Nature:

When you go on a trip like this, you're able to have a relationship with nature that's just not possible somewhere else. And partially it's that relationship that is the most compelling thing about it. I could go to the American parks, like Yosemite and all those places, Glacier National Park, and they're very interesting parks, there's no doubt that they're beautiful and ecologically important. But you're basically dealing with a very highly managed area.

If you wanted to go hiking in Yosemite or something, you wouldn't have the opportunity to cut down trees and make your own shelter. To collect firewood. Do things that you can do in these unprotected areas--which won't be around much longer. Either they'll be totally logged to the ground, or they'll be turned into hands-off parks, with very small managed areas in which people are allowed to travel.

There's always something a little bit selfish involved in these trips, you know. In some way, it's the last chance to do this kind of stuff. I don't think that people will be able to do this by the turn of the century, even. Certainly by the time I'm in my 60's, that whole way of life will be completely gone. And it's not as though we're Theodore Roosevelt going to Africa and piling up rhinoceros and elephant. You know, we did no hunting while we were there. The only things we collected were insects and fish. We didn't, nor would we be interested in, breaking any kind of laws about endangered species. We didn't chop down any 300-year-old mahogany trees. Everything we did is quite negligible. There's no lasting impact.

But for me that's an important part of the trip, having a relationship with nature that is as endangered as those environments.

That relationship involves an interaction with nature in a way that doesn't treat nature like a museum. When you go to an American national park, you're basically going to a museum. That museum just happens to be a forest. I'm interested in a more hands-on approach in some way. Yet at the same time I don't want to indulge in any kind of primitivist fantasies, survivalist fantasies.

The whole trip--all of these trips--are fantasies about that, about going back 500 years or whatever. They're just fantasies that are being enacted as close as possibly can be done with contemporary equipment. If there was a time machine, we'd do them in a time machine. And when you travel in some of these places, it is like traveling in a time machine: you start in a city, which is kind of a post-industrial city; from there you go to an industrial town; from that you go to a smaller settlement, which might be based on trading of rare items like rubber or gold, animal skins, fish. And then, after that, you go to smaller and smaller settlements. The whole point of a trip like this is to try to get away from people altogether.

It's Disney's world, we just live in it:

In the future I just see a more homogenized, less interesting world, where the same crap is available globally, and the differences between cities become kind of exaggerated in a completely Disney, South Street Seaport kind of way. Differences will become tourist attractions, as they already are, of course, but there'll be more. Life in every city will become the same, and whatever is different architecturally or culturally will be accentuated but in a completely uninteresting, mediated way.

I think that's long-term, but it's happening already, very obviously. When we arrived in Guyana, there were really no overt signs of Western businesses. And when we left Guyana, they had begun construction of their first Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know, we were only there for a month.

Discomfort:

I don't think that we went to test ourselves in some way. Alexis maybe, because he had less experience. He handled it extremely well, I couldn't have handled it so well on my first trip. Never even been camping before. He's a tough fuckin' guy.

We did it, but we did it with our crutch of alcohol. For me, I cannot sleep in the jungle unless I drink something. It's absolutely impossible. Because it's incredibly uncomfortable. It's very hot, first of all, and then you have to sleep in a hammock. The only times I did not sleep on that trip were times when I didn't drink that day, and it was really difficult. Alexis was quitting drinking, and that was quite an environment to do it in, especially putting yourself with three people who were drinking quite a lot. We had a case of rum with us.

I actually was quite pissed off at him at the beginning, because of that. One of the best parts about being in the jungle is the late-night storytelling, and the fishing, and kind of fooling around, talking about philosophy, or girls, or whatever you talk about late at night in the jungle. He wasn't joining in, but I think that was partially because he was trying to avoid drinking. He would join in on some of them, like the post-dinner conversations, but after that, he was always the first in bed. I would always be the last in bed and the last up.

One of my biggest problems in working on trips like this is that I lack a certain kind of empathy for people who are not used to doing it. When I had a friend of mine visit me in Central America, and she couldn't handle it, it really put her on the brink of a nervous breakdown, to be in this place that was so hot, so full of bugs, and that she had to do things like walk at night. And I couldn't really understand what the problem was. That was when I learned my lesson about really making sure that if someone's gonna go with you, they know what they're getting into.

It doesn't help to complain about something that can't be changed. When you're involved with something that has immediate, nagging problems, like the rain, the heat, the bugs--it can really get your spirits down. But you know that those aren't the things you'll think about after the trip.

Beauty:

There are a couple things that are just utterly unforgettable. One is being in a small plane and seeing a group of giant red and green macaws below you, over the forest. The wingspan must be close to 4 feet. So here's this outrageous bird that you see in Kodak commercials, actually in the wild, flying, and then you're seeing it from a perspective that is usually impossible to see: from above, the way the other birds see it.

Another beautiful thing was taking the airplane over the river system that this guy Shark had worked on all of his life, and had known since he was a boy, with him seeing that from above, his first time ever in a plane. You couldn't help but share in the amazement of that to him.

And then there's just a million little things--that's what I like about the American jungles. They're not full of elephants and tigers and lions. They're full of amazing small insects in every imaginable shape and color. And plants that have devised outrageous strategies for capturing water and sunlight and fending off insects and disease. It's the little things you have to go to the American tropics for. It's like a coral reef in the Caribbean. You don't go there because you're going to see giant fish, you go there because the microfauna is just so amazing. We didn't go there to see jaguars. We went there to see the ecosystem as opposed to its superstars. Even though we did see a jaguar.

Interview by Marisa Bowe