Amazonian Research Trip

Six Days and 1,410 Miles

Around the halfway point of my doctoral studies, I spent a year living between Boston and Belém in the Amazon region of Brazil to experience firsthand what I had until then been researching from satellite images and other people’s accounts. Belém became my base, from which I made frequent short excursions to surrounding areas to get a feel for life in the region. After that initial experience, I planned deeper immersions that recently brought me back for two longer field trips. This is a brief narrative of one of them.

The first Amazonian journey—for my Ph.D. thesis on the history of the urbanization of Amazonia—was designed in light of the study “The Five Amazons” by the Amazônia 2030 initiative, in intersection with the territorial boundaries of the so-called “Arc of Deforestation.” The study divides the Brazilian Legal Amazon into five macro-zones according to current vegetation cover: the forested Amazon, the forested Amazon under pressure, the deforested Amazon (originally forested), the non-forested Amazon (primarily cerrado, or tropical savanna and natural fields) and the urban Amazon.

The study explains: “The non-forested zone consists of municipalities whose original vegetation was largely cerrado. The other zones correspond to municipalities where more than half of the original coverage was forest. The deforested zone refers to municipalities that had already lost more than 70 percent of their forest, excluding Protected Areas. The forested zone, by contrast, includes municipalities with only 5 percent of forest loss. Municipalities in the forest-under-pressure zone retain extensive cover (>75 percent) but face accelerated recent deforestation. The urban zone follows the IBGE’s criteria for defining urban centers and resident population.”

The Arc of Deforestation, in turn, encompasses 256 municipalities where environmental destruction has historically concentrated and where the Ministry of the Environment has sought to intervene. Stretching from western Maranhão and southern Pará westward across Mato Grosso, Rondônia and Acre, it has been shaped since the 1960s by the construction of the Belém-Brasília and Cuiabá-Porto Velho highways. Today, the arc accounts for about three-quarters of all deforestation in the Amazon.

Overlaying the deforested Amazon and the forested Amazon under pressure with the arc’s boundaries reveals northeastern Pará as a frontier zone—a place where the advance of agribusiness and urbanization over the forest is most visible. It is here that one can perceive how deforestation is not only a process of ecological transformation but also one of redefinition of life, territory and possibilities.

The itinerary of the trip began with the region’s main cities, highways and large infrastructure, before moving into smaller roadside settlements and dirt tracks that lead to plantations, mining zones and frontier forests. I wanted not only to document what is being lost, but also to experience how life is reorganized in the wake of loss.

Everywhere, the signs of abandonment were stark. Roads, left to time and weather, eroded into dust and holes. Towns presented themselves with sewage running along the streets, sparse trees, destitute public spaces and buildings falling apart in plain sight. Vegetation survived as scattered enclaves, reminders of what once thrived. The soil, leached and unprotected, painted the landscape in shades of red and yellow. The sense was not simply of neglect, but of a slow unraveling—of structures and landscapes that had once held together but were now dissolving under the weight of accelerated change.

On the highways, the rhythm was monotonous and inescapable: soy, corn, cattle, grain silos, trucks. Life condensed into logistics and production. Human presence seemed confined to vehicles; outside them, the fields stretched endlessly, homogeneous and silent. When forest did appear, it was as if in defiance—patches of richness interrupting the uniformity, offering sudden glimpses of a different possibility. In those moments, the contrast was almost overwhelming, as if the forest itself were performing resistance, insisting on its vitality.

The region of Carajás unsettled expectations. Known for hosting one of the world’s largest iron ore mines, its image is one of monumental violence against the earth. And indeed, the open pits are vast, the air choked with dust, the ground barren like another planet. Yet paradoxically, the sheer scale and value of extraction have created protective perimeters: beyond the mining sites, the forest is preserved, stretching uninterrupted. From above, the mines appear as tiny punctures in an immense green expanse. In Carajás’s surroundings, one senses the forest as it should be felt everywhere: abundant, continuous, immense. That presence, after so many miles of monoculture, feels like a reprieve.

Tucuruí offered another paradox. As the fourth-largest hydroelectric dam in the world, it is an infrastructure of staggering scale, a monument to both ambition and devastation. The route from Marabá to Tucuruí skirts its reservoir, where vegetation thrives with unusual vigor. The landscape oscillates: on one side, deforestation; on the other, dense forest. Yet the flourishing of life around the reservoir cannot erase the memory of what was drowned. The forest here carries the weight of what was erased—the displacement of communities, the destruction of habitats. Its beauty is also a reminder of irreversible harm. For a traveler, however, the sudden abundance of water after days of dryness and dust remains moving, even if tinged with contradiction.

Taken together, the journey through Pará revealed a landscape of contradictions: monotony punctuated by revelation, predictability disrupted by surprise. It showed how soy and cattle are inseparable from dust and neglect, how the state asserts itself where infrastructure demands but withdraws from everyday civic life, leaving residents to improvise survival. It suggested both abandonment and endurance. There were moments when the journey itself felt precarious, when the breaking down of a vehicle might mean days of uncertainty.

And yet, at every turn, the forest reminded us of its role—not merely as backdrop, but as protagonist. Whenever it appeared, it altered everything: the air, the soil, the sense of life. It appeared not as remnant, but as force—as a hero at the end of a story that otherwise unfolds in scenes of decline. Its presence carried hope, for around it the landscape visibly transformed, and life flourished once again, human life included.