Amazon.com, the Amazon, and the Amazons.
Assuaging ecoanxiety, botching intersectional feminism, and the taste of bad coffee.
Listening to the sounds of trees crashing to the ground is horrible. Rending cracks and wrenching crunches announce an imminent fall, and then, in slow motion, they lean, tip, and topple. The crash hits hard. You hear the branches first, then WHUMF!, a sound wave explodes across the valley. Then silence. A silence that feels like an age, but is broken only seconds later by the growl of the chainsaw as it tears into the next tree.
The ever-hungry saw is never sated; its appetite a bottomless pit into which tree after tree tumbles. Deforestation around here has, over the last year, seen much of this landscape stripped bare of its cool, temperate chestnut forests. Trunks thick with myriad mosses are now piled high in ordered pyramids, and roots that once burst with seasonal fungi are laid bare. What were seemingly endless woodlands now each has a horizon, a treeline glimpsed between the trunks.
The irony that Amazon.com is to blame is not beyond me. But Amazon.com needs paper. After the pandemic, more people are working from home, and a deficit of recycled paper left the behemoth without its boxes. With nothing in which to freight its neverending consumables, it turned its hungry eyes to FSC woodlands.1 Supposedly “stewarding” forests, the FSC has been questioned for its authenticity, and even challenged as a front,2 making the transparency of the ‘green’ packaging with which Amazon.com washes itself about as clear as mud.
It is similarly ironic that Amazon.com is named after the Amazon. Their pairing sounds like the preface of a bad joke: the all-consuming multi-national, and the last giant rainforest threatened by deforestation. ‘Lungs of the earth,’ they called it. What a burden to bear: just by virtue of outlasting other expansive tracts of woodland, 5.5 million km2 of rainforest is cooly labelled a ‘carbon sink.’3 Until recently, the Amazon was considered a ‘virgin forest,’ defined by the dictionary as “not yet used, exploited, or processed.” It’s not. That’s just Western Eurocentrism talking.
In fact, the Amazon shows signs of millennia of human activity pre-1492.4 When agriculture supposedly yawned into existence some 12,000 years ago, research suggests three-quarters of the planet was already anthropogenically altered.5 Colonists can’t face a rival though, and upon their arrival, the forest was labelled virginal because it hadn’t been cultivated à la Européen; i.e. utterly exploited. Unto this supposedly chaste place, the notion of an ‘untouched wilderness’ was applied; a playground in which heterosexual white men could perform their manly masculinity through wholesale extraction.6
The Amazon—and its eponymous Amazon.com—are named after the Amazons, an Ancient Grecian mythological tribe of female warriors. In this all-female society, interactions with men were solely reproductive. If the Amazon’s progeny were female, they were raised as daughters. Undesired male offspring weren’t welcome and returned with such transactional efficiency as to challenge Amazon.com.
One suggested—yet disputed—origin of the Amazon's ambiguous name is their practice of cutting off their right breasts to better use the bow—a- ‘without,’ mazos ‘breast’. The Amazons were self-emancipated, favouring matriarchy in lieu of men. Perhaps their self-mastectomies reflected this; half-ridding themselves of the social shackles which motherhood often traditionally placed upon them as women.
Under the patriarchy, in which femininity equals vulnerability, women need men to protect them, and vulnerable men are sissies. These socially constructed gender sensibilities are what psychologist Walt Odets terms “unnatural and humanly impoverishing.”7 They are imposed systems that help maintain social order. In Christian tradition, the virgin is perhaps the epitome of vulnerability; an immaculate, free from sin.
The virtue of a forest being virginal is—as the dictionary so eloquently puts it—its potential for exploitation. If human virgins and virgin forests share commonalities, then they are yet to be used, exploited, or processed. You’d hope that today if a God were to conceive a messiah in a virgin’s womb, it might not fly as ‘immaculate’ in a court of law, though, as the #metoo movement suggests, this particular form of exploitation continues to be overlooked.
Another CRASH!: another tree, gone. It is not for nothing they call it Mother Nature; the normative tropes of fertility and reproduction being its social burden to bear. Upon this reproduction, our extractivism relies. The local farmer indicates his intent on wholesale local deforestation: “They’ll grow back.” I suppose they will… but need they? Are all those things in their eco boxes wholly necessary? Who knows. I deleted my Amazon.com account ‘in protest,’ but I still use my dad’s on the sly. I’m not culpable if it’s not under my name, am I? CRASH! That’s another few boxes. I’ll forget on my return to London, and when my next order arrives, that recyclable packaging will assuage my eco-anxiety.
I take a sip of my coffee as I listen to the world fall around me. We ran out of the single-origin this morning and I had to have a Lavazza. Needs must. It’s easy to forget about the swathes of tropical rainforest deforested for your commodity coffee when you’re having to deal with such a compromise of flavour.8 Plus, there’s deforestation within earshot, so how am I supposed to be conscious of both? They say coffee is in crisis; that within years we’ll no longer be able to have it.9 Another bridge to cross, but let's wait until we come to it. For now, let’s not enjoy our Lavazza and continue fretting about Amazon.com.
Perhaps the analogy of Amazon.com cutting off the Earth’s right tit to better function commercially is contentious? I neither identify as female; nor was biologically born as one. My main thoughts on social fertility centre on the injustices faced by queer people through normative centrism on biological reproduction. Personally, I think comparing Amazon.com to anti-patriarchal feminism is ridiculous, yet deforesting in the name of green-washing seems just as silly.
FSC Collaborates with Amazon on Climate Pledge Friendly Program, FSC. (23/09/20) [https://fsc.org/en/newscentre/events/fsc-collaborates-with-amazon-on-climate-pledge-friendly-program]
Greenwashed Timber: How Sustainable Forest Certification Has Failed, Richard Conniff.(20/02/18) [https://e360.yale.edu/features/greenwashed-timber-how-sustainable-forest-certification-has-failed]
Amazin: Lungs of the Earth, BBC. (n/d) [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130226-amazon-lungs-of-the-planet]
Megaliths of the North Eastern Amazon, Jose Iriarte. (n/d) [https://www.joseiriartearchaeology.net/megaliths-of-the-north-eastern-amazon/]
Untouched nature was almost as rare 12,000 years ago as it is now, Layal Liverpool. (19/04/2021) [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2274704-untouched-nature-was-almost-as-rare-12000-years-ago-as-it-is-now/]
Sandilands, C. M., & Erickson, B (2010). Queer Ecologies: Sex, nature, politics, desire. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Page 6.
Odets, W (2020). Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men’s Lives. London: Penguin. Page 36.
Lavazza Pushes Back on EU Deforestation Law it Voluntarily Agreed to, Zac Cadwaladar. (28/07/23) [https://sprudge.com/lavazza-pushes-back-on-eu-deforestation-law-it-voluntarily-agreed-to-212541.html]
Most Coffee Species At Risk Of Extinction Due To Climate Change, Trevor Nace. (17/01/19) [https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/01/17/most-coffee-species-at-risk-of-extinction-due-to-climate-change/]