He's alone in the Brazilian Amazon, but for how long? Excerpts:
The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the point of near invisibility.
That description relies on a few unknowable assumptions, obviously, but they're relatively safe. The man's isolation has been so well-established—and is so mind-bendingly extreme—that portraying him silently enduring another moment of utter solitude is a practical guarantee of reportorial accuracy.
He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last survivor of an unconnected tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.
And:
History offers few examples of people who can rival his solitude in terms of duration and degree. The one that comes closest is the "Lone Woman of San Nicolas"—an Indian woman first spotted by an otter hunter in 1853, completely alone on an island off the coast of California. Catholic priests who sent a boat to fetch her determined that she had been alone for as long as 18 years, the last survivor of her tribe. But the details of her survival were never really fleshed out. She died just weeks after being "rescued."
Certainly other last tribesmen and -women have succumbed unobserved throughout history, the world unaware of their passing. But what makes the man in Brazil unique is not merely the extent of his solitude or the fact that the government is aware of his existence. It's the way they've responded to it.
Advanced societies invariably have subsumed whatever indigenous populations they've encountered, determining those tribes' fates for them. But Brazil is in the middle of an experiment. If peaceful contact is established with the lone Indian, they want it to be his choice. They've dubbed this the "Policy of No Contact." After years of often-tragic attempts to assimilate into modern life the people who still inhabit the few remaining wild places on the planet, the policy is a step in a totally different direction. The case of the lone Indian represents its most challenging test.
And:
He eats mostly wild game, which he either hunts with his bow-and-arrow or traps in spiked-bottom pitfalls. He grows a few crops around his huts, including corn and manioc, and often collects honey from hives that stingless bees construct in the hollows of tree trunks. Some of the markings he makes on trees have suggested to indigenous experts that he maintains a spiritual life, which they've speculated might help him survive the psychological toil of being, to a certain extent, the last man standing in a world of one.
And:
But how long can his isolation last? I get Facebook updates telling me what people half a world away are eating for breakfast. Corporations and governments are pushing deeper and farther than ever in search of bankable resources. How can it be that no one has flushed this man out already? In 2010, can anyone realistically live off the grid?
We all inhabit multiple universes simultaneously, even at this moment. Your connections and experiences are at once uniquely personal, yet can also be viewed through the larger lenses of family, friends, neighborhoods, towns, etc.., combining and overlapping with other universes just by the act of associating with others. Think about a single string in a piece of cloth; over, under, crossing paths to create something.. Larger.
This man, however, has almost no connections. He truly is "a world of one." His Universe is so far removed from ours that neither he, nor we have much in common aside from sharing the same planet. This "uncontacted" man must be on a much higher spiritual path, with a humble existence, flowing with nature and natural patterns, introverted behavior(and the probability of non-verbal stasis) for great spans of time, if not the majority of his life.
Upon further thought(and if you believe in re-incarnation-which I do), "higher spiritual path" should also include the possibility of reward. Communing with nature and having pure, un-interrupted thought for a large portion of your life sounds like a reward to me. The Buddhists believe in the elimination of Desire, in all its forms. A solitary life committed to nature and thought sounds like a majority of Desire has been eliminated and that a higher plateau has been achieved.
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