Читать книгу The Organic Garden - Allan Shepherd - Страница 15

It matters to somebody somewhere, even when we think it doesn’t.

Many people have changed the direction of my life. Some of them I’ve never met. Top of this list is Chico Mendes. Chico Mendes worked in a small area of rainforest in a remote region of Brazil. His job was to extract a harvest of natural rubber from trees – a job he could do without harming the trees. Chico supplemented his income by collecting other things from the forest too – Brazil nuts, herbs and fruits. He believed in harvesting from the forest in a way that would keep the forest intact for ever. Being totally reliant on it he was horrified to hear that his area of rainforest was to be cut down. Faced with the loss of his own livelihood, he organised a peaceful campaign of protest and resistance. He was sitting on the steps of his home when two gunmen hired by loggers shot him dead.

Can there be anything more ugly than the jagged edges of felled tree stumps poking up from empty soil?

What could be so important to take the life of a man like Chico Mendes? The sad reality is that the wood Chico died to protect was turned into charcoal, garden furniture and plywood fences. It appeared in chain stores around Britain and we bought it.

How extraordinary it must have been to garden a rainforest. To walk amongst giants every day. To be no bigger than an ant nor older than a child in comparison to the living things around you. How brave to go into your garden every morning wondering whether you will return to sit on the steps of your home each night. As gardeners we can imagine how it must have been for Chico Mendes as he heard the bulldozers move onwards through the forest. Wondering when his garden would be next.

I can picture the landscape after the bulldozers moved on. It doesn’t take much imagination. We’ve all seen the photographs. Can there be anything more ugly than the jagged edges of felled tree stumps poking up from empty soils?

But however vivid these pictures are, they still don’t tell the whole story. We might think that within a few years farmers are happily ploughing and harvesting crops on this new landscape but the truth is that once a rainforest has been removed from a piece of land nothing on that land is ever quite the same again.

Rainforest soil relies on rainforests. Once they are removed the soil loses its fertility. It is a story that 300 million slash-and-burn farmers know all over the tropical world. Each one cuts, farms and moves on, chasing ever-decreasing circles of fertility until they are forced off the land altogether, into city slums. This is competition at its most brutal. Competition amongst men for land, and with nature for fertility.