Brazil’s Fordlandia:

Aveiro, Brazil – The flames roared higher than a hundred feet, sending smoke billowing across the jungle.

Boars scattered from the underbrush. Toucans shot from the trees. And thousands of acres of Amazon rainforest soon crumbled into ash.

It was 1928, and a vast stretch of land in north-central Brazil was being cleared for a monumental undertaking: Fordlandia, a $20m city dreamed up by the richest man in the world at the time, American industrialist Henry Ford.

From the charred earth rose a hospital, a cinema, schools and bungalows. A golf and tennis courts were built for the arriving Americans to feel at home. The sawmill and factory floors, meanwhile, were the purview of the local workers.

But over the past eight decades, Fordlandia has lain largely abandoned, slowly falling into disrepair.

Still, smoke continues to hang in the air, as Brazil contends with an ongoing legacy of deforestation and fortune-seeking in its world-renowned rainforest.

About 2,000 people remain residents of Ford’s utopian experiment, a decaying reminder of the ambitions that shape the forest.

Plagued by poverty, these residents find themselves caught between competing pressures: to protect the environment that surrounds them — or exploit it to make ends meet.

“Yes, I deforest. How else am I going to farm?” said Sadir Moata, a 31-year-old resident of the area.

A muscular farmer with dark, bushy eyebrows, Moata took it upon himself to rehabilitate one of Fordlandia’s larger houses, originally intended for American expats. He mucked out the bat droppings and tamed the overgrowth in the garden so that his father could use it as a home.

But his income from farming is meagre, and clearing the land through fire allows him to grow more crops.

“I get 600 reals [$120 per month] from a government programme. There’s me, my wife, two children and a brother who eats with us. What kind of life am I going to have with 600 reals?”

But experts, advocates and other residents warn that the cost of Amazon deforestation will inevitably be higher than any gains.

Turning the Amazon into ‘tabula rasa’

The largest rainforest in the world, the Amazon spans more than five million square kilometres, comprising a vast but dense ecosystem packed with no less than 40,000 distinct plant species.

One plant, in particular, sparked a frenzy: hevea brasiliensis, commonly known as the rubber tree. Slice into its grey bark, and a white, waterproof sap will ooze from the gap, providing the raw material for latex.

Indigenous people had long valued this resource, but in the 19th century, the discovery of a new chemical process to harden latex into rubber sent colonial explorers into overdrive.

What followed was a period of violence and destruction in the Amazon. Rubber “barons” scoured the forest, searching for the naturally growing trees. Along the way, they often enslaved Indigenous labourers or forced them into debt.

The first rubber boom had gone bust by the time Ford began hatching his scheme for Fordlandia. One of the foremost carmakers in the world, Ford imagined a vast rubber plantation, allowing him to control his own supply for tyres and other vehicle parts.

“We are not going to South America to make money but to help develop that wonderful and fertile land,” Ford said in the Magazine of Business in 1928.

He also envisioned his land — more than 14,000 square kilometres (5,000 square miles) along the Tapajós River — as a modern pastoral utopia, where he could impose his strict ideals for a healthy workforce, including prohibitions on gambling and alcohol.

“The idea was to domesticate the forest and all the beings that live in it, including humans,” said Ana Luiza Silva, an architect and PhD candidate at the Federal University of Bahia. She co-authored the article “Fordlandia — Ruin of the Future”.

Ford himself never travelled to Fordlandia, but under his direction, workers “razed the land to clear the terrain, making way for a tabula rasa on which would be built a civilisation”, Silva explained.

The downfall of Fordlandia

Much has remained the same in Fordlandia in the decades since. To get to the plantation site, travellers undertake a voyage nearly identical to the one Ford employees took nearly a century ago.

From the boomtown ports of Manaus in the west and Belem in the east, they travel along the Amazon River, turning south at the Tapajós tributary.

As Fordlandia nears, a 45-metre water tower rises above the emerald canopy. Its hillsides are still terraced for crops. But rain has since washed away the water tower’s painted logo, and wild plants have reclaimed some of the slopes.

Fordlandia was a short-lived experiment: By 1945, the Ford Motor Company sold the $20m investment to the Brazilian government for a mere $244,200.

The reasons for Fordlandia’s downfall are myriad. Ford, for example, was in the final years of his life. Once stubborn and charismatic, he had been forced to step down as company president after a stroke left him struggling to recognise even his closest associates.

Then there were the problems at Fordlandia itself. In 1930, for instance, grievances over the strict dietary restrictions Ford imposed culminated in the “Breaking Pans” revolt. Rioters smashed cars and machinery, causing thousands of dollars worth of damage.

But the biggest challenge was the environment itself. Rubber trees grow best naturally dispersed. In the plantation’s tight rows, however, they were vulnerable to fungus and pests like lace bugs spreading from tree to tree.

Luiz Magno Ribeiro, a local historian, believes the fall of Fordlandia holds lessons for modern-day exploits in the Amazon.

“Ford disrespected the laws of nature. But nature is sovereign — nobody beats nature,” Ribeiro said during a recent tour of the town.

Water ‘worse than during Ford’s era’

A short middle-aged man with closely cropped black hair, Ribeiro grew up in Fordlandia. He considers it home. And he worries what its future holds as mining and large-scale agriculture continue to encroach on the Amazon.

“People believe that investments are more important than life. We need more to understand how much we need this planet,” he said.

One of the threats the region faces is “wildcat” gold mining — an illegal process that often uses toxic mercury to separate precious metal from silt along the Amazon’s waterways.

Gold mining is the principal economic activity in the Tapajós River basin, according to The Amazon Institute for Man and the Environment (Imazon), a nonprofit think tank.

The institute estimates that approximately 12 tonnes of mercury are released every year into the region’s air, soil and rivers, endangering humans and animals alike.

“How many species of fish will the coming generations no longer see? I see this change happening every day,” Ribeiro said.

Francisco Jose Pereira de Oliveira, a 68-year-old resident of Fordlandia, shares Ribeiro’s concerns. The polluted water is his principal preoccupation nowadays.

“The river used to be clear, and we could see fish. But since the beginning of mining activity, we no longer have access. It’s polluted,” he added. “It’s worse than during Ford’s era.”

From carbon sink to carbon source

But mining is not the only threat facing the region. Much of the Amazon’s deforestation today is caused by logging and agribusiness, with cattle ranches and soybean farms dotting the landscape.

“Ford’s project seems small compared to what agribusiness is doing, which is even more violent,” Silva, the architect and PhD candidate, said.

Those activities received a boost under former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. During his administration, from 2019 to 2022, deforestation soared to a 15-year-high. More than six million hectares went up in smoke.

Bolsonaro loosened environmental protections during his term. Critics also accused him of turning a blind eye to illegal activity in the Amazon, as environmental enforcement plummeted.

But Bolsonaro was quick to dismiss deforestation concerns during his tenure, brushing the criticism off as “environmental psychosis”. He also blasted government data about the scale of the destruction, framing the numbers as “lies”.

Bolsonaro narrowly lost his 2022 reelection bid, and the following year saw a power shift.

Left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office on the promise that he would halt the expansion of agriculture in the Amazon. He has also set a goal of zero deforestation by 2030.

But while deforestation rates have dropped, the rainforest is still dangerously close to a point of no return.

For now, the dense forest absorbs more heat-trapping carbon than it emits, making it a valuable bulwark against climate change.

As trees are cut, however, that carbon is released — leading experts to warn that the Amazon could shift from a “carbon sink” to a carbon source if deforestation continues.

Poverty a driver of deforestation

One of the drivers behind Amazon deforestation, though, is poverty.

A study published by the Getulio Vargas Foundation analysed government statistics and found that 62.9 million people in the country lived in poverty, and some of the highest rates were found in the northern Amazon.

In the densely forested coastal state of Maranhao, for instance, poverty afflicts 57.9 percent of the population as of 2021. In the state of Amazonas, the rate was 51.4 percent.

Para, the state in which Fordlandia lies, had a slightly lower tally: 46.8 percent. Fordlandia, with its shattered windows and rusting architecture, mirrors the neglect many residents say they face.

Raimunda Maria Silva Santos, a 59-year-old retired teacher, grew up in the 1960s — long after the Ford Motor Company had abandoned the plantation city. Nevertheless, she remembers residents enjoying the benefits of its carefully plotted infrastructure.

“There was a good healthcare system. We could go to the hospital, and we were given medicine,” Santos said, in between sweeping and chatting with neighbours in the early morning sun.

But Fordlandia’s sleek, modern hospital has since been destroyed. A 2012 fire destroyed much of its furniture, and in the aftermath, plunderers made away with materials containing lead and copper to sell.

Today’s residents now make do with a small health clinic, where nurses offer basic services.

“That golden age is behind us,” Santos said of Fordlandia’s heyday.

Students at the local high school likewise told Al Jazeera that the lack of economic prospects forces residents to look elsewhere.

“All my fellow classmates want to leave because there’s not a single opportunity here,” said 17-year-old Fordlandia resident Kayna Bodsiad.

Eighteen-year-old Isaque Santos also bemoaned the fact that running water in the once-bustling city is now unreliable. The pipework has not been significantly updated since Ford’s time, and replacement parts are hard to come by.

“We’ve already gone up to 30 days without water. No one cares about anything here any more,” Santos said.

Hope in history

But some residents hope that a solution can be found in the history of Fordlandia itself.

Since the 1990s, residents have pushed Brazil’s National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN) to grant Fordlandia historical recognition, a status which would protect its buildings from slowly crumbling or being torn down.

They hope an influx of tourism can boost the local economy, which could, in turn, provide alternatives to activities like illegal farming and ranching in the region.

So far, however, their hopes have been in vain. Last September, Para state prosecutor Isadora Chaves Carvalho even admonished IPHAN’s lack of action with a public statement.

“The inertia of the bodies responsible for preserving the Fordlandia District as a cultural heritage site has put its conservation at risk,” the prosecutor wrote.

Like the long-silent workers’ bell or the absent hum of Fordlandia’s machinery, Ribeiro, the local historian, said the wait has left residents feeling “silenced”.

He hopes that, in preserving Fordlandia, residents might one day preserve the nature it sits within — and the lessons its crumbling walls hold, too.