Key Takeaways from Episode 3 of Rewilding Amazonia

• Forest fragmentation—the breaking apart of continuous forest by roads, cleared land, and agricultural expansion—is one of the most serious and least discussed threats facing the Amazon. 95% of all deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon occurs within five kilometers of a road, and by 2050, 25 million kilometers of new roads are projected to be built globally, with 90% of them in tropical developing countries.
• The Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous community has been closing the BR-174 highway every night since the 1990s to protect their forest, running the longest citizen science roadkill monitoring project in road ecology history. The data confirms what they’ve always known: inside their territory, wildlife diversity is higher and roadkill rates are lower.
• The Black Jaguar Foundation is restoring 2,600 kilometers of fragmented landscape along the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor—one of the only remaining connections between the Amazon and the Cerrado. Five years after restoration began, wildlife trap cameras are capturing giant anteaters, tapirs, deer, and the first jaguars returning to areas that were previously empty.
• In Ecuador, Nature and Culture International helped unite six Amazonian provinces and Indigenous nationalities under the Amazonian Platform—the first agreement of its kind—to protect 60,000 square kilometers of intact forest sitting entirely outside the national protected area system. Four provincial reserves have already been formally established, totaling 4.2 million hectares.
• The through-line across every story in this episode is the same: the corridor, the platform, and the refuge only function if they connect — and the people who have always lived in the Amazon are the ones best placed to lead that work.

A Forest Under Fire

Picture yourself as a young spider monkey in the Amazon canopy, still learning how to use your impossibly long arms and incredible prehensile tail to swing through the treetops that have always been your home. Then one morning, the tree you slept in the night before starts to fall, and on the breeze you catch something that burns your lungs and makes your eyes water. Your troop is moving frantically around you, and you rush to find your mother because something is deeply, unmistakably wrong. The forest that has always stretched endlessly in every direction is disappearing, and all you can do is run.

That spider monkey’s story is playing out across the Amazon right now, in forests that are being cut apart faster than most of us realize. And when a forest gets fragmented—divided by roads, cleared land, and the slow creep of farms and settlements pushing in from every direction—it becomes broken, where wildlife can’t move between the patches that remain, and where the land slowly loses its ability to recover. But what I found when I started investigating this story is that there are people actively rebuilding what’s been severed, and at a scale that I could barely believe.

This is Episode 3 of Rewilding Amazonia by Rewildology. I’m Brooke Mitchell. Let’s go where the forest ends.

Roads: Juliana Martins and Projeto Reconecta

What is Road Ecology?

When was the last time you thought about roads? They’re so unequivocally part of our lives that we barely notice them. Roads connect cities, move goods, give us the freedom to travel, and provide remote communities with access to healthcare and opportunity. Nobody builds a road to destroy a forest. And yet, in the Amazon, that’s exactly what’s happening. So I had to ask — what is the real cost of opening up the Amazon, and is there a way to build without paying the price?

To answer that question, I called Juliana Martins, a road ecologist and PhD candidate at Imperial College London who has spent the past several years studying how roads affect wildlife in the Amazon.

Juliana: “Road ecology is quite a new field. There are publications back in the sixties, but it really grew after the eighties — it was when the technological advancements came. We had faster cars, and we needed infrastructure for these faster cars. The road network grew immensely, and it’s still growing a lot. It is estimated that in 2050, 25 million kilometers of new roads will be built — and this is 60% more than what we had in 2010. And 90% of them will be in developing countries, in the global south, and most of these countries are tropical countries, which holds most of the tropical biodiversity.

The most obvious impact is roadkill. But there are many other impacts — indirect impacts. The road itself causes an impact much more than just the surface of the road itself. There is habitat loss, edge effects, barrier effects. For example, 95% of all deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon occurs within five kilometers of roads. Roads are the initial step for many environmental crimes — for hunting, for illegal mining. There are many benefits to roads, of course — economic opportunity and social mobility — but if they’re badly planned, they can create a huge environmental impact.”

The Waimiri-Atroari and the BR-174

The most important aspect of Juliana’s work isn’t the science — it’s who she does it with. Juliana is on the Projeto Reconecta team, which works alongside the Waimiri-Atroari, an Indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon, and is helping them build the scientific case for something they’ve known for decades: that the highway cutting through their territory has been damaging the forest, and every being who depends on it, for over fifty years.

Juliana: “In the seventies and eighties, Brazil had the military government — the dictatorship. And during this dictatorship, one of the main policies was called ‘integrate to not surrender.’ It was a second colonization of the Amazon based on the premise that neighboring countries were trying to steal the Amazon. So they started building highways — without acknowledging that already millions of people already lived in the Amazon. One of the highways they built was crossing the Waimiri-Atroari indigenous territory — the BR-174, that connects Manaus to Boa Vista. Manaus and Boa Vista are two very important capitals in the Amazon. And this is the only access through land to Manaus to the northern part of the country, and also the only access to other countries such as Venezuela and Guyana. It’s a very important highway, economically.

The Waimiri-Atroari people — they are warriors. Protecting their territory is really part of their culture. So they really fought back against the government. And at the time, the military used machine guns, bombs, even Agent Orange on the people in the villages. And the Waimiri-Atroari people only had bows and arrows to fight against the government. Ninety percent of the population was killed. It was one of the worst genocides of any indigenous communities during this time — they were killed until they were only 300 people. And it was recent. It was in 1977.

And since the end of the military dictatorship, the Waimiri-Atroari community started to do a lot of mitigation measures to mitigate the impact of the highway in their territory. They started counting roadkill — since 1997, every day. And this is the longest running citizen science project in road ecology in the world. They counted almost 20,000 roadkill incidents during all this time.”

Locking the House

For decades, the Waimiri-Atroari have been closing the BR-174 every night at 6pm by putting chains across the highway, laying tire spikes on the road, and standing guard until 6am. It works, and they know it. But knowing something and proving it to a government are two very different things. That’s where Juliana came in. I asked her what the community told her when she arrived.

Juliana: “I asked them, why do you close the road? And then they answered me, don’t you lock your house when you go to sleep? The forest is our house, so we also lock our house when we go to sleep.”

Juliana and her supervisor, Dr. Fernanda Abra, along with the Projeto Reconecta team, have been monitoring wildlife along the 125-kilometer stretch of BR-174 that runs through Waimiri-Atroari territory — comparing what’s happening inside the indigenous land, where the highway closes at night, to what’s happening outside it. What they’re finding is striking.

Juliana: “From very preliminary data, we can see that inside indigenous land, the diversity is much higher and we also find less roadkill. White-lipped peccary and the collared peccary, they avoid the road — the relative abundance is much higher at one kilometer from the road rather than closer to the road. And pumas — further away from the road, they are mainly diurnal. Closer to the road, they are mainly nocturnal. Does that mean the road doesn’t affect the other species? That’s actually the opposite. If they don’t see the highway as a risk, they can go to the highway and be road killed. So we found many species road killed, such as giant anteater. Road ecology is very complex — we really need to study case by case and species by species.”

Natural Bridges and Canopy Crossings

It’s obvious from the data that the highway is affecting wildlife. So how are they reducing its impact? What they’ve come up with is both surprisingly simple and potentially transformative for the rest of the Amazon.

Juliana: “They also planted trees that they knew — this was in partnership with Professor Marcelo Gordo from the Federal University of Amazonas. So they joined forces to choose specific species of trees that would form the canopy over the highway, to create natural bridges. So you have a way to cut the trees so they can form this arch on top of the highway, and that’s what they did. So you can actually see some species of primates crossing the road using these natural bridges.

There’s also the canopy bridges, and in the Projeto Reconecta project, we do the canopy bridges made by rope, which is a much cheaper solution. We started with Dr. Fernanda Abra in the Waimiri-Atroari indigenous territory. But this is a case study that could be expanded throughout the whole Amazon because it’s much cheaper than the ones made by iron. And we can already see the species using a lot these canopy bridges. So this is especially for arboreal mammals.”

Building Roads Differently

What the Waimiri-Atroari and Projeto Reconecta have built together is incredibly moving. But it also raised a question I kept coming back to — if we know roads cause this much damage, why aren’t we building them differently? I asked Juliana exactly that.

Juliana: “If we are bringing roads and it’s economically justifiable and it’s going to be beneficial, and we know that roads have this secondary effect of new roads and deforestation — so let’s build a road but create protected areas around the road. So we don’t have these crimes accessing these new roads, and doing illegal hunting or illegal deforestation. And the other thing, and most important, I think we should really empower the people from the Amazon — the indigenous people — that they are the ones who’ve been protecting the Amazon for thousands of years. And I really believe that we will only be able to save the Amazon if they are the protagonists and we give them the means to do what they’ve been already doing for all these years. They know the land, they know how to use their resources without putting so much pressure on their land. So the idea is not to have more income at any cost, but to have more quality of life. And I think they have the right to live their lifestyles the way they want to live.”

They Will Not Open the Road

Juliana told me that being a conservationist can be deeply frustrating — waking up to news of fires, deforestation, environmental disasters, and feeling like the work is never enough. But she said it’s the Waimiri-Atroari who give her energy to keep going. Because when she asked them what would happen if they ever lost the right to close the highway, they gave her an answer she’ll never forget.

Juliana: “Once I asked them, what if people decide that you don’t have the right to close the highway anymore, and then you have to open the highway. And then they said, well, that’s not gonna happen. And I’m like, how come not? And then they said, yeah, we are not gonna let that happen. If they try to open the highway, we are gonna be there. The only way that they will do it is if they kill us all. Last time, they couldn’t kill us all. And now we came back much stronger. But then if they want to open this highway again, they will have to kill everyone. If there’s one Waimiri-Atroari standing, that road won’t be open.”

The Corridor: Ben Valks and the Black Jaguar Foundation

Why the Araguaia?

By the end of my conversation with Juliana, I was already feeling better about roads and the BR-174. Here was an example of a community using its rights to protect its people and wildlife, and the data proved it was working. Next, I wanted to find someone restoring large swaths of the Amazon, turning degraded land into a thriving landscape. A few searches later, I found one of the largest rewilding projects on earth—the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor in Brazil, by the Black Jaguar Foundation.

The Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor runs 2,600 kilometers through the heart of Brazil—roughly the distance from Boston to Miami. It sits at a remarkable ecological crossroads where two of South America’s most extraordinary ecosystems meet: the Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna, and the Amazon rainforest. Decades of forest fires, illegal mining, agricultural expansion, and cattle ranching have fragmented the connection between them—leaving isolated patches of forest with no way to reach each other. Ben Valks, a Dutch entrepreneur turned conservationist, saw that fragmentation and decided to do something about it.

The first thing I wanted to understand was why here. With so much of the Amazon in need of restoration, what made the Araguaia corridor the one?

Ben: “This area has been carefully selected because it’s one of the only areas which connects the Araguaia River with the Tocantins River, and it also connects the Cerrado savanna with the Amazon rainforest. This is one reason this corridor was selected. Another reason is that it fortunately has one of the most pristine river islands in the world — it’s called the Bananal Island. And the Bananal Island used to be completely intact and is the biggest river island in the world. So this is in the center of the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor — it’s a great example, like the pearl of intact nature. And the last key reason is that this river has only one big hydro dam. As you might know in Brazil — well, all over South America — many rivers are completely destroyed every three, four, five hundred kilometers by the construction of a huge hydro dam. It destroys — you have to destroy so much forest for it, the whole ecosystem is gone in the surrounding areas. And in this stretch of 2,600 kilometers — almost 2,000 miles — there’s only one hydro dam. That means if we bring back nature, nature can come back, because there is possible connectivity between existing nature patches.”

Six Years of Preparation

I was blown away by the sheer scale of what Ben and the Black Jaguar team are attempting — and how long it took just to get started. This isn’t a project you launch overnight.

Ben: “This project is so big and I am not fortunately Elon Musk. I do not have the funds of 9.4 billion dollars and it is so complex as well. So I dedicated six years of my life to only the preparation phase of the Black Jaguar Foundation — six years, only preparation. That means we carried out a full cost benefit study for the whole biodiversity corridor. Because the length of the corridor is 2,600 kilometers — it’s equivalent to the length from Boston to Miami. It’s more than six to seven years of preparation and now we are in our sixth year of implementation. We are the work bees. We are, with all due respect, not one of these organizations sitting in Washington on the 25th floor. No — we are the doers. We are one hundred percent boots on the ground.”

Seventeen Steps to Restoration

Being boots on the ground means something very specific to Ben. When I dug into how the Black Jaguar Foundation restores land, I found that planting trees is only one small part of the process.

Ben: “We believe only in quality restoration — to really bring back biodiversity. We have brought amazing forest engineers from all over Brazil, and step by step we are learning that it is so much more than planting a seed or planting a tree. Now in our sixth year, we have developed a 17-step approach to restoration. And planting a tree or a seed is just one of the 17.”

Here’s something I didn’t know before researching this episode — Brazil actually has some of the strongest land protection laws in the world. Landowners in the Amazon are legally required to preserve up to 80% of their land as native forest. In the center of Brazil, that number is 35%. But many landowners have fallen behind on that legal obligation — and that’s where the Black Jaguar Foundation comes in. There are over 13,000 farmers along the Araguaia corridor alone, and getting them on board isn’t easy.

Winning Over Farmers

Ben: “When we approached the first farmer, he was very hesitant when we showed him the map and said, hey, your farm is in this amazing plan of biodiversity corridor, and we are here to help you restore part of your land into native forest. So who are you? And at that time our team was only three. I’m originally born in Holland — maybe my heart is in Brazil. I speak okay, basic Portuguese, but of course anyone can understand it — my accent is not from here, so hey, gringo. Many of them have been approached by organizations who promise a lot, and then they see the complexity and they run away. They think we are like only an environmentalist, a leftist organization. So in a long story short — we need always to do what we promise. And by doing what we promised, builds trust. So the first five farmers we approached, five became a partner. And we did exactly what we had promised. And then they say — wow, you have helped us meet our legislation. You have helped preserve our water sources. Even nature’s coming back — because without the forest, the farmer cannot continue to farm. Keep in mind the water levels — if we don’t take action, the water levels of the entire Araguaia region are going down every year. So it’s not just a joke. It’s not only about biodiversity. The forest is a key factor for the farmer to keep on farming. So the first five. Then one farmer speaks to the other, and one community speaks to the other. And then we were able to have 10 and 15 and 20.”

Where They Are Now

When I asked Ben where they were in the grand scale of the project, he told me this:

Ben: “We are just in the learning phase. Fortunately we came out three years ago from survival mode to stability mode. Very simply — we will reach the first 2 million native trees planted at the end of next year. Today we have one hub of restoration — a hub consists of a large nursery, offices, warehouses, trucks, water trucks, a whole community of seed collectors, a training center. And one hub covers around 300 kilometers of coverage. In the coming year or years, we will invest and build our second hub of restoration 400 kilometers north. And even we have plans to build our third hub on the other side of the Araguaia River. Our goal is to reach 10 million native trees by 2029. I know it’s ambitious, but that’s where we are. 10 million native trees — it’s still nothing compared to the total. But how to say — before we can race or run, we first must make sure that we can walk.”

Nature Coming Back

The next part of the project made my heart swell — all of the hard work, the trust building, the six years of preparation, felt worth it.

Ben: “We have installed the first wildlife trap cameras in areas which we started to restore five years ago. Five years ago this area was — as flat and empty as a soccer field. Nothing. Nada. Today — I could not believe the result. You find the giant anteater with babies on his back walking past. Deer. Tapirs. All the animals are coming back. And we even have the first jaguars passing through. Nature is coming back so quickly — but we have to help nature and the communities for just three years. We as humans are good in destroying — but we also see that we cannot live without nature. And nature is coming back. We just have to help.”

The Platform: Bruno Paladines and Nature & Culture International

Ecuador’s Hidden Amazon

Ben’s work answers one half of the connectivity question — how do you restore what’s been lost? But there’s another half. How do you protect what still remains? That question took me to Ecuador.

The Amazon makes up almost half of Ecuador’s national territory — and for most of history, the majority of this region sat outside any formal protection. That line of thinking led me to a conservation organization called Nature and Culture International — NCI — and one of their coordinators, Bruno Paladines, who has spent over two decades working to protect Ecuador’s Amazon.

Bruno: “Ecuador has less than 2% of the entire Amazon — that is the share of Ecuador. But within Ecuador, the Amazon is more than 50% of the country. So then it is crucial for us, because it’s half of the country, a bit more. And what happened there is that — approximately 120,000 square kilometers, that is the Amazonian. And from that total, approximately 30, 40,000 square kilometers were protected, let’s say, by the national system of protected areas. But the question was — what happened outside? In 2016, we saw the map and identified approximately 60,000 square kilometers that were in a very good conservation state. Connected. But outside the national system of protected areas. So our idea was — we should work there, with local communities and with the municipalities and provinces. There is a possibility for the creation of municipal and provincial areas of approximately 60,000 square kilometers.”

The Threats Closing In

Around 60,000 square kilometers of intact, connected forest. But the threats closing in on it are accelerating.

Bruno: “As in most of the countries — probably all the Amazonian countries — we have huge problems and threats now. Mining, illegal mining, probably is the worst, or the newest. Because in Ecuador we did not have this so strong and aggressive rise of mining, of illegal mining. Now provinces like the southern province of Zamora Chinchipe have huge threats with illegal mining. Cattle was also always a problem — the rise of the production frontier gave rise to huge amounts of deforestation. Roads — the construction of roads, for example in the northern part of the country because of oil — deforestation because of the road system is huge. Ecuador until five, eight years ago — it was a very peaceful place to work. We, as NCI, we have never had problems. Fortunately. But we now are taking into account all this new context that is in place. It’s not an easy thing to think and to plan and to do.”

The Amazonian Platform

So what do you do when the threats are moving faster than the national government? NCI’s answer was to go creatively around it. The team went directly to Ecuador’s six Amazonian provinces and the indigenous nationalities who own these forests, and asked them to come together under one mission: protect the Amazon. This idea became known as the Amazonian Platform.

Bruno: “In 2015, we received the invitation of the Pasta province — to start thinking about this new way of development, new approaches to take conservation into account, to take more into account the crucial role of the indigenous peoples. We found the possibility to start thinking about an agreement — an agreement between the six provinces of the Amazon. And the idea for the creation of a political decision, in order to start working under a complementary vision to protect this huge amount of forest — came to life in 2017. The six provinces signed an agreement. That was the start of this Amazonian platform strategy. The interesting thing was that that agreement was also signed with the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Amazonian part of Ecuador. So it was the first time that an agreement to start thinking collaboratively — between not only one province, but the six provinces and the indigenous peoples — was a reality. And then NCI became a technical partner of this strategy. To make this political decision a reality at the field.”

The Amazon Future Fund

The backbone of the whole platform is something called the Amazon Future Fund — a financial mechanism for conservation that for the first time puts indigenous nationalities and provincial governments together as equal partners in deciding how conservation money gets spent. I asked Bruno how decisions actually get made — because on paper, getting six provincial governments and multiple indigenous nationalities to agree on anything sounds nearly impossible.

Bruno: “The design of the projects will be made by them — that are part of the fund. NCI is a technical partner that will help, will support their visions. So we have this possibility of sitting together — first identifying the necessities, designing the projects — and raising the money to attend those necessities. All decisions are taken under the free and prior consultancy processes — consulta libre — that is crucial for them to decide and take the decisions they want. It takes time, it takes money, but it is the way they have decided they want. If the decisions are taken by them, based on their priorities, and the projects are designed together, and you have the trust fund that will help in the administration of those resources — then the model is improving. That has not happened before. It is the beginning. It is not easy. But we believe it is the way we need to take.”

Results on the Ground

It’s already producing results. Four provincial reserves have been formally established, totaling 4.2 million hectares — larger than the entire national protected area system on Ecuador’s Amazon side. The goal is 5 million hectares under the platform by the end of next year. And Bruno told me the next frontier is taking this unified voice into international forums like COP30 — not separately, but all three partners at the same table.

Bruno: “Our vision now is to go together — not as an NGO, not as an indigenous leader alone. Because that was also the problem. You have an indigenous leader going to COP — to Brazil, or to the US, or to the UK — to speak alone about what for them is conservation. Our strategy is to have all three partners — state, indigenous peoples, and the organizations — sitting together and defending this vision. To have politicians and indigenous leaders talking together under one communication — one speech — together. That’s part of what we are building now.”

The Jaguar Needs Land to Come Home To: Mario Haberfeld, Onçafari

All this connectivity work brought me back to my conversation with Mario Haberfeld from Episode 2. We talked at length about protecting and rewilding jaguars — but if there isn’t anywhere safe to release them, the project is doomed to fail. So Mario and the Onçafari team decided to do something about it.

Mario: “The way we started buying and preserving land — it started because of the rewilding process. The first time we went to do this in the Amazon, with two females. It’s in the southern Amazon state called Pará, which is right at the arch of deforestation. So deforestation comes from north to south — people clear the land, put cattle, then soybean comes, takes over, and then the cattle goes forward and keeps going like that. Every time I flew to that place I could see the forest disappearing. It was really shocking how fast things were happening. So when we released these two cats, I said — look, we need to do something here. Because otherwise these two cats won’t have a chance of surviving in the future, because their home is gonna be gone. So we decided to use that river as a barrier — to stop deforestation going north. We started buying land. We joined with other landowners, other lodges, and kind of created a buffer zone that couldn’t be deforested any further. With time, we managed to convince the governor of that state to create a wildlife refuge. And on the other side of the river, you have still amazingly 6 million hectares of preserved land. We wanted to stop deforestation there so it couldn’t reach the other side.”

The jaguar has always been the symbol of the Amazon’s health. And what Mario just described is the through-line of everything you’ve heard today — restoring what’s been lost, protecting what remains, and making sure the people who’ve always been here are the ones leading the way. Because none of it works in isolation. The corridor, the platform, the refuge — they only function if they connect.

What Comes Next

How do you measure a healing forest? How do you track destruction happening across millions of hectares in real time? As it turns out, some very clever people have figured out how to see what the human eye simply can’t.

That’s next on Rewilding Amazonia. I’m Brooke Mitchell. See you in Episode 4.