Last Chance to See. Mark Carwardine

exploding with superlatives that wanted to get out.

      I caught Stephen’s eye. He’d stopped learning Portuguese for a moment and, like me, was staring in disbelief out of the window.

      ‘Oh my God!’ I said.

      ‘I know,’ he nodded, knowingly.

      We both felt better.

      Some of the trees were considerably taller than others. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but jungles have a small number of very tall trees whose role in life is to tower majestically above the main canopy. They form what is known in the trade as the ‘emergent layer’ and they might as well be in the Sea of Tranquillity, they are so difficult to reach and so death-defyingly hard to study. As high as 70 metres (235 feet) above the ground, these emergents give a whole new meaning to the term ‘out on a limb’.

      The scale of the Amazon beggars belief. Describing it as big is like describing Bill Gates as fairly well off.

      Immediately below them is the thick leafy realm of the forest canopy. This is the heart of the rainforest – home to the vast majority of the Amazon’s large trees and, indeed, most of its animal and plant species. It forms a more or less continuous cover of foliage some 40 metres (130 feet) above the ground, and blocks out pretty much all the sunlight. To be precise, it blocks out 98 per cent of the sunlight (living in the gloom underneath must be like living under a particularly expansive, dark-green golfing umbrella).

      The science of navigating and studying the jungle canopy is called ‘dendronautics’. If you fancy a career change, with more day-to-day risks than coal mining, deep-sea diving or flying with the Red Arrows, this is the job for you. It’s perfect for dinner-party conversation because, joy of joys, you would be allowed to call yourself a dendronaut.

      As a dendronaut, you will be able to fire ropes into the jungle trees with a crossbow, erect elaborate cranes with rotating jibs, build precarious walkways, climb to dizzying heights using nothing but ropes and pulleys, and even fly above the forest canopy in a wonderful assortment of motorised hot-air balloons, tethered helium balloons and airships straight out of a science-fiction movie. You’ll also get to live in a real-life vertigo-inducing tree house.

      The customary storm of the day about to drop its customary load.

      Best of all, since dendronautics is still in its infancy and the jungle canopy is one of the last largely unexplored frontiers on earth, there’s a very good chance that you will come across something entirely new to science. The forest above a forest is believed to harbour literally millions of species, from lianas and bromeliads to frogs and monkeys, which are just waiting to be discovered.

      Stephen was still staring out of the window. Every so often he’d shout ‘macaw’ or ‘eagle’ or ‘oooph!’ (there was a lot of turbulence with black rain clouds gathering for the next torrential downpour) to anyone who would listen.

      I think we saw more wildlife from the plane, flying over the jungle canopy, than in four days of exploring from the Cassiquiari.

      The striking thing about wildlife-watching in the Amazon is that you don’t get to do it very often. Far from being overwhelmed by the forest’s world-renowned biodiversity – it was once described as ‘the most alive place on earth’ – much of the time we were decidedly underwhelmed by the apparent absence of anything remotely resembling an animal.

      The reason is simple: ingenuity. Competition for food is so intense that rainforest animals live in constant fear for their lives. They have to be clever and resourceful to avoid being eaten (or, at least, to avoid being reduced to gibbering nervous wrecks and dying from stress-induced heart attacks). Experts at concealment and camouflage, they simply can’t afford to be seen.

      So it was our own fault, really, that we didn’t see very much. Unlike the jungle’s super-predators, with their finely tuned senses, our pretty useless urban eyes, ears and noses were virtually incapable of spotting anything – unless it actually landed on us and bit really hard.

      What we did occasionally see were the animals that deliberately make themselves conspicuous, or simply don’t care whether they are seen or not. These showy jungle inhabitants tend to be either fast-moving, like birds, or inedible and dangerous, like poison-arrow frogs.

      Halfway into the journey, it dawned on me that we were probably flying over vast areas of forest that no one had ever walked through, let alone explored or studied.

      When Europeans first arrived in the early 16th century, the Amazon had an indigenous population of about six million people living in some 2,000 nations and tribes. Nobody can agree on exactly how many have survived the onslaught of western civilisation, but fewer than 700,000 is the most widely accepted figure.

       There are many reasons for the disappearance of so many ‘noble savages’ (as early Europeans called them), but disease is perhaps the most significant. The explorers and early settlers unknowingly brought smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, influenza and a host of other deadly illnesses with them. The Indians had no immunity and were utterly helpless. Tens of thousands perished. Ironically, many never even came into direct contact with the outside world – entire tribes were annihilated by germs that travelled faster than their European carriers.

      Then, as if things weren’t bad enough, Jesuit missionaries dedicated to spreading Catholicism terrified the hapless Indians by warning that this wave of sickness and death was God’s punishment for their lack of faith.

      The number of indigenous people living in the Amazon seems to have increased slightly in recent years, perhaps because they have acquired a certain level of resistance to at least some of those diseases. Against the odds, there are still more than 200 indigenous groups in the region, talking 170 different languages and dialects, and at least 50 of them rarely or never have contact with the rest of the world.

      But the depressing reality nowadays is that there’s more chance of stumbling upon mechanical diggers and bulldozers in the Amazon than of meeting indigenous people.

      Since 1970, almost one-fifth of the entire Amazon rainforest has been destroyed. That’s equivalent to an area the size of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Germany and Denmark combined.

      You couldn’t dream up a bigger list of more damaging activities if you tried: cattle ranching, land clearance for soya-bean plantations, small-scale subsistence agriculture, logging, and a mixed bag of commercial agriculture, mining, urbanisation and dam construction are responsible for most of the damage. Construction of the 5,000-kilometre (3,125-mile) Trans-Amazonian Highway (which bisects Amazonia and opens up vast areas of land to settlement and development) certainly hasn’t helped. Even misguided government policies, and outrageously inappropriate World Bank projects, have contributed to the environmental havoc.

      So why aren’t we all shocked and appalled and waving our arms about in despair?

       I think it’s because we tire of hearing about rainforest destruction. I remember writing articles predicting doom and gloom in the Amazon twenty years ago and I quoted similarly horrendous figures – ‘an area the size of Belgium lost every year’ springs to mind. Two decades of the same old revelations make them less shocking than they used to be. Our senses are dulled as the relentless stories of devastation become little more than background noise.

      What’s really frightening is that nothing much seems to have changed since deforestation first hit the headlines. Actually, that’s not true – it’s getting worse.

      Have all those years of campaigning, fund-raising, pleading, cajoling and cautioning by so many individuals and conservation groups made the slightest difference?

      I suppose the positive