Aveiro, Brazil – Flames roared more than 100 feet high, sending plumes of smoke throughout the jungle.
Wild boars are scattered from the undergrowth. A toucan was shot from the top of a tree. And thousands of acres of Amazon rainforest quickly collapsed into ash.
The year is 1928, and vast tracts of land in north-central Brazil are being cleared for a monumental project. Fordlandia is his $20 million city dreamed up by Henry Ford, the richest American businessman in the world at the time.
Hospitals, movie theaters, schools, and bungalows rose from the charred earth. Golf and tennis courts were built to make arriving Americans feel at home. Meanwhile, the sawmill and factory floors were the exclusive property of local workers.
But over the past 80 years, Fordlandia has been largely abandoned and slowly fallen into disrepair.
Still, smoke continues to hang in the air as Brazil grapples with an ongoing legacy of deforestation and the pursuit of wealth in its world-famous rainforest.
About 2,000 people are the residents of Ford’s utopian experiment, a decaying reminder of the ambitions that shaped the forest.
These poverty-stricken residents find themselves caught between conflicting pressures to protect their environment or exploit it to make ends meet.
“Yes, we are deforesting. How else are we going to farm?” said Sadir Moata, 31, who lives in the area.
Moata, a muscular farmer with dark bushy eyebrows, took it upon himself to renovate one of Fordlandia’s large homes, originally intended for American expatriates. He dug up bat droppings and tamed the overgrowth in the garden so his father could use it as a home.
However, the income from farming is small, and by clearing the land through fire, more crops can be grown.
“I’ll give you 600 reais. [$120 per month] From government programs. There’s me, my wife, two kids, and my brother who eats with us. What kind of life can you live with 600 reais? ”
But experts, advocates and other residents warn that the costs of Amazon deforestation will inevitably outweigh any benefits.
