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L.A. contractors razed a native plant garden for kids. What happens now?

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Friday, August 9, 2024

For more than a decade, visitors say the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park was a shady showcase for indigenous plants, with dense stands of mature native trees and shrubs lining the paths of the grounds just west of Grace E. Simon Lodge and creating a cool, restful places to walk, play and learn. Then, in late June, all that lush undergrowth was leveled by a contractor hired by Los Angeles’ Department of Recreation and Parks to conform with the Los Angeles Fire Department’s brush clearance requirements. Since then, finger pointing and cries of “Ecocide” have reverberated on social media and during city meetings.“It was a magical environment,” said Shari Lee, a nearby resident who’s been walking the site for years. “Now it just seems sort of ... blank.” The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park after the brush clearance. (Shari Lee) These heated exchanges are all part of an ongoing and often contentious discussion about how a city like Los Angeles should manage urban wild lands with native plants. No one questions the need to remove such fast-growing invasives as black mustard, which becomes kindling for wildfires once it dries out in the summer. But should green native shrubs like toyons and lemonade berry be treated the same way? Native plant enthusiasts say those plants control erosion, provide shade and habitat for wildlife and pose little fire danger. Newsletter Sign up for our L.A. Times Plants newsletter At the start of each month, get a roundup of upcoming plant-related activities and events in Southern California, along with links to tips and articles you may have missed. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Critics say that before the work was done, the city should have notified stakeholders, such as the Northeast LA Forest School, which pays to use the Children’s Garden (also known as the Children’s Arboretum) year round for outdoor instruction. They also believe there should have been an environmental evaluation of the site before Mariposa Landscapes Inc. of Irwindale did the work. The trees and shrubs had been planted more than a decade earlier by the urban forestry nonprofit North East Trees, a project that included signage to identify the many native species added to the site, such as California buckeye, California black walnut and oaks. The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on a rainy day in February, 2024 (top) and after the brush clearance on June 27, 2024. (Becca Hackett-Levy) Today, the area looks denuded. The remaining trees have been trimmed so their limbs are at least 6 feet above the ground per fire prevention rules, some of the plant identification markers have been upturned and the dry, loose soil is covered with leaf debris.Both Mariposa and North East Trees contract with the city on other projects. Neither was willing to be interviewed for this story.The brush clearing was required by the Los Angeles Fire Department to protect a metal shed where the parks department stores fuel for lawn mowers, said Leon Boroditsky, principal ground maintenance supervisor for the forestry division of Recreation and Parks. The fire department did not respond to interview requests. Boroditsky didn’t order the clearing; he was away when the project was contracted. He said that he didn’t know how long the shed had been at the site but that this appeared to be the first year the LAFD felt the building needed to be considered a structure under the brush-clearing rules. The city is also trying to find out how and why North East Trees installed the native plant garden at the park in the first place. It happened about 20 years ago, said Rose Watson, public information director for Recreation and Parks, but the department can’t find any documents outlining the project or what plants were added to the site. There are lots of unanswered questions, Boroditsky said, and the clearance has created so much uproar that the city plans to bring in an independent third-party “arboreal expert” to do their own evaluation. “There have been a lot of knee-jerk reactions and inflammatory rhetoric happening,” Boroditsky said. The city doesn’t even have photos of what the area looked like before the clearing, he added, “which is why I’m saying they don’t have evidence to make some of those claims.”The site is in what the fire department classifies as a very high fire hazard severity zone,” Boroditsky said, and the rules for clearance in such spots are strict. For instance, in “areas within 200 feet of structures and/or 10 feet of roadside surfaces or combustible fence: Grass shall be cut to 3 inches in height. Native brush shall be reduced in quantity to three inches in height. This does not apply to individual native shrubs spaced a minimum of 18 feet apart, provided such shrubs are trimmed up from the ground to 1/3 of their height with all dead material being removed ....” Volunteers located tiny native plants like this toyon that survived the brush clearing, wrapping them in shade cloth to protect them from the scorching sun. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) So basically, the city paid $12,500 for brush clearance to protect a metal storage shed. Critics question whether it would have been simpler and cheaper to just move the shed, say to the adjacent Grace E. Simon Lodge enclosure? “That’s really not something I can clarify now,” Boroditsky said. “That’s something we’re evaluating now.”Becca Hackett-Levy, director of the Northeast LA Forest School, said the shed was at the Children’s Garden before she began using the location nearly eight years ago. She added that she was on maternity leave after the birth of her second child when she got panicked calls from parents saying the space she had paid the city to use for her year-round outdoor classroom had been devastated. A storage shed at the edge of the Children’s Garden in Elysian Park reportedly triggered the brush clearance around the site. The Grace E. Simon Lodge is behind the fence to the left. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) After weeks of uncertainty, Hackett-Levy said she got a call from parks officials Tuesday who told her that they’d found some areas she might be able to use nearby. “They found some good spots in the area, and they’re even changing their mowing schedule to accommodate the school,” she said Wednesday. “I’m just so thankful and shocked, frankly.” The other concerns won’t be so easily resolved. The Elysian Park Children’s Garden on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush clearance. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) Native plant supporters mobilized within hours of the clearing to locate and try to protect surviving baby native shrubs, dotting the area with small red and yellow flags to indicate their locations. Without shelter from the larger shrubs, they were vulnerable during the severe heat, said Brenda Contreras, director of the native plant and wildlife support group Coyotl wan Macehualli. So volunteers wrapped many of the plants in chicken wire and shade cloth for protection and carried in water to irrigate the survivors.Elizabeth Birkenbuel, who lives above the site on Park Drive, was so distressed by volunteers lugging large containers of water on the slippery hill that she encouraged them to hook up hoses to her outdoor faucet so they could more easily fill their buckets. The city typically does brush clearance in the area to remove invasive and highly flammable black mustard and castor bean plants, Birkenbuel said, “but it was really aggressively cleared this time, in a way I’ve never seen it done before. I was very shocked. I usually end my walks there in the summer because it was very shaded, lush and cool, but it’s vastly different now.” The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park, before the clearance of plants. (Shari Lee) Birkenbuel said she can’t afford to keep sharing her water; she’s hoping the city will provide an alternative source. That’s another thing Recreation and Parks is researching right now, Boroditsky said, along with why stakeholders weren’t given advance notice about the work, per usual, and whether the department needs to change its protocols for when it requires environmental review of a site before brush clearance can occur. However, native plant advocates are still going to city meetings and onto social media to accuse the city of deception and “ecocide” by killing protected plants like California black walnut. Boroditsky, a certified arborist, said the site still has lots of native trees, like buckeyes, walnut and oaks, that may have been trimmed to conform to clearance rules but that were not removed. “There is no evidence that protected trees were removed,” he said. Although he added that that’s partly because he didn’t have any photographs of the site before the clearance to confirm what plants were no longer there. He accused community activists of guerrilla gardening in the area by planting more native plants before the city had time to assess what happened and what needed to change. Adding more plants before the city has a plan is a problem, he said, because similar brush clearing might have to be repeated in the future. The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush was cleared. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) However, Contreras and Flink say no one is putting new plants into the ground, especially in the heat of summer, when they would have little chance of surviving. All they’re doing, Contreras said, is trying to identify the plants that survived the clearance and keep them alive until the rains come this winter, which, they worry, could result in problematic erosion in that stripped area. Meanwhile, Mason Flink and Max Kanter, co-founders of Garden City LA, are trying to build awareness of land management at the park by leading free, hour-long tours on the West Loop Trail from Aug. 10 through Sept. 1 to demonstrate the ways public lands can be managed and how the public can get involved. The tour includes the cleared Children’s Garden and the thriving native plant Test Plot gardens they help tend near the Marian Harlow Grove. Preschoolers from the Northeast LA Forest School race up a path last fall toward the native shrubs in the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park. (Becca Hackett-Levy) “Before they cleared out all the native plants, our point of going through the Children’s Garden was to show how all this life was flourishing,” Flink said. “Now it will offer a stark visual contrast to the Test Plot native plant gardens to spark conversations among the participants.” Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose district includes that part of Elysian Park, has taken the role of mediator and hopes to bring everyone together to discuss what happened and how to avoid problems going forward. The city “made a big mistake in not communicating with the community groups” who frequent that space, Soto-Martinez said in an interview. But Recreation and Parks “gave the correct instruction for the brush clearance,” he added, “because we don’t want a brush fire in that area with so many homes nearby.” As for the storage shed that apparently triggered the $12,500 upset: “That’s one of the first things we thought about ... couldn’t we have just moved it?” Soto-Martinez said. “I think that’s a very simple question to ask and a fair thing to keep asking.”

Los Angeles paid $12,500 to raze a native plant garden in Elysian Park to protect a metal storage shed from fire. Critics ask: Why and what now?

For more than a decade, visitors say the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park was a shady showcase for indigenous plants, with dense stands of mature native trees and shrubs lining the paths of the grounds just west of Grace E. Simon Lodge and creating a cool, restful places to walk, play and learn.

Then, in late June, all that lush undergrowth was leveled by a contractor hired by Los Angeles’ Department of Recreation and Parks to conform with the Los Angeles Fire Department’s brush clearance requirements. Since then, finger pointing and cries of “Ecocide” have reverberated on social media and during city meetings.

“It was a magical environment,” said Shari Lee, a nearby resident who’s been walking the site for years. “Now it just seems sort of ... blank.”

The Children's Garden in Elysian Park after the brush clearance.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park after the brush clearance.

(Shari Lee)

These heated exchanges are all part of an ongoing and often contentious discussion about how a city like Los Angeles should manage urban wild lands with native plants. No one questions the need to remove such fast-growing invasives as black mustard, which becomes kindling for wildfires once it dries out in the summer.

But should green native shrubs like toyons and lemonade berry be treated the same way? Native plant enthusiasts say those plants control erosion, provide shade and habitat for wildlife and pose little fire danger.

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Sign up for our L.A. Times Plants newsletter

At the start of each month, get a roundup of upcoming plant-related activities and events in Southern California, along with links to tips and articles you may have missed.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Critics say that before the work was done, the city should have notified stakeholders, such as the Northeast LA Forest School, which pays to use the Children’s Garden (also known as the Children’s Arboretum) year round for outdoor instruction. They also believe there should have been an environmental evaluation of the site before Mariposa Landscapes Inc. of Irwindale did the work.

The trees and shrubs had been planted more than a decade earlier by the urban forestry nonprofit North East Trees, a project that included signage to identify the many native species added to the site, such as California buckeye, California black walnut and oaks.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on a rainy day in February, 2024 (top) and after the brush clearance on June 27, 2024. (Becca Hackett-Levy)

Today, the area looks denuded. The remaining trees have been trimmed so their limbs are at least 6 feet above the ground per fire prevention rules, some of the plant identification markers have been upturned and the dry, loose soil is covered with leaf debris.

Both Mariposa and North East Trees contract with the city on other projects. Neither was willing to be interviewed for this story.

The brush clearing was required by the Los Angeles Fire Department to protect a metal shed where the parks department stores fuel for lawn mowers, said Leon Boroditsky, principal ground maintenance supervisor for the forestry division of Recreation and Parks. The fire department did not respond to interview requests.

Boroditsky didn’t order the clearing; he was away when the project was contracted. He said that he didn’t know how long the shed had been at the site but that this appeared to be the first year the LAFD felt the building needed to be considered a structure under the brush-clearing rules.

The city is also trying to find out how and why North East Trees installed the native plant garden at the park in the first place. It happened about 20 years ago, said Rose Watson, public information director for Recreation and Parks, but the department can’t find any documents outlining the project or what plants were added to the site.

There are lots of unanswered questions, Boroditsky said, and the clearance has created so much uproar that the city plans to bring in an independent third-party “arboreal expert” to do their own evaluation.

“There have been a lot of knee-jerk reactions and inflammatory rhetoric happening,” Boroditsky said. The city doesn’t even have photos of what the area looked like before the clearing, he added, “which is why I’m saying they don’t have evidence to make some of those claims.”

The site is in what the fire department classifies as a very high fire hazard severity zone,” Boroditsky said, and the rules for clearance in such spots are strict. For instance, in “areas within 200 feet of structures and/or 10 feet of roadside surfaces or combustible fence: Grass shall be cut to 3 inches in height. Native brush shall be reduced in quantity to three inches in height. This does not apply to individual native shrubs spaced a minimum of 18 feet apart, provided such shrubs are trimmed up from the ground to 1/3 of their height with all dead material being removed ....”

A tiny green plant surrounded with shade cloth and chicken wire for protection.

Volunteers located tiny native plants like this toyon that survived the brush clearing, wrapping them in shade cloth to protect them from the scorching sun.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

So basically, the city paid $12,500 for brush clearance to protect a metal storage shed. Critics question whether it would have been simpler and cheaper to just move the shed, say to the adjacent Grace E. Simon Lodge enclosure? “That’s really not something I can clarify now,” Boroditsky said. “That’s something we’re evaluating now.”

Becca Hackett-Levy, director of the Northeast LA Forest School, said the shed was at the Children’s Garden before she began using the location nearly eight years ago. She added that she was on maternity leave after the birth of her second child when she got panicked calls from parents saying the space she had paid the city to use for her year-round outdoor classroom had been devastated.

A metal storage shed barely visible at the edge of the Children's Garden in Elysian Park.

A storage shed at the edge of the Children’s Garden in Elysian Park reportedly triggered the brush clearance around the site. The Grace E. Simon Lodge is behind the fence to the left.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

After weeks of uncertainty, Hackett-Levy said she got a call from parks officials Tuesday who told her that they’d found some areas she might be able to use nearby. “They found some good spots in the area, and they’re even changing their mowing schedule to accommodate the school,” she said Wednesday. “I’m just so thankful and shocked, frankly.”

The other concerns won’t be so easily resolved.

An open space with sparse trees and dirt that was once the Children's Garden.

The Elysian Park Children’s Garden on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush clearance.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

Native plant supporters mobilized within hours of the clearing to locate and try to protect surviving baby native shrubs, dotting the area with small red and yellow flags to indicate their locations. Without shelter from the larger shrubs, they were vulnerable during the severe heat, said Brenda Contreras, director of the native plant and wildlife support group Coyotl wan Macehualli. So volunteers wrapped many of the plants in chicken wire and shade cloth for protection and carried in water to irrigate the survivors.

Elizabeth Birkenbuel, who lives above the site on Park Drive, was so distressed by volunteers lugging large containers of water on the slippery hill that she encouraged them to hook up hoses to her outdoor faucet so they could more easily fill their buckets.

The city typically does brush clearance in the area to remove invasive and highly flammable black mustard and castor bean plants, Birkenbuel said, “but it was really aggressively cleared this time, in a way I’ve never seen it done before. I was very shocked. I usually end my walks there in the summer because it was very shaded, lush and cool, but it’s vastly different now.”

Trees and brush shade the Children's Garden.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park, before the clearance of plants.

(Shari Lee)

Birkenbuel said she can’t afford to keep sharing her water; she’s hoping the city will provide an alternative source. That’s another thing Recreation and Parks is researching right now, Boroditsky said, along with why stakeholders weren’t given advance notice about the work, per usual, and whether the department needs to change its protocols for when it requires environmental review of a site before brush clearance can occur.

However, native plant advocates are still going to city meetings and onto social media to accuse the city of deception and “ecocide” by killing protected plants like California black walnut.

Boroditsky, a certified arborist, said the site still has lots of native trees, like buckeyes, walnut and oaks, that may have been trimmed to conform to clearance rules but that were not removed. “There is no evidence that protected trees were removed,” he said. Although he added that that’s partly because he didn’t have any photographs of the site before the clearance to confirm what plants were no longer there.

He accused community activists of guerrilla gardening in the area by planting more native plants before the city had time to assess what happened and what needed to change. Adding more plants before the city has a plan is a problem, he said, because similar brush clearing might have to be repeated in the future.

An empty space where the shady garden once stood.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush was cleared.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

However, Contreras and Flink say no one is putting new plants into the ground, especially in the heat of summer, when they would have little chance of surviving. All they’re doing, Contreras said, is trying to identify the plants that survived the clearance and keep them alive until the rains come this winter, which, they worry, could result in problematic erosion in that stripped area.

Meanwhile, Mason Flink and Max Kanter, co-founders of Garden City LA, are trying to build awareness of land management at the park by leading free, hour-long tours on the West Loop Trail from Aug. 10 through Sept. 1 to demonstrate the ways public lands can be managed and how the public can get involved. The tour includes the cleared Children’s Garden and the thriving native plant Test Plot gardens they help tend near the Marian Harlow Grove.

Three preschoolers racing up a path toward thick shrubs in the Childrens Garden in Elysian Park

Preschoolers from the Northeast LA Forest School race up a path last fall toward the native shrubs in the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park.

(Becca Hackett-Levy)

“Before they cleared out all the native plants, our point of going through the Children’s Garden was to show how all this life was flourishing,” Flink said. “Now it will offer a stark visual contrast to the Test Plot native plant gardens to spark conversations among the participants.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose district includes that part of Elysian Park, has taken the role of mediator and hopes to bring everyone together to discuss what happened and how to avoid problems going forward.

The city “made a big mistake in not communicating with the community groups” who frequent that space, Soto-Martinez said in an interview. But Recreation and Parks “gave the correct instruction for the brush clearance,” he added, “because we don’t want a brush fire in that area with so many homes nearby.”

As for the storage shed that apparently triggered the $12,500 upset: “That’s one of the first things we thought about ... couldn’t we have just moved it?” Soto-Martinez said. “I think that’s a very simple question to ask and a fair thing to keep asking.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public. In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done. Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County. In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.   As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by Petitioners—including the 2018 feasibility study—there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the Railway.” “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio—a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project. DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it because in the three years since the IPO, it has done…nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment. Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies? During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers. “You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement. Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.) While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station. There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them. “This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year.

Activism
Energy
Government

Coos Bay port embroiled in controversy over racism allegations against contractor

A coalition of human rights groups, environmental organizations, a labor union and other nonprofits have called on the port to reject business dealings with a local business owner identified by Oregon anti-fascist activists as a neo-Nazi and an avowed white supremacist.

The citizen board that oversees the Port of Coos Bay this week said it will review its policies for leasing port property in response to allegations of racism and other hate speech involving one of its contractors.A coalition of human rights groups, environmental organizations, a labor union and other nonprofits have called on the port to reject business dealings with a local business owner identified by Oregon anti-fascist activists as a neo-Nazi and an avowed white supremacist.The controversy comes as the Port of Coos Bay, the largest coastal deep water shipping port between Seattle and San Francisco, is poised for a significant transformation. It recently landed $54 million in federal funding toward a possible $2.3 billion expansion and what might someday be a large rail and shipping hub, paving the way for thousands of jobs in southwest Oregon.Port officials have scrambled to respond to the campaign targeting a contractor who holds relatively small contracts with the agency. The contractor, Michael Whitworth Gantenbein, characterized the allegations as “a smear campaign.” He denied the allegations in two phone interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive.“I don’t do that kind of stuff,” he said. “I’m not a racist or any of that.”Already, a former state lawmaker who is an investor with the development group that has signed on to build and operate a new terminal has informed the port that his group won’t contract with Whit Industries, a Coos Bay hydraulics company owned by Gantenbein.“He will not get one dime of our money, ever,” said Brian Clem, who served in the Oregon House from 2007 to 2021, in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Clem, who is from Coos Bay, said the developers plan to spend at least $800 million on the terminal project.The coalition behind the effort against Gantenbein forwarded allegations to port officials that were compiled by Left Coast Right Watch, which describes itself as an investigative journalism outlet, and CVAntifa, which says it is an antifascist collective based in Corvallis.They allege Gantenbein is a former leader in a defunct chapter of White Lives Matter, which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.The letter to the port refers to archived audio recordings from a White Lives Matter chat group on Telegram. A man whom activists say is Gantenbein provides his home address in the audio; the address is the same one linked to Gantenbein in public records, according to public records reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive.The letter to the port is signed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 932, Oregon’s Bay Area, Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition, Oregon Just Transition Alliance, Rogue Climate, Sierra Club Oregon Chapter, South Coast Health Equity Coalition, Unite Oregon and Western States Center.The groups urged port officials to reject leasing to businesses owned by Gantenbein; port representatives, however, say they are unaware of any pending transactions that would require the board’s signoff.“There are no imminent plans for lease transfers involving the Shipyard,” Kyle Stevens, president of the Port of Coos Bay Commission, told the group in a written response.“We are reviewing our policies for leasing property to ensure they comply with Title VI and will share any policy revisions publicly,” he wrote. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal dollars.“We are committed to making this a transparent process,” Stevens wrote. “Any future lease transfers would fall under the new policy being developed.”Gantenbein declined to respond to each allegation of racist activity and said he had “never been the leader” of any racist group.He acknowledged the authenticity of an image the groups are circulating showing him sitting down eating lunch with a man activists identified as a White Lives Matter leader.“I met with this guy and when I found out what this was about, I walked away immediately,” he said.He called the allegations “a bunch of propaganda.”“I’m not a bad person or an evil person,” he said. “I have people of color that work for me. I mean, this is just ridiculous. The people that know me know this, so it boggles the mind.”Gantenbein is a longtime hydraulics contractor with port contracts, Stevens confirmed in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive.As of Nov. 5, the port had paid Gantenbein’s company, Whit Industries, nearly $290,000 since 2015.Stevens said contracts with Whit Industries on three projects remain ongoing; he said the board is reviewing those agreements, which involve repairs to port equipment.Stevens said port staff contacted Gantenbein when the allegations of racism first surfaced to discuss various public information requests the port received regarding business dealings with Whit Industries.Stevens said Gantenbein “cut them off and informed them he did not want to hear it and that he keeps his personal life separate from his professional life.”Stevens said the board recently adopted a non-discrimination policy and is developing an official complaint process for potential violations.“There is no place for discrimination in our community and we remain committed to ensuring any and all employees and contractors uphold that same commitment as part of our public mission,” he said.— Noelle Crombie is an enterprise reporter with a focus on criminal justice. Reach her at 503-276-7184; ncrombie@oregonian.comOur journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

Activism
Business
Conservation

Amid Devastation in the Amazon, Diamonds Were Their Best Hope

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years. “New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforestThe diamond was so big the women said it resembled “God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” “Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors. He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.” The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right. The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.) The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism. Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years. “New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforestThe diamond was so big the women said it resembled “God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” “Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors. He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.” The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right. The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.) The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism. Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

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