© 2001 Cable News Network 
October 17, 2001

AmazonQuest is an interactive expedition developed by Classroom Connect. For five weeks, a team of scientists and explorers are examining one of the most distinctive and most threatened environments on Earth: the Amazon River basin.

No sound better symbolizes the Amazon's destruction than the angry whine of a chainsaw felling a tree.

Then again, one man's noise is another man's music.

Environmentalists endlessly warn us of the rain forest's rapid demise. They say that trees disappear at a rate of 64 acres per minute and the Amazon's ability to sop up greenhouse gases is saving us from catastrophic global warming. But try telling that to a man whose family can't survive unless trees come down.

This morning, we struck off into the village of Contamana to find out about the people behind the chainsaws and those who make their living from those fallen trees.

Contamana, a town of some 7,000 people, owes its existence to lumber. Strung along a mile-long stretch of the Ucayali River and backed by jungle, the town is a collection of shabby buildings separated by muddy streets. The riverbank serves as the town's sewer, bathing area, docking port, and garbage dump. Several hundred vultures greeted us when we stepped off the boat this morning.

Jose Silva, 39, saws logs into lumber to support his wife and three kids. Jose inherited his sawmill from his father, who inherited it from his father. The mill was cool, dark, and had the sour, mealy smell of fermenting wood shavings. I found Jose and his two workers using a Canadian-made saw to rip a catawa tree into planks.

Jose explained that loggers go into the jungle during the dry season and cut their logs. When the October rains come the river floods and the loggers float their logs to his mill. Since this was the end of the dry season and there's not much money to go around in Peru these days, Jose could only afford to pay his workers $5 a day.

"We hardly ever see the profitable high-quality woods like mahogany and cedar. You'd have to travel 200 miles in the jungle to find those trees still growing," he told me. "It's got to get better or I'll be out of business soon."

Next door we visited one of Jose's clients, Temistecles Pinedo, a furniture-maker for over thirty years. He converts Jose's lumber into tables, chairs and benches. He too has come under hard times due to lack of lumber. "People don't have money for furniture," he said. "The government isn't giving jobs and timber men have to go too far to get wood. No one can make a living."

"Are you afraid that there will be no wood for the next generation?" I asked.

"No, I'll be dead before the wood completely runs out," he replied. "If old age doesn't get me first the Pakistanis' bombs will." Lastly, I visited Bartolome Luis Sandoval, an 83-year-old lumberjack. A bent and wrinkled yet proud man, his profession has left him fiendishly scarred. When I greeted him, he offered his left hand. A fallen branch had left his right hand limp and gnarled, like a claw. Perhaps Mother Nature was exacting revenge: In 60 years of lumbering, he figures that he personally cut over 100,000 trees.

Bartolome invited us to his simple house where his wife of 61 years, Lucina was busy preparing lunch. He walked up to her and hugged her, a rare show of affection in this part of the world. Then he offered us chairs and asked us how he could serve us.

I asked him why he chose logging as a profession.

"I can't say that I've liked it but it has fed, clothed, and educated my five children and 15 grandchildren," he said. "I really didn't have any other option."

"You know, environmentalists are worried about the Amazon," I said. "In all those years of tree cutting, did you ever worry that you were leaving nothing for your children and their children?"

"Of course I did," he said. "Every year I had to travel farther and work harder to make a living. Today, lumberjacks cut down trees for lumber that we considered garbage trees ten years ago."

"Did it ever occur to you to do anything about it?"

"Of course it did," Bartoleme replied calmly. "Twenty-five years ago, I planted 800 cedar trees on some land I own. That's my children's inheritance."

At least that's a start.

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