Still Rolling: Why Cowell's 40-Year-Old Amazon Films Feel Like Tomorrow's News

This November, Brazil will host COP30, the first Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Amazonia. Rather than representing a breakthrough in Amazonian forest preservation, this historic meeting has sparked significant concerns among those committed to protecting this vital biome. They span from practical challenges—such as logistical difficulties for delegations and social movements seeking to reach and accommodate in Belém—to more troubling environmental contradictions, including the Brazilian government's recent authorization of oil exploration in the Amazon River delta.

If I could ask one thing of the authorities and specialists attending COP 30 this November's meeting—something to help them rethink their approach to Amazonia—it would be to watch Adrian Cowell's film series The Decade of Destruction (1980-1990).

I recently watched this series at the Amazônia: Memórias para o Futuro (Amazonia: Memories for the Future) film festival in Rio de Janeiro. You can find most titles unofficially on YouTube, and the festival toured Belém, Pará, this October (check the festival's catalog in Portuguese and English, and this essay by the festival curators, Stella Oswaldo Cruz and Alexandre Gouin).

There are many reasons this would be my wish. First, Cowell's filmography represents perhaps the most remarkable filmic record of the capitalist occupation of Amazonia ever made. In the ten years covered by this series, the Brazilian government, supported by major global players like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), carried out what Cowell calls the "greatest forest carbonization in human history," considering the short timeframe in which it occurred (see Banking on Disaster, and Ashes in the Forest, in the series). In that decade, about one-fourth of Rondônia's forests were turned to ashes.

If you're unfamiliar with Rondônia and have never considered this often-forgotten state in the North of Brazil, you've probably eaten some of its soybeans, frozen beef, fresh or chilled beef, corn, or coffee—it's now the second-largest Brazilian Amazonian agricultural exporter.

Rondônia's current position as a key supplier to global food markets was forged through the destruction of approximately 3.3 billion trees during the 1980s.¹ To put this in perspective—because numbers this big are hard to grasp—that's roughly 8.3 million soccer fields of destroyed forest. If we lined up these trees around the equator, they would circle the Earth about 25 times (still hard to figure it out, right?).

The burning of this carbon mass was so intense that on most days during the 1980s, people lived under dark, nightmarish smoke clouds that created a perpetual pale twilight, with the sun appearing as an orange orb on the horizon.

Today, Rondônia has lost about 35% of its original forests. The state ranks third among contributors to Amazonian deforestation over the past 50 years, accounting for 14% of the total, despite representing only 7.6% of Brazil's Legal Amazon area. (Check out this recent data/map report from InfoAmazonia on Rondônia state, its deforestation, and the fight to preserve what remains of its forests).

The second reason these films still resonate with us is how they depict the land conflict in Amazonia. A central theme running through Cowell's movies is the impact of "development" on forest peoples. Among those most brutally affected during the clearing of Rondônia's forests were the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, an Indigenous people who lost 80% of their population during this period after being forcefully contacted by the Brazilian Indigenous Affairs Agency (FUNAI) in the context of the opening of a highway that would bring people to explore Rondônia's lands.

Cowell, along with his main partner Vicente Rios, filmed one of the earliest encounters between the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and FUNAI workers in The Search for the Kidnappers. Watch these images, and you see that the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau's body movements and facial expressions reveal a completely different way of living from ours, with faster head movements and a completely different way of resting their arms and holding themselves upright. And sadly, you can't help but think that this way of life is disappearing right before your eyes.

The 1980s, as captured by Cowell and his team, were also a time of violence against other people who make a living out of the forests, the rubber trappers. Among their leaders was Chico Mendes, who would become—with Cowell films’ help—one of the most outstanding forest leaders in history. Mendes foresaw his own death and spoke about it on camera. You can see this scene in the disturbing Chico Mendes: I Want to Live, which I watched alongside another film from the series, Killing for Land—a combination that I don't want to repeat.

In the years that followed, these killings would increase to the point where Brazil became one of the most violent places in the world for rural conflicts (see recent reports on this issue from Agência Brasil and the Pulitzer Center).

Although the violence depicted in these films is raw and cruel, Cowell's movies don't sensationalize it. The local conflict is always portrayed as part of a broader, structural picture. Thus, we learn that in the 1980s, poor people moved to Rondônia at a rate of 200,000 per year at the peak of Brazilian state-stimulated migration to the region. INCRA (the Brazilian National Land Reform and Colonization Agency) offered a 50-hectare land plot for new settlers, and they were supposed to burn all trees to ashes to establish their property (that was a standard policy to promote Amazonia occupation during the greater part of the 20th century).

After arriving, the newcomers would often enter into conflict with the previous (and unrecognized) owners of those lands—Indigenous people and rubber tappers' groups. Films like In the Ashes of the Forest (Cowell, 1984) brought to a broad public, perhaps for the first time, the understanding that internationally-funded development pitted the most marginalized people in Brazilian society—landless poor farmers, Indigenous peoples, and rubber tappers—against each other.

But that's not the whole story. According to data shown in Cowell's films, 60% of the new settlers abandoned their plots in Rondônia within three years due to the poor quality of the sandy, nutrient-depleted soil they'd received—something they realized only after the hard work of deforestation. They would then sell their land to larger farmers, who would accumulate vast territories, helping keep Brazil among the most unequal places in the world for land distribution—recent reports show that 1% of the population owns 45% of the country's land, with large agribusiness controlling 76% of arable land.

Moreover, as these unfortunate farmers discovered they'd worked for nothing—unable to sustain their families with the crops they planted—they moved to the edges of the forest clearing zone, hoping to arrive early and secure better land this time. They would then restart the deforestation machinery miles ahead, causing more conflicts and opening space for further land speculation.

We learn thus that the entire process was designed to enrich certain individuals, using the workforce and life resources of poor people, ignoring forest biodiversity, and sadistically fostering violence between the underprivileged.

Some individuals who benefited from this process went on to become prominent politicians. Ronaldo Caiado, for example, a well-known politician in today's Brasília, was filmed by Cowell rallying to unite landowners against forest peoples. What struck me about this scene was the similarity between Caiado's 1980s speeches and those of more contemporary figures like Blairo Maggi, Teresa Cristina, Ricardo Salles, and Jair Bolsonaro. That's one of the reasons I kept feeling this weird contemporaneity while watching Cowwel's movies. These 40-plus-year-old images feel disturbingly timeless: they could have been filmed yesterday, or, even worse, they can be filmed tomorrow.

Despite everything, these films also manage to inspire hope. It's beautiful to see people like Chico Mendes, Marina Silva, Raoni Metuktire, and Aílton Krenak—who would become some of the most influential forest defenders of the last 40 years—already out there defending Amazonia and championing alternative ways of life.

Marina Silva, for example, who would later serve as Brazil's Environment Minister, significantly reduced deforestation in Amazonia during the early 2000s and more recently, in her second term as minister. She became one of the world's most influential environmental leaders and, along with Raoni, Krenak, and Mendes, helped shape the concept of povos da floresta—or forest peoples—as we know it today.

Many of them are seen in Cowell's movies as connected to the Brazilian Workers’ Party, PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), currently, and then, led by the actual Brazilian president, Lula. The PT, featured in Cowell's films uniting the most important grassroots movement in the country against powerful elites, would later turn its back on the forest leaders it once supported, to become a “more palatable” political option.

The harsh reality is that, over time, the Brazilian left would get used to trading Amazonia degradation, deforestation, damming, and mining as a token of political exchange to secure support from agribusiness leaders in the Congress.² That is how we get back to the beginning of this text and to the authorization of oil prospecting in the Amazonia delta, on the eve of COP 30.

But I don't want to end this Canopy Critic edition with a sad note. Perhaps the most valuable lesson from The Decade of Destruction is realizing the power of narratives in shaping public perception of Amazonia—a power that we still have today, and need to use more. In the 1980s, Cowell successfully helped José Lutzenberger, a pioneer among Brazilian ecologists, pressure the U.S. Congress to stop funding the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank for these destructive projects. These films also sensitized people like the then-Prince Charles and the singer Sting, and were among the many factors that helped shape Rio-92, the first COP and world meeting to discuss our planet's climate issues from a multilateral perspective.

Perhaps that's why, when I watched Cowell's 40-year-old series, I wished it could be part of the COP-30 program. We still have a lot to learn from it, if we want to shoot a different movie on Amazonia development in the future.

The old story says Amazonia is an empty space waiting to be developed. The new story reveals it as the most biodiverse and culturally complex region on Earth, home to people who've been environmental stewards for millennia.

Which story will shape the next century?

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