Amazon Aluminium Part 2: Snake in a Box

Our small plane lands on Juruti's red dirt airstrip and shudders quickly to a standstill. I am met off the plane by Volnei in the dazzling light and baking heat of the midday sun. We bypass the little shed that passes as the airport terminal. Volnei and his team are to show me the restoration plans and work at ALCOA’s brand new Juruti bauxite (aluminium) mine.

Juruti airport. Baggage collection on the left; departure lounge on the right

Juruti is a small town that has existed on the banks of the Amazon for generations. Although the operating mine itself is only a couple of years old, ALCOA has been in the town for the past eight years to develop the mine. As a new mine Juruti has benefited from the experiences of other older operations, such as Trombetas, from where I have just arrived. A mine of the scale, value and longevity of Juruti will inevitably transform the surrounding region. In recognition of this, and in order to gain the necessary operational licenses, ALCOA has committed to working with other key organisations such as regional and local government agencies and surrounding communities to develop a system to ensure that the people who are to be most impacted by the mine, i.e. local people, have the most to gain from its presence. One early example of this is that, unlike at Trombetas and Carajas mines, all Juruti mine workers will live in the town and will become fully integrated members of the community. The mine has also built a brand new hospital and there are plans for other major community enhancement projects too.

It’s a 54 km drive through the jungle along a brand new tarmac road, between Juruti and the mine proper, following the railway line that transports bauxite from the mine to the port on the banks of the Amazon. There is virtually no traffic on the road. This drive must be done twice a day by all who work at the mine, meaning early mornings and late evenings for everyone.

I am taken to meet Volnei’s team, including Ellie, Susiee and Diego and, as usual, we subject each other to Powerpoint paraphernalia. After a surprisingly good lunch, considering we are in the middle of the jungle, we tour the mine site. The bauxite extraction method is essentially the same as that described for the much older Trombetas mine a couple of blog’s ago. Still, the scale of the operations, even at this early stage, is mind-blowing. We emerge from the forest road into an expansive moonscape, distantly bordered by the green wall of the jungle. Weaving around mechanical dinosaur mining machinery, we bump along the dirt roads of an expansive earthen scar under a bleached blue sky, heaps of yellow and red rock towering above us. Could this be what Mars looks like?

We arrive on the other side of the experience back on the edge of the Amazon jungle – or at least it had been the edge a few days ago. Now the forest is almost flattened: enormous trunks lay scattered, randomly like dropped matchsticks, as chainsaw rasping reverberates. We are here to see the wildlife rescue team in action, whose job is to scour the forest before clearance to remove slow-moving animals and save important plant specimens. We are shown a large wooden box the size of tea chest, upon which sits a smaller wooden box bound tightly with rope. The occupant of the latter is colloquially called sururucu - a three-metre long, venemous snake! The rescue chaps start opening the box to offer us a closer look, but I am more than satisfied to simply watch a video of the beast’s capture on a mobile phone. Scary looking thing! If that’s what's in the small box, then the occupant of the larger one must be truly terrifying. Despite my protestations they open it and lift out a very sleepy, three-toed sloth. I've never seen one before and as they hold it it slowly looks around with a bizarrely high-foreheaded human face and a fixed smile! Around and about, under a temporary awning, is a motley collection of smaller animals – lizards, frogs, etc. and tree seedlings – carefully extracted from the forest before their parents become flattened.

Forest in the process of being cleared, prior to mining

To my more than slight concern the snake in a box is put on the back of our vehicle for return to the site office where Ellie compounds our fears by donning safety gloves and snake-proof shin guards and tries to open the box in the kitchen. The look of complete horror on everyone’s faces, including mine, dissuades her, yet, conflictingly we all want to watch and are secretly disappointed that she doesn’t follow through. Sururucu will be sent to a snake research organisation in Belem, which will then return it to a safer patch of forest.

Susiee in her pilot tree planting area

Back on the mine I am shown the very first areas that will be re-planted at Juruti in the next few weeks. Once the forest has been cleared, the demarcation between forest and barrenness is as straight as the edge of an English country lawn, and shows up very well on Google Earth (see the map-cake link). Juruti are trialling a slightly different kind of forest re-establishment compared to Trombetas. Instead of simply spreading the topsoil in layer over the workings and planting trees, they are using a loose-tipping method in which piles of soil are tipped off the backs of trucks. The regular rain of the area then washes much of this down to cover the surrounding subsoil and then trees are planted. This method requires fewer heavy vehicle movements (no spreading) therefore reducing compaction, saving fuel costs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Also, the different soil depths provide more ecological niches for colonisation by other species. I was taken to a small pilot area where trees were planted less than three years ago and are already double my height with a closing canopy. Very promising.

It's late afternoon and I'm taken to Juruti to the room of my small, new hotel, literally on the bank of the Amazon. As sunset approaches I decide to explore the fascinating little town – a town that is on the verge of transformation. I am absorbed by the water-front where passenger boats sit, awaiting cargoes of people and products, hammocks at the ready, for shipping to who-knows-where in this riverine wilderness. There are people washing and fishing in the river and then returning to their boat homes, getting for the night, which drops like a shutter at this latitude.

Juruti river front

I wander the streets passing tidy shops with various acknowledgements that Christmas is around the corner, although tinsel and Santa seem seriously out of place given the surroundings. Four girls wearing pink, plastic roller-skates straggle uphill towards me on this sweltering equatorial evening. I’m heading down in the opposite direction. Street-side shops boom an unsolicited auditory backdrop of their own mediocre musical brands, merging as I stroll between them like the set-list of a useless D.J., and easily out-performing the squabbling birds roosting in the mango trees. Rivulets of human effluent flowing down the street, as in most Amazon towns, occupying the olfactory sense – my flip-flops aren’t the ideal footwear here! I reach the river front, far enough from the music for it not to distract, as the sun is setting. Clouds obscure the spectacle somewhat, but it’s the setting that matters: I’m in Juruti, the hill is a river bank, and the river is the biggest in the world – the Amazon – and I’ve finally realized a childhood dream.

Later that evening, I am picked up by Volnei and family and, with the rest of his team, sit in a basic restaurant at the side of a dark street. The barbecued Amazon fish is the best that I have ever tasted and washes down well with the local beer. I go to bed satisfied and relaxed.

Ellie with tree seedling

The next morning we pay a quick visit to the germinal Juruti tree nursery. Health and safety policy dictates that I have to wear a straw hat as sun protection, although it fits my head in the same way an upturned egg cup would. Although some tree seedlings are growing, the site is still being developed; a recently discovered archaeological site will be preserved and incorporated as part of the nursery’s educational mission. I am taken to view the small herb and vegetable garden at the risk of being hammered in the head by hard, green mangos which gravity extracts from the large, over-hanging tree, hitting the floor within a couple of feet of us with a dull thud. I have little faith in the cranial protection offered by my egg cup straw hat.

Awaiting a mango hammering!

I am then driven to the short, red dirt airstrip to fly back to Santarem. I arrive with about 20 minutes to spare, but this is not Heathrow, everyone is chilled and no-one even asks me for ID. I opt to wait outside in the shade of a wing rather than in the tin shed on offer as the airport building. I know that if/ when I return here in a couple of years’ time this will have all changed. There are serious plans to build a tarmac runway to take jet planes and a proper airport building where you will sit in an air-conditioned room and stare through a window - just like everywhere else.

The plane takes off and again I have views over the pilot’s shoulder as we aim for Santarem. It will take me the best part of three days and numerous flights, but I am now leaving the forest of my dreams and chasing the sun south to Patagonia.

Goodbye Juruti, so long Amazon; Patagonia here I come!

Amazon Aluminium Part 1: Alligator on Ice

I’m flitting around the Amazon basin like a house fly in a hot kitchen to visit two major bauxite mines – one very new and one middle-aged – on the Amazon River to see for myself their forest restoration work. The former is ALCOA’s Juruti mine and the latter, the subject of this blog posting, is MRN’s Trombetas mine, on the north bank of the Amazon.

The Amazon River somewhere en route to Porto Trombetas

Milena, an MRN forest engineer, meets me off the plane at Porto Trombetas’ small, rustic airport, fabricated from jungle logs and, incongruously, sporting an artificial Christmas tree. In an overly air-conditioned bus, we are driven to the mine’s purpose-built town. Much of the architecture is of 1970’s style with mature trees and gardens. Before the mine and its necessary infrastructure were created over 30 years ago, there was nothing here but pristine forest and a very small village of people of mainly African descent. Today there is a large surface mine and a mining town of a few thousand people and has generated billions for the Brazilian economy.



I finally meet Domingos, with whom I have been corresponding for many months in the lead up to this visit. He is Alcoa’s environmental manager for Latin America and the Caribbean and earns a great deal of air miles every year. Both Domingos and Milena are hosting my visit to the world’s largest bauxite mine. After donning the obligatory, and stifling, health and safety clothing we subject each other to mutual Powerpoint presentations in the oldest building in Trombetas – the original mine office, now serving as a museum/ education centre.

Bauxite, or aluminium ore, is usually red- brown and around here is found just a few metres below the surface in expanses covering hundreds of square kilometres. (A Bosnian geologist once explained to me that to test for bauxite you touch the suspect mineral with your tongue. If it is bauxite, the mineral absorbs your tongue’s moisture and sticks to it in an instant! He didn’t tell me how to remove it without flaying your tongue though!).

This kind of bauxite is easy to mine. First the forest is cleared by bulldozer with commercially-valuable timber stockpiled until authorisation is received for its transportation. Then the topsoil (about 50cm thick) and overlying rock (8-12m thick) are scraped off and stored for later use in reclamation. Now the red bauxite ore is exposed and excavated and taken for subsequent treatment. Each activity occurs in separate strips, hence the name strip mining, with the overburden removed from the latest strip being deposited in the previous strip from which the ore was extracted. This is then covered the topsoil and is followed by tree-planting. From the air, the mining area forms a perfect red rectangle cut from the green forest blanket (see the Google Map link in the right hand column).

The mining area before the green wall: right bulldozer extracting red bauxite; left bulldozer replacing yellow overburden

The process of restoring the rainforest in the mining areas begins before the actual mining starts. Wildlife monitoring is set-up two-years before, and continues during, forest clearance. Immediately before clearance, a wildlife rescue team is sent in employing trained local contractors to rescue slow-moving animals, such as sloths and tortoises, important plant species such as orchids and the nests of stingless bees, which are vital for the pollination of many forest plants, including trees. These are translocated to previously restored forest areas.

Frozen delights!

The company runs an animal hospital (although Rolf Harris was nowhere to be seen) to deal with injured animals. In the midday heat I am taken to a chest freezer from which I expect to be handed a refreshing an ice cream. Silly me! Milena opens it to extract a frozen baby alligator from a veritable menagerie of icy reptiles and parrots. These animals have been accidentally killed in one way or another in the local area and are, apparently, waiting to be collected by a taxidermist. A less macarbre collection saved from the forest is of the orchids (of which Domingos is a big fan) and other epiphytic plants, currently being stored in the nursery. Many of the plants here are recognizable as typical British house plants, except here they are outside and invariably look much healthier.

Bromeliad

Orchid

The ultimate goal of the forest restoration team is to produce a new jungle, eventually, as close to the original as possible. They have made steady progress in this over the past 30 plus years, based on careful research and experimentation. Of the 180 tree species found in the diverse local forest, 100 are chosen for replanting, based on their speed of growth for soil protection, their ability to attract fauna (through fruit and flower production) importing seeds from outside area, and use to people – fruit and nut production, medicinal use, timber, etc. A favourite, for economic reasons, is the Brazil nut tree. Twelve local village families assist in collecting seeds and raising seedlings to augment the half a million produced every year by MRN’s own nursery. Around 70 local people are employed to plant the trees during the wet season.

I was shown every stage of the mining and restoration activity and all my questions were readily answered. Although this hot, wet and humid climate is not ideal for someone from the north of England it does provide excellent conditions for growing a new jungle. Within a couple of years the trees are above head height and the canopy is closing. This means light-loving weeds are shaded out and forest understorey plants can get a toe-hold. Also, new trees are coming in, spread in the guts of animals attracted to the newly planted forest areas.

Tree-planting area just five years old - they were less than knee height when planted. (Note black lower leg guards against snake bites!)

Stingless bees' nests in log sections from recently cleared areas

Since 1981 when reforestation began MRN’s people have planted over nine million trees, covering four and a half thousand previously mined hectares. To the casual observer the oldest planted areas are becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the forest, although Milena and her team are not satisfied; their numerous indicators of success tells her that the forest is around 70% there – not good enough in her books. We are taken around the very first forest that was restored in the early 1980s where the translocated stingless bees' nests are buzzing happily, epiphytes have been reintroduced from more recent cleared areas and a Brazil nut tree is already a 40 metre giant around which my gibbon-like my arms don’t reach.

Brazil nut; top of the tree reaching 40 metres, planted in the mid-1980s

Brazil nut; bottom of the tree - tree hugger!

Bizarrely, the need for mining and the desire for wild places are often intertwined by accidents of geology and geography. My natural reaction to the destruction of these wonderfully uncomfortable and stimulating jungle places is sadness, but not anger, because equally uplifting is the effort expended by genuinely concerned, talented people to regrow these forests and provide new opportunities for local people.