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Savages Joe Kane Knopf, $25
The death of a rain forest is one of those tragedies we know about as news, but we don't mourn such news the way we mourn the death of a friend. Even the most haunting visual images of slashed-and-burned wastelands or oilblackened rivers in the jungle tend to shock the eyes but numb the heart. It is one of the paradoxes of modern global media, such as television, that the more they make us aware of our world, the less intimate that awareness becomes.
Joe Kane is a writer with the sense to know that tragedy without intimacy is mere information and with the skill to show us the loss of a rain forest as the loss of many friends. In Savages he takes us with him into the heart of the Ecuadorian rain forest, in a quest to understand the people who live there. His portrait of the Huaorani (pronounced wow-rah-NEE) as they face destruction by the operations of an American oil company is as gripping as a Conrad novel, full of strong characters and wild landscapes. Some literary critics believe that the traditional novel is being replaced by what they have called the nonfiction novel; if so, Joe Kane's Savages is a classic example of the genre.
Kane was working for an environmental organization, the Rainforest Action Network, when the Huaorani became the center of a political dispute: in a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund charged that oil drilling on Huaorani land would be ethnocide, "that for the sake of enough oil to meet U.S. energy needs for thirteen days, the Huaorani way of life would be destroyed." Other environmental groups were trying to work out deals on behalf of the Huaorani and fighting among themselves for control of funds the oil companies might set aside to help the tribe. Still other interests, including missionaries, politicians and land-hungry colonists, were pressing for access to the Huaorani heartland. But, with the exception of a few individuals, none of these groups had ever in fact met the Huaorani faceto-face. "For all the ruckus being raised," Kane writes, "no one knew what the Huaorani wanted. No one really knew who the Huaorani...