Olivia's Passionate Plea
By Bunty Avieson
Olivia Newton-John recently returned from a week living in tree houses along the Amazon River, eating freshly caught piranha and dodging monkeys, to bring the plight of the vanishing Brazilian rainforests to world attention. The Australian superstar, in Brazil to make a one-hour special for the American television program The Reporters, hopes to make more people aware of the environmental destruction caused by cutting down trees.
“I was always aware of the environment but didn’t really focus on it till I had Chloe. She is the future and I want her to have everything I did,” says Olivia, 41. “In the last couple of years there seems to have been an environmental awakening. People are realising we don’t have time. We are in trouble now. Most of the people I mix with are parents and we all have the same feelings.” Olivia and her husband, Matt Lattanzi, endured rugged conditions and long, tiring hours in 40C degree heat to film the special. They arrived ready to start work at a village on the Amazon feeling jet-lagged and sick from a cocktail of injections they had had to prevent them catching exotic diseases.
On their second day, they and their film crew found themselves stranded kilometres away from civilisation in dense jungle. “We were trying to find a particular cattle ranch where we knew they were burning, but it started getting dark so we headed back to the helicopter. The pilot asked us where we wanted to sleep. There was only 15 minutes of light left and it would have taken at least 45 minutes flying to get back to the village. We all voted to follow the road until the light ran out. We found a camp, kilometres from anywhere, and decided to drop in on them,” says Olivia. “It was a tin mining camp and there were lots of men with guns standing around. They didn’t know who we were. This bunch of Americans with this blonde woman arriving on their doorstep.” Fortunately, the soldiers turned out to be friendly and agreed to drive the crew to the next point on the map.
But after a bumpy 45-minute ride, they were all ordered out of the truck. “There were police ahead and the men weren’t allowed to carry people. We had no idea where we were but got out and started walking. Then we stumbled across the most amazing sight a bar with a pool table and toilet in the middle of nowhere.” They downed a few welcome beers then hitched a ride on a passing bus. Olivia laughs about it now, but admits she was a little worried that they might never see their village again.
Olivia describes the trip as one of the most worthwhile experiences of her life. She has many happy memories of spectacular wildlife bright pink dolphins, iridescent green lizards and orange butterflies the size of dinner plates. At night, they fished for piranhas then cooked them over outdoor fires. They even managed time for some big game hunting river crocodiles. “That was fun until one bit Matt on the finger. It wasn’t a big crocodile but it gave him a big fright. I suggested he dangle his whole hand in as bait for the piranhas but he wouldn’t,” she says with a mischievous giggle.
The couple spent some idyllic nights in a hotel-cum-treehouse. Olivia says their small room, which had just a shower, toilet and bed and took 250 steps to reach easily competed with some of the world’s best hotels. “Our room was literally built into this enormous tree overlooking the Amazon River. It was breathtaking.”
For Olivia, it was a constant inner struggle not to be overwhelmed by the widespread destruction of the beautiful surroundings. She studied aerial maps outlining areas of forest that had been destroyed and flew over great tracts of land that were ablaze to clear the way for farming. It left her upset and frustrated. “Once you cut down the trees, the soil is so fragile that after less than 10 years it won’t grow anything. “It needs the canopy of trees above to provide it with the dying matter for it to recycle. Without the protection and the sustenance of the trees, the soil dies.”
Olivia is passionate and articulate about the devastation. She also met some of the poor peasant families who are farming the land. It showed her the human side of the problem and she is adamant that they should not be ignored. Any solutions to the rainforest problem must include their welfare. “Sometimes you get environmental depression. It’s too easy to be paralysed by the vastness of it all. I try to look at the little, positive things like the end of the Berlin Wall. That is a step in the right direction for the whole world. Reading about that made me very happy and gave me much hope for the future of our planet.”
Olivia stresses that every person can make a difference. Her latest album, Warm And Tender, a compilation of children’s songs released later this month, includes a leaflet with practical suggestions on how people can practise conservation at home. “If we reduced our meat consumption, we wouldn’t need to cut down so many trees to make way for cattle ranches,” she says. “I wish I had been to Brazil before I did the album. There is so much more now that I could say. I saw the teak forests being cut down. If we stopped buying teak we wouldn’t need to cut down those beautiful old trees. There is nothing like those rainforests anywhere in the world. They are so special.”