An excerpt from Conquest of the Useless; Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog.

Camisea, 11 June, 1981: (Peru, at the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest)

"It was already dark when I was called to the medic's station in the big camp. Up on the plateau between the two rivers, woodsmen had been felling trees, barefoot as usual, and one of them had been bitten by a snake. Snakes had never been seen anywhere near chain saws, because the noise and the exhaust fumes drive the snakes deep into the jungle, but this man had suddenly been bitten twice in the foot. He had dropped his chain saw and just caught a glimpse of the snake before it disappeared into the underbrush; it was a chuchupe. Usually this snake's bite causes cardiac arrest and stops breathing in less than a minute, and cases in which a person has survived a bite longer than seven or eight minutes without treatment are almost unknown. Our camp with the doctor and the antivenom serum was twenty minutes away. The man, so I was told by someone who had been working next to him, had stood motionless for a few seconds, thinking hard. Then he had picked up the chain saw, which had stalled when it hit the ground, pulled the cord to start it, the way you pull an outboard motor, and had sawn off his foot above the ankle. I saw the man - his whole body was gray. He was alive, perfectly collected, and very calm. Before they took him to the doctor, the others had tied off his leg in three places with lianas: below his crotch, below his knee, and above the stump, and had twisted the lianas with sticks to make a tight tourniquet. They had stuck a kind of moss on the stump to stop the bleeding. I had a plane readied to fly him out to Lima the next day."

The blogger that posted this excerpt admired the courage of the woodcutter. I admire his decision-making prowess. Without his foot, his life would be harder. He wouldn't be able to walk, run or work as before. But he didn't spend time on anger, denial, etc. He just took the only action that might save his life.

I wish our society could deal with our problems that effectively, but we seem to be doing the opposite. We're stuck in anger and denial while we poison ourselves.

Some twenty-eight years later, I read that Hunt Oil - a Dallas-based company with close ties to the Bush administration, has been despoiling Camisea for natural gas:

Peru's Camisea Gas Project is arguably the most damaging project in the Amazon Basin at the time of writing. Located in the remote Lower Urubamba Basin in the south-eastern Peruvian Amazon, the $1.6 billion project includes two pipelines to the Peruvian coast, cutting through an Amazon biodiversity hotspot described by scientists as "the last place on earth" to drill for fossil fuels.

Nearly 75 percent of gas extraction operations for "Block 88", as the original Camisea concession is known, are located inside a state reserve for indigenous peoples living in isolation. In violation of both stated company policy and international laws such as ILO Convention 169 and the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, employees of Veritas, a contractor working for consortia member Pluspetrol have made contact with these communities, pressuring them to abandon their ancestral lands. Pluspetrol also facilitated helicopter transport of missionaries to remote areas to contact isolated indigenous groups.

Additionally, another 22 indigenous communities living in intermittent contact with outsiders, as well as dozens of farming communities have suffered a range of direct and "indirect" impacts, from the loss of local fish and game populations on which they depend for their subsistence to landslides, infectious diseases and STD outbreaks. A May 2004 report, published by the Peruvian health ministry's General Office of Epidemiology confirmed that that incidences of infectious diseases had increased in the reserve among one isolated group, the Nanti, to such an alarming extent that only one in four now reaches adolescence. These serious environmental and social impacts now affecting the entire local population were predicted by environmental and human rights campaigners.

In the first 18 months after it became operational in August 2004, the Camisea pipeline, which runs from the Amazon, over the Andes, to the Pacific Coast, has ruptured four times, with at least three major spills. This appalling record is highly unusual for such a pipeline and comes despite repeated assurances from the downstream consortium and the Inter-American Development Bank that no such problems would occur. According to a February 2006 independent report by non-profit engineering consultancy E-Tech International, the pipeline was constructed by unqualified and untrained welders using corroded piping and rushing to avoid onerous late completion fees that would have totalled $90 million.

The project also has upset many in Peru given the gas processing facility on the Peruvian coast was built within the buffer zone of the Paracas Marine Reserve, an internationally important wetland area recognised by the RAMSAR convention and Peru's only marine reserve. Despite repeated appeals by Peruvian civil society, the consortium refused to choose an alternative site.

Pluspetrol and Techint have appalling environmental track records. In 2000, a Pluspetrol oil spill devastated one of Peru's largest protected areas, the Pacaya-Samiria Reserve, and seriously affected the health of the Cocamas-Cocamillas people who suffered severe diarrhea, skin diseases and malnutrition after their food and water supplies were decimated by toxic pollution. In the northern Peruvian Amazon, Pluspetrol continues to pump oil wastes into local rivers causing stomach ailments, cancer and respiratory diseases among Achuar and Quichua communities.

In early 2002, a huge explosion --the second in less than a year--- along an Argentinean gas pipeline operated by Techint, the contractor for the Camisea pipeline, again sent flames leaping through the Yungas forest, an area of critical conservation status, home to jaguars and other rare species. In Ecuador, Techint constructed the OCP pipeline and was embroiled in controversy, facing lawsuits, protests, and fines for the destruction of protected areas and the habitat of rare endangered species.

But that could never happen in the US, could it?