The World Without Us
Although the rest of the human race was already hurtling into a new millennium, the Z?para had barely entered the Stone Age. Like the spider monkeys from whom they believe themselves descended, the Z?para essentially still inhabit trees, lashing palm trunks together with bejuco vines to support roofs woven of palm fronds. Until cassava arrived, palm hearts were their main vegetable. For protein they netted fish and hunted tapirs, peccaries, wood-quail, and curassows with bamboo darts and blowguns.
They still do, but there is little game left. When Ana Mar?a?s grandparents were young, she says, the forest easily fed them, even though the Z?para were then one of the largest tribes of the Amazon, with some 200,000 members living in villages along all the neighboring rivers. Then something happened far away, and nothing in their world?or anybody?s? was ever the same.
What happened was that Henry Ford figured out how to mass-produce automobiles.
[...]
They still hunted, but men now walked for days without finding tapirs or even quail. They had resorted to shooting spider monkeys, whose flesh was formerly taboo. Again, Ana Mar?a pushed away the bowl proffered by her granddaughters, which contained chocolate-colored meat with a tiny, thumbless paw jutting over its side. She raised her knotted chin toward the rejected boiled monkey.
?When we?re down to eating our ancestors,? she asked, ?what is left??
- Via The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.
Comments
Post a comment