The western Amazon is the last frontier, as wild a west as Earth has ever known. For thirty years David G. Campbell has been exploring this lush wilderness, which contains more species than ever existed anywhere at any time in the four-billion-year history of life on our planet. With great artistic flair, Campbell takes us with him as he travels to the town of Cruzeiro do Sul, 2,800 miles from the mouth of the Amazon. Here he collects three old friends: Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together even farther into the rainforest, set up camp, and survey every living woody plant in a land so rich that an area of less than fifty acres contains three times as many tree species as all of North America. Campbell knows the trees individually, has watched them grow from seedling to death. He also knows the people of the Amazon: the recently arrived colonists with their failing farms; the mixed-blood Caboclos, masters of hunting, fishing, and survival; and the refugee Native Americans. Campbell introduces us to two remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely frontier, and Dona Ausira, A Nokini Native American who is the last speaker of her tribe's ages-old language. These people live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them -- a land of ghosts. "[The Brazilian rain forest] is . . . marvelously described and movingly evoked . . . Campbell offers what feels like a lover's last, lingering look." --William Grimes The New York Times "A fluent and highly intelligent book." --Joe Kane, Orion Magazine "There are dozens of entertaining up-the-Amazon narratives, but A LAND OF GHOSTS stands out among them." --Elizabeth Royte The New York Times Book Review David G. Campbell is the author of the prizewinning Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica. He is a professor of biology at Grinnell College. PROLOGUE The Odyssey This is a story from the edge of the human presence on our planet, the far western Amazon River Valley, where the forest envelops the horizon and the sky vaults in indifference to our small ways. It is a tale of men and women on a frontier so vast that they seem eclipsed by it. It is the story of their survival and their despair— and sometimes their triumph. It is a record of scientists who seek understanding of the natural world and of Native Americans who are losing that world, as their age-old culture—and their cosmos— disintegrates. For thirty years I have conducted ecological studies in the Brazilian Amazon, in particular around the remote headwaters of the Rio Juruá, in the state of Acre, near the Peruvian border. In the course of my journeys there, I have become friends with—indeed, part of the extended family of—the pioneers along the rivers and highways. A wanderer from another continent, I have shared their lives and for a moment was captivated. I lived among four cultures: the recently arrived colonists from Brazil’s densely populated east who have settled along the Transamazon Highway; the Caboclos, people of mixed heritage who are masters at making a living along the rivers in this intractable land; the local Native Americans; and the university-trained scholars of the Western empirical scientific tradition. The colonists settle along the moth-eaten edge of the highway — the Transamazonica—growing manioc and coffee and raising a few pigs and chickens in the sandy soils. Some bring the inappropriate farming technologies of Brazil’s arid east to the tropical rainforest; or, worse, some are city folk with no understanding of farming or the soil. The colonists inevitably fail; the forest succumbs to ephemeral small fires; its fertility is transient. The Caboclos are fiercely defensive of their lonely environment. Of African, European, even Middle Eastern descent—the vestiges of past diasporas—they are mostly Native American. They all speak Portuguese now. Although most have lost their native languages, they have not necessarily lost all their native skills. They know how to eke out a living in the river and forest. Still, they are not masters of their environment. They are seduced by the forces of commerce, especially by rubber-tapping and cattle- ranching. The Native Americans, who once understood every nuance of this forest and had a name for every one of its species, have become dislocated and confused, coveting Western ways but unable to grasp them. In a generation many will become Caboclos themselves, but in the quantum jump from Native American to Caboclo they will lose their traditions, their culture, and their very language. Each family along the rivers has its own tale, often tragic, sometimes heroic. The best interests of the different groups are often in conflict in a land where there is no law, a land neglected by an indifferent governmen