The annual destruction of the Amazon rainforest is tallied every August and announced to a world sadly accustomed to the idea that its greatest tropical forest is being wiped off the face of the Earth. Invariably, the area of destruction is so large that the loss is expressed in terms of states or countries—a Vermont here, an Ireland there—roughly equivalent measures meant to make the scale of the catastrophe more readily apprehensible, as if all of us could say, for example, that this many Connecticuts make a Texas or that there are so many Switzerlands to a France. Oddly, the effect of the news seemed to be a lulling of concern, as if the Amazon could go on disappearing indefinitely, without ever actually doing so.