The Awa are a distinctive-looking, diminutive forest people, smaller than any of the dozen other Amazon tribespeople I have met. Reduced size is adaptive in a rain forest. You can move around more easily and unobtrusively. Not only humans but other species are smaller in rain forests.
There's a basic kind of tension here. It's between those who say, I'd like to clear cut this forest and reduce it to saw timber because that's an economically productive thing for me to do.
True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics.
The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.
Bahia is the Amazon's geographical next-of-kin: the same climate, forest canopy, diverse floor. But there is no wild cacao; the tree was introduced, most likely by a Frenchman, Louis Frederick Warneaux, who, in 1746, sowed seeds near one of Bahia's large rivers.
Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.
If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot.
We did a 'Vanity Fair' spread for 'The Hunger Games,' and we were on set, and I saw a little head pop up from the tree. There were three teenage girls who snuck past security and made it into the forest.
Before you rip off three feet of toilet paper, consider that each year 500,000 acres of virgin boreal forest in northern Alberta and Ontario are being clear-cut to make the stuff. These forests are home to some 500 First Nation communities, as well as caribou and bears, moose and wolves, and, in the summertime, billions of songbirds.
My friends and I would get up early and take our horses through the national forest. My mom was very free. It was always 'Out of the house!' There was no watching television on weekends.
I can be a woodsman if need be. I grew up very close to some forest, and I spent a lot of my formative years up and down trees, fooling around in the woods. I'm no stranger to that sort of landscape.
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
