The first time I traveled to the Brazilian Amazon some years ago, I visited my friend Simone in Macapá. The capital of Amapá, one of the nine states that make up Brazil’s Legal Amazon region, Macapá is a sleepy town on the northern bank of the Amazon River, close to…
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“The most important thing is audacity,” the Amazonian environmental activist Maria said to me. “If you have the courage to fight, then fight,” her husband, Zé Claudio, emphasized…
Surging deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon grabbed international headlines in 2019. In early August, The Economist decried environmental destruction in the world’s most extensive rainforest as “vandalism.” Three weeks later, French President Emmanuel Macron…
Forests. For many, they invoke beautiful images of trees and splendid scenes of nature, often inspiring deep reverence and respect for something so powerful and ancient. But as soon as one begins to peel back the branches, it is clear that this ecosystem and humans’ engagement…
The fires that raged across the Amazon basin last fall hit Bolivia particularly hard. From September to November, the fires swept through more than 3,000 square miles—twice the area of Rhode Island—, much of it in the pristine dry forests of the Chiquitanía area…
Tropical rainforests are not virgin but rather “anthropogenic,” as humans are said to have created these forests. At least that is what anthropologists have been arguing for the past thirty years. In this past decade, this view has expanded with concepts like “cultural”…
