"El Sendero de la Anaconda" or the Path of the Anaconda, must be one of the most impressive documentaries I have seen recently. It is gentle, persuasive storytelling that weaves history, science and adventure to tell us about our fragile ecosystems, and the urgent need to preserve it for the future generations.
Strange as it may sound, the film does not feature any Anaconda snakes, let alone any other exotic creatures of the Amazon forests. It is instead the story of a student tracing the path taken by his teacher about 80 years ago. It is also the story of how rubber got tangled with the fate of this planet.
The teacher in this story is Prof. Richard Evans Schultes, and his student is a Canadian author named Wade Davis. Schultes is considered the father of modern ethnobotany, who is perhaps more famous among junkies of this world for his greatest popular book, "The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers" (1979).
A few decades before he popularised hallucinogenic concoctions such as ayahuasca, he was roped in by the US government for an important project during the second world war. In 1940, 95% of the world's rubber supply was grown in roughly 12 million acres of plantations of South East Asia. Within six weeks of the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Japanese had seized control of literally the entire world's supply. The supply of rubber had become so crucial to the war effort that an alternative source had to be found. This source lay in the original mother lode of the rubber tree - the Amazon forests.
However the problem was that South America is also home to the most potent fungal disease affecting this tree -- the South American Leaf Blight. It is because of this disease that the British created large rubber plantations in South East Asia (SEA), far from the Amazon basin, in areas where the fungal disease had not yet taken root. Prof. Schultes was given the task of finding a species of the rubber tree that was resistant to fungal disease, so that rubber production could be jacked up from 50,000T a year in the Americas, to over a million tonnes, to break the Asian monopoly.
Prof. Schultes' mission in 1943 was to travel up the Vaupés River, somehow find a way overland to the headwaters of the Rio Apaporis, and then to determine the quantum of rubber that could be extracted from the area...but as he moved overland, coming to the confluence of the Macayá and the Ajajú, he found himself the mountains of Chiribiquete, the fountain of the rivers of Colombia, where -
An area the size of the full moon probably had 300-400 million individual rubber trees, of three different species, producing high quality latex...among them was a tree resistant to the blight and high yielding...it was like looking for a needle in a haystack...and he found it! - in the Leticia, in the homeland of the Ticunas, he found what the rubber barons would call "the real bleeders"...and with this he laid the foundation of an America based rubber industry.
All this effort came to naught however with the discovery of synthetic rubber. The US State Department took over this project, and in a fit of bureaucratic insanity, destroyed the clonal gardens. Later, better sense prevailed with the realisation that synthetic rubber just could not replace natural rubber completely.
However two developments were not anticipated - one - the radial tyre that must have natural rubber in the sidewall and the belt for strength, but even more importantly, the development of the modern airline industry. On every plane you have ever flown on, those tires are cut 100% from a tree. Only natural rubber has the qualities that allow it to go from the sub-zero temperatures of high altitude to the shock and impact of hitting the tarmac at 250 kmph, within a period of 10 minutes. Because of this we use more natural rubber than ever before and it still is derived from SEAsia from trees that are essentially genetic clones of the original seeds Wickham took out in 1877.
So, in a sense, we are now back to square one. Nearly all the rubber plantations in SEA continue to be vulnerable to fungal blight - a single act of biological terrorism, or the accidental introduction of the spore to SEA will completely disrupt the industry.
Hence a global effort to create a 'Path of the Anacondas' - an ecological and cultural corridor extended all the way from the Andes to the Atlantic, covering eight countries in the upper Amazon basin - Brazil , Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and the three Guineas.
Now, what exactly is a "cultural corridor"? Wade Davis explains this beautifully:
Children in the Northern Americas are raised to think of mountains a piles or rock, while those in the South grow up with the belief that mountains are the abodes of spirits. These belief systems manifests itself in culture with profound ecological consequences.
Culture is not trivial; culture is not decorative; culture is not the songs we sing, the prayers we utter. Ultimately culture is about a body of moral and ethical values that we place around each individual human being, to keep at bay the barbaric heart that history so sadly teaches us lies within all of us. And so the maintenance of cultural integrity is the maintenance of civilisation itself. Cultural diversity is not an academic conceit - it is a fundamental indication of the way things are meant to be.
"El Sendero de la Anaconda" conveys its story very effectively indeed with an engaging narrative, superb photos and drone-videos, and a haunting music score. It leaves two questions unanswered - what happened to that fungus-resistant strain of the rubber tree discovered by Prof. Schultes ? Why has it not been used to replace all the old plantations in SEA and elsewhere?
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LINKS & REFERENCES
* Wendt, Paul (1947): The Control of Rubber in World War II - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1053336
* UNESCO World Heritage List - Chiribiquete National Park - https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1174/
