State of Wonder

The unique compound found in the bark of the Martin Tree has two groundbreaking medicinal properties. It allows women to extend their reproductive cycles indefinitely, and it inoculates against malaria. The former quality makes it invaluable in the first-world, where people will pay a high premium for fertility treatments, while the latter quality makes it invaluable in the third-world, where malaria kills nearly a million people a year across the equatorial regions of the world. Unfortunately, only one of these qualities is highly profitable for corporate shareholders of Vogel, as Dr. Swenson reminds Marina in Chapter 9: “the people who need a malarial vaccine will never have the means to pay for it” (288). Thus, the Martin Tree’s properties symbolize the troubling global conflict between medical research that benefits human health, and research that mainly benefits corporate shareholders. 

The Amazon River, much like the Congo River in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, represents the link between modern civilization and the wilderness. It is, on one hand, what allows Marina to learn about the unique culture of the Lakashi, the wonder of the Martin ecosystem, and experience the deep interior of the otherwise impenetrable Amazon Rainforest; on the other hand, it allows similar access to the developer, the tourist, the agents of corporate exploitation like Vogel, and the other corrupting influences to permeate even the deepest reaches of this environment.