Land, People, and Paper in Western Amazonia

Abstract

Abstract It is hard to see Amazonia as landscape, in the sense this term has for people from temperate climes. The land does not recede away from a point of observation to the distant horizon, for everywhere vegetation occludes the view. In the forest, sight penetrates only a short distance into the mass of trees. Along the big rivers, you can see further, but even here there is no distant blue horizon. The sky starts abruptly from behind the screen of forest. Sight is hemmed in, and you would succumb to claustrophobia had not a plane journey or many days of travel let you know the scale of this land of big rivers and unending forests. To travel in most of Amazonia is to pass through an endless succession of small enclosed places, and to imagination itself is left the task of contructing out of these an immense extension of space. Only when an Amazonian landscape has been radically transformed by roads and deforestation is it revealed as visually extended space. A bright red road extends to the horizon, while buildings, fences, and isolated trees recede away into the distance. It looks more like a northern temperate landscape, with the wilderness forest no longer dominating the visual field, but simply a hazy transition between land and sky in the far distance.

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