The last new world

Great nations have long been moved by quests to conquer and settle frontiers, both overland and overseas. Such drives have typically involved a double mandate: "to destroy and pull down, to build and to plant," the Bible says. The Last New World is about this twin mandate of conquest in the vast, forbidding, and fragile rain forest of Amazonia, the New World's newest frontier and perhaps its last. Most of the world's nations conquered their frontiers by the late. Nineteenth century. Now, a hundred years later, Brazil, South America's most dynamic nation, is pursuing its own version of Manifest Destiny, and settlers, cattlemen, drifters, and adventurers have moved into the Amazon at a furious pace. The result is a contradictory landscape of thriving boom towns and forests aflame, where settlers discover new opportunities while squatters, Indians, and rubber tappers battle for their lives, where gold mines devour whole mountains. And poison the rivers with mercury. The conquest of the Amazon is no more or less violent than the settling of any other frontier, but the world has undergone a sea change in sensibilities. Pioneers are no longer seen as heroic, vigorous figures, but as agents of death and destruction. The annual burnings and the blood of the Amazon's forest dwellers have sent waves of revolt around the globe. This is a story not only of waste and ruin, but also about those who are. Trying to pick up the pieces and endure. Peasants, cattlemen, and rubber tappers have carved out a life in the Amazon and they are there to stay. They are outsiders, both geographically and ecologically. Hailing mostly from the temperate zones, they are puzzling out the intricacies of the largest of the planet's tropical rain forests, one of the last available habitable spaces on Earth. With the help of scientists and extension workers, the people of the Amazon region. Are stubbornly trying to find a way to develop this complex environment without destroying it, a middle course between the unrealistic goal of total preservation and the unthinkable one of wholesale exploitation. In a world reeling from the results of our manhandled environment, the struggles of these frontier peoples, both newcomers and natives, may hold important lessons for the rest of us.