Scale, Invisibility, and the Arrogance of Conservation

Even Al Jazeera got the story wrong when publishing content about the Amazon in Brazil. I'm referring to a film documentary released last year: "Raids in the Rainforest" which follows a format or formula common to nonfiction TV narrative. That formula: find a story that involves a journey, danger, high risk, and, most importantly, a subject - a protagonist or hero for the camera who is willing to be filmed and can lead the audience where the producer wants to go. It of course helps if that subject is young and "attractive." Thomas Wartman, the director of this film, seems to have found all the ingredients - a drama about the destruction of the rainforest, and the young heroine making risky journeys into the forest to apprehend environmental criminals.

As the film carries forward this standard formula - it succeeds. It tells an interesting story. But it is made to satisfy knowledge that already exists, knowledge based in a somewhat neo-colonial idea about nature. Intentionally or not, the film is structured to reinforce a myth about what conservation is and should be, and it perpetuates a stereotype about poor, uneducated people being the scourge of the Amazon rain forest. In fact, the English subtitles misrepresent what is being said, ignoring phrases that would confuse the moral coherence of the story. 

Only in Brazil would I expect Al Jazeera to stumble like this. Brazil is the land of misinformation - the only monarchy that existed in the new world - the last country in the world to abolish slavery - a land that touts racial democracy but where the only people of color on the national Globo network are seen running from the police in favelas. 

The myth perpetuated by this film is not just a neo-colonial narrative. It is a scientific and technological neo-colonialism, tied to satellite based remote sensing, geographic information systems, and the idea that nature is separate from society. Biodiversity can be financed, and valued as natural capital. In Brazil's Amazon, satellites are helping to build legal models of the landscape, but these legal models and their official interlocutors are not the primary consideration for the humans who actually reside in these landscapes.But the value of the Amazon for conservationists or carbon financiers is not the value that the land holds for people who actually try to eek out a living on the land. 

My project for Expanded Documentary is about trying to feel past the models - to try to identify what neocolonial attitudes and technology do in terms of scale and in terms of value. Scale is a geographical concept, which takes account of the issue of visibility or invisibility of phenomenon. Maps of the Amazon can see deforestation and land use change. But can they see the reality of alternative small farmers with a passion for forest gardens? Can they see the political economic hegemony of cattle and and how ranching dominates rural finance and state governments in frontier states like Mato Grosso and Rondonia? Can they see how people from São Paolo, like the protagonist of the film above, have no idea of what poor settlers lives are like?

If you believe in the neo-colonial narrative, then "Raids in the Rainforest" is a sanguine tale that offers hope. But if you dissolve the cartography of neo-colonialism, this is a trumped up story of environmental police rendering poor, vulnerable people into life-sentence environmental criminals. The people encountered by these police will never be able to pay the astronomical fines levied by IBAMA (the federal environmental agency), at the same time that their civil and financial liberties will be severely and permanently curtailed. Meanwhile, those who are actually driving deforestation and creatively wasting the landscape, are invisible in this film - as powerful people and interests with impunity.

Below, I take a 3 minute video gander, contrasting global environmentalism with sounds and things encountered in a similar landscape as that of the film above – northwest Mato Grosso on the southern agricultural frontier of the Amazon. The video is a simple string of clips, where I start with a a glimpse of an economics conference at the Rio+20 global environmental conference, then shift to the sounds and things of the rural landscape: Brazil nut trees both living and dead, coffee plants, the smokestack of a slaughterhouse, a federal government agrarian reform settlement, and a small farm in this settlement, where a small farmer harvests pupunha (heart of palm) and walks us through his forest garden in the twilight.

This is obviously just an initial video sketch. But as it is not standard documentary narrative, I found that the audio was especially compelling, even if just background audio of insects. And with a good camera sensibility, one can be technologically intimate with humans, non-humans and things. How will I work out a critique or a satire of the neo-colonial narrative above? Or, push this technological immediacy and explore how video could be parsed through an alternative cartographic frame?