not.  And yet, the river does offer its grown-up epiphanies.  There was a day on the lower Amazon when we set out to explore in the late afternoon.  The low sun glanced off the river and filled the air with golden light.  A vivid rainbow arched over the mouth of the small black-water tributary we were entering, and the green reeds behind flared into incandescence.  Two river dolphins, as softly pink as seashells, rolled their backs out of the muddy water in front of our boat.   Flocks of parrots streamed toward their roosts, announcing their readiness for slumber with ear-splitting screams.  With startling speed, the sun set bloody behind the knife-edged silhouettes of palms, and as abruptly as a conjurer’s trick, the air filled with bats.  I felt as alive as I have ever felt, as alive as the Amazon, worthy to add my human voice to that cacophonous chorus of life.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned along the Amazon is this:  we are part of nature - not its audience, its interpreter, its lover, or its victim.  The spark that unfolds the trout lily and ignites the orchid, that quickens the jaguar and empowers the grizzly bear, is the same spark that flashes in human laughter and glistens in human tears.  The wild places of this earth are our homeland.  In all their variety, from extravagant savagery to disarming sweetness, they nurture us, and we must preserve a place for them if we are to remain fully human.   Traveling between Oregon and Amazon, I have come to know that the preservation of wilderness is the preservation of ourselves.

Originally Published:   Jefferson Monthly, June 1998