Dust billows from dirt roads as truck after truck laden with logs returns from the outlying forests.
Buff-colored grit coats door stoops, patio tables, roadside weeds, everything. Acrid smoke from piles of logging waste and trash sometimes burn untended night and day, mixing with the dust and making breathing difficult, if not dangerous. Paragomines is along the deforestation frontier in the Amazonian rain forest. Ranchers followed, burning vast tracts of forest to make it suitable for grazing, followed in turn by loggers who searched for and cut the best trees in the remaining forests, which in turn were often cut again and burned by landless peasants desperate for a place to grow food. Paragomines and the forests and villages around it are a lesson in rapid, destructive land-use change.