Key Takeaways from Episode 6 of Rewilding Amazonia

• Isolated indigenous peoples chose isolation. These communities experienced the outside world, understood what it was offering them, and chose to disappear into the forest. That distinction matters: their isolation is a decision to be honored, not an accident to be managed.
• Venezuela’s illegal mining crisis was designed from above. The Maduro regime illegally opened 12% of Venezuela’s national territory—an area larger than Portugal—to indiscriminate extraction, then became the financial architecture around the criminal groups already occupying those lands.
• The Saamaka people won a landmark Inter-American Court ruling in 2007—and are still waiting for full compliance 19 years later. Hugo Jabini was forced into exile for six years. Death threats continue.
• A 2022 study found that approximately 78% of adults in Puerto Maldonado, the regional capital of Madre de Dios, have mercury levels above safe international standards. Not in a mining camp: in the city.
• Between 1985 and 2020, 90% of Amazon deforestation occurred outside indigenous-managed lands. In territories with legally recognized land rights, just 1.2% of native vegetation was lost over that entire 35-year period.
• To honor nature is to live beautifully. Rosa Espinoza closes the episode with a concept from an indigenous leader that reframes everything that came before it.

The Defenders

Around 2002, men arrived in Cesar Carrasco’s village in the Peruvian Amazon, saying they were papaya farmers, looking to rent land. Cesar and his father turned them away, but his brother and a few others in the village said yes, and the men moved in. They came with a lot of money and threw big parties, and slowly worked their way into the community. They stayed for years. When the community finally pieced together that cocaine was being grown under the guise of a papaya plantation, Cesar and the community tried to evict the men. When the police came, the group disappeared north, taking Cesar’s 13-year-old niece with them. She had her first child when she was around 15.

Cesar: “They took one of my niece — she was 13 years old, and they took her to the north when they left. So that’s why I seen those people never more.”

That’s what pressure looks like in the Amazon. Not always a bulldozer or a gunman, but disguised as gifts, and by the time you realize what’s truly happening, you’ve already lost something you can’t get back.

Welcome to Part 6 of Rewilding Amazonia. I’m Brooke Mitchell. Let’s go to the Amazonian frontlines.

Daniel Aristizábal: Isolated Indigenous Peoples

A Decision, Not an Accident

To understand what’s at stake in this episode, we start in the Colombian Amazon in a region Daniel Aristizábal knows intimately. Daniel is the PIACI Process Director at the Amazon Conservation Team (PIACI stands for Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact) and he is also the General Secretary of GTI-PIACI, an international working group dedicated to protecting the communities that have chosen to disappear into the forest. He explained something early in our conversation that is important to establish, because it’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of his work.

Daniel: “All of these people decided to flee and escape deep into the forest because there was contact. So these are groups, families, clans — that decided to flee into the forest, deep into the forest, and reject all contact with the outside world. Their decision here is the ultimate exercise of self-determination.”

They are not uncontacted peoples—a term that implies they’ve been sheltered from the world by distance or luck. They are people who experienced the world, understood what it was offering them, and chose isolation instead. That distinction matters, because it means their continued isolation is not an accident to be managed. It’s a decision to be honored.

Daniel described the decision in a way I immediately understood.

Hundreds of Years of Quarantine

Daniel: “Think of COVID, right? It was less than 1% of the world’s population that perished, but it stopped the world. We went into isolation, we went into quarantine. Governments fell, the economy crashed, cities stopped. Well, the impact of diseases on these groups were so big that they went into permanent quarantine. We went into quarantine for six months, a year, two months. They went into quarantine for hundreds of years.”

Hundreds of years of quarantine, and the communities that chose it are running out of space. According to GTI-PIACI, 60 groups of Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact have been formally confirmed across South America, with 128 more yet to be confirmed by their governments. Most of their populations are small and fragmented, with no demographic rescue possible from neighboring groups if something goes wrong. And something is increasingly likely to go wrong. A peer-reviewed analysis of mining requests submitted to Brazil’s National Mining Agency found that 97% of all requests are concentrated in the lands of just 21 isolated groups, meaning the people who chose five hundred years of quarantine are now sitting on top of the most coveted mineral deposits on the continent.

And yet the solution turns out to be rather straightforward, even if it runs against the instincts of the governments that have tried to implement it.

The Simplest Policy in the World

Daniel: “For indigenous people in isolation, all you need to do is guarantee their territory, free of threats. Once you do that — they have livelihoods, they have health, they have access to culture, they have the right to life. It’s kind of easier than anything else. But this flips the general recipe of development and rights on its head — because you have to accept no knowledge of the group to grant its rights. The best way forward is not to go there, and not to know.”

Not to go there and not to know. In Brazil, it took until 1987 for the people causing the most harm to finally recognize the damage they were doing.

Daniel: “Many of these sertanistas — these professional forest contactors — met and proclaimed a declaration. They all said: ‘Listen, what we’ve been doing for the last decades has caused death in the indigenous people that we claim to protect. We should do the opposite. Just let them be, and use all our skills, all our knowledge of the forest, to protect what’s left.'”

The moment these professionals stood up and said what we have been doing is killing people created the policy opening that Daniel and his colleagues have been working through ever since. In Colombia, that work resulted in a national policy enacted in 2018, after five years of consultation with indigenous communities across the entire Amazon, that created something genuinely unusual.

Daniel: “Something interesting about this system is that there’s a national commission that makes decisions on how to protect. And the commission is 50% indigenous, 50% government — so there’s not one superior power over the other.”

The Green Transition Threat

This was a huge policy win. But the threats on the ground are outpacing the protections.

Daniel: “The demand for gold in uncertain times — for luxury jewels in Europe and the US and India and China — is driving a lot of illegal mining in the forest. And this illegal mining has been married to drug trafficking and armed groups.”

It’s not just gold. Daniel pointed to something more troubling still: the minerals the world is counting on to power the green transition.

Daniel: “The world is moving forward towards the so-called green transition — the electric, the electricity. For this, you need a lot of specific strategic minerals, what have been known as transition minerals — nickel, cobalt, gold and others. And indigenous people in the Amazon and around the world have been raising their voices saying: a lot of these transitional minerals for the green economy are devastating our territories. So they’re not so green after all.”

Daniel brought that argument directly to COP30 in Belém, and came away with something concrete.

Daniel: “There was an article agreed by all countries saying that the just transition should respect the rights of indigenous people, including those in isolation — and that those territories of people in isolation should be restricted from the mining or extraction of these minerals.”

It’s a significant win. But Daniel was careful not to let it land as a triumph without context, because the ground has been shifting in a different direction at the same time.

Daniel: “We celebrate when a law is enacted as a triumph. But what we’re seeing now is even attacks on the policy itself. Legislative attacks saying these national laws that protect isolated peoples — these are just inventions of the left, myths of the forest. We need to get rid of these laws because the forest is ours, it’s a resource for development. And basically, five naked indigenous persons in the forest are just a burden for the development of our nation.”

Five naked indigenous persons in the forest. That’s the argument being made in parliaments right now, and the people making it are not on the fringe. They are winning elections.

Cristina Vollmer Burelli: Venezuela and the Architecture of Destruction

A Mining Policy, Not a Crime of Opportunity

If you recall from Episode 4, Cristina is the founder of SOS Orinoco and a Venezuelan conservationist who has spent seven years documenting illegal mining across her country while in exile. What her team uncovered goes beyond monitoring—it’s a portrait of what happens when a government doesn’t just fail to protect its people, but becomes the engine of its country’s destruction.

Cristina: “People on the ground were saying, it’s not just Canaima. You should go check out Yapacana National Park. You should see what’s going on in the headwaters of the Orinoco. And what we realized was that there was a mining policy. This wasn’t by accident. This was a mining policy designed and implemented by the Maduro regime.”

To understand how that policy came about, you have to understand what the regime was facing.

Cristina: “As Chavez and then Maduro realized that the oil industry was no longer producing the three million barrels a day it used to produce — they had fired the top 20,000 employees of the oil industry, the industry was basically imploding — desperate for fresh funds, they said: why don’t we turn to southern Venezuela, which is full of minerals. This is an area of 500,000 square kilometers, 80% of which is protected. And throughout the twentieth century, Venezuela was the beacon of conservation — American, European, Canadian academics used to go to Venezuela to do their fieldwork because it was such a protected and pristine region.”

A beacon of conservation, opened to indiscriminate extraction almost overnight.

Cristina: “They illegally decreed a huge swath of this area — 12% of the national territory. It’s bigger than Portugal. And they opened it to indiscriminate mining, no previous consultation with indigenous people, no consideration for environmental laws. They invited companies to come and bid for concessions — Canadians, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, they came from all over. And when these companies went to take control of their concessions, they realized that every single one had already been occupied by armed criminal groups. None of these companies ever took control of their concessions.”

The Supply Chain of Impunity

So the regime adapted. If the criminal groups were already there, already running the territory, the pragmatic move was to become the financial architecture around them, and take a cut of everything.

Cristina: “The military make money by selling access to the protected areas. They have a monopoly over fuel — all the fuel required for these mines, they control it and sell it. Most of these mines use mercury, which is illegal in Venezuela — the armed forces smuggle in the mercury and sell it to the miners. And then they make money off the gold. Everybody has to pay. Miners have to submit part of their gold to the owners of the mine and to the civil and military authorities who allow the mining to happen. They’re making money off the whole supply chain.”

What the regime built operates with complete impunity. There is no rule of law, no labor protections, no oversight of any kind.

Cristina: “It’s all controlled by armed criminal groups that have no respect for labor laws or human rights. They use children and young adolescents to go into the tunnel-type mines. There’s prostitution. Every crime under the sun is basically occurring in this area. And all of this is happening under the gaze of the civilian and military authorities — they know exactly what’s going on.”

Communities Torn Apart from Within

And the communities caught in the middle of it had nothing to do with building any of this.

Cristina: “Most of these indigenous communities have never been involved in mining. Until now, they were very much involved in agroforestry, artisan work — the Pemon have some of the most amazing basketry on the planet, the sophistication of the weaving. But once the oil stopped flowing and the money stopped flowing, the indigenous communities were left unassisted, penniless. No education, no medical help, no work. And their only option in many cases is to go to the mines.”

And the mines offer a promise that turns out to be a trap.

Cristina: “Nobody who goes to the mines becomes rich. Let’s face it. You mine, you find a little bit of gold, you have to share that gold with the owner of the mine. You have to pay for everything in southern Venezuela in gold — milk, gas, rice, food. You go on TikTok and you see these little supermarkets in the mining towns, and people are weighing out gold for milk. Whatever you find in the mine, you have to turn it over — either to the owner of the mine, or to pay for your livelihood.”

That economic trap is tearing communities apart from the inside, not just financially, but along every fault line they have.

Cristina: “It is tearing communities apart — first and foremost culturally. The elders and the women are, for the most part, anti-mining because they know this is not good for young people, not good for the community. It puts indigenous people in very dangerous situations — human rights abuses, working conditions, mercury. We’re starting to see the effect of mercury on women and babies. And it’s the men and young people who think they’re gonna get rich and go to the mine. So that’s driving a huge wedge.”

And that wedge reaches all the way into indigenous leadership.

Cristina: “A lot of the indigenous leaders have been co-opted by local authorities saying: if you allow us into your territory to do mining, you’ll get a cut of the profits. So you’re seeing a wedge between these corrupt indigenous leaders and the rest of the community who realize that this is a scam. And because people have been going to the mines, they’re no longer doing the basketry. There are a few indigenous leaders trying to maintain that knowledge — but because it’s not written, you pass it from one generation to another, there is the danger of losing that tradition entirely.”

The Cost of Speaking Out

The communities that push back face something worse than economic pressure. When Cristina’s team used satellite imagery to expose an illegal road built from Brazil across an international border into Venezuelan indigenous territory—a road that required both indigenous leaders and military authorities to look the other way—the response was immediate.

Cristina: “The indigenous leader who had partnered with the Brazilian garimpeiro and allowed this to happen was so furious that he started threatening indigenous women in the community who had opposed it and accused them of snitching to us. That is an example of how they retaliate against people who come out and denounce illegal activity.”

Cristina’s team operates anonymously, using code names and encrypted communications, with no public identities for anyone inside Venezuela.

Cristina: “Everybody in Venezuela is anonymous. They have code names. They have to be very careful with their social media, their phones, their computers. There are indigenous people, people living in communities who post information, who send information — there’s a dredge, there are five new dredges on the river. We’ve become very good at doing a systematic search of open source intelligence. With that knowledge, and whatever information we’re able to get from witnesses, from social media, from satellite images — you can deduce a lot.”

Hope for Venezuela

Seven years of that work, from outside a country she cannot go home to. And still, Cristina holds onto something real.

Cristina: “Venezuela was always looking north because we were selling oil to the north. We never pitched ourselves as an Amazonian country. But I am hopeful that we will be able to go back to the Venezuela that used to be the beacon of conservation — respecting nature, preserving this biodiversity. Venezuela has this cadre of very well-educated academics, scientists, experts. The possibilities are amazing.”

Hugo Jabini: The Saamaka People and 300 Years of Resistance

A note on spelling: Throughout this episode, we use “Saamaka”—the spelling the community has adopted to reflect their own pronunciation. The landmark 2007 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling is formally recorded as Saramaka People v. Suriname, which reflects the historical spelling used in legal documentation.

A Woman Crying on the Road

Hugo Jabini was born in a village called New Aurora, deep in the interior of Suriname. His mother taught him to farm, and he walked two hours through the forest every weekend to reach their land. He grew up, as he puts it, in harmony with nature. At eleven years old, he had to leave his village to attend secondary school, but came home the moment he could, because in his heart, he had never really left. What he found on the road back forever changed the direction of his life.

Hugo: “I noticed that logging activities were taking place. We met a woman who was crying — her farm was destroyed by a bulldozer, by foreign companies who got permission from our government to do logging in our territory. They built a route through her farm, so all the peanut, the cassava, the crops were destroyed. And they blocked the creek that we use as our water resource — for washing, for drinking — just to build a route for this multinational company.”

Nobody had asked her if the foreign logging company could use her land. No government person had asked for permission from anyone in her community.

To understand why that pattern of extraction without consent felt so familiar to Hugo and his community, we need to go back in time to trace the Saamaka people’s history and learn how long they have been fighting this.

Who the Saamaka Are

Hugo: “The first Saamaka people moved from the plantation to the forest in 1690. And from different occasions, our ancestors set into the forest — but it was not just go, because the colonizers came behind them with the whole army. After 100 years of war, the Saamaka signed a peace treaty with the Dutch colonial government in 1762, where the Dutch declared them to be free people, to stay where they are in the forest. From that moment, the territory is ours. We are the boss. We could decide.”

A hundred years before the abolition of slavery, the Saamaka had already fought their way to freedom and legal recognition of their territory. They built 74 communities along the Suriname River, with their own governance structure and developed a deeply intertwined relationship with the forest—farming in rotation, hunting and fishing, and taking only what they needed, then leaving the land to recover. Today, their territory contains 1.4 million hectares of tropical forest, 83% of which is still pristine.

Hugo: “We don’t destroy nature. We just take what is necessary, what we need, and then leave it intact. If we open a farm, we use it for two to three years and then we leave it and go to another spot, so that part can recover again. After ten to twenty years, we can go back and open a new farm there. That’s how we live in harmony with our nature.”

Most people outside the Amazon have never heard of Afro-descendant communities like the Saamaka—and that invisibility, as Hugo would later tell researchers, is part of the problem. A landmark 2025 study published in Communications Earth & Environment—the first to systematically measure the conservation contributions of Afro-descendant communities across Ecuador, Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia—found that deforestation rates on their lands are as much as 55% lower than in surrounding areas, and that more than half of those territories rank among the most biodiverse regions on Earth. Hugo contributed to that research himself, and what he told the scientists was straightforward:

Hugo: “Our land management practices combine traditional African knowledge with the Amazon Rainforest. The areas where we have lived have become healthier and sustained entire communities.”

The Second Big Violation

For three hundred years, the Saamaka had been doing exactly that. And then, in the 1960s, while Suriname was still a Dutch colony, an aluminum company called Alcoa was given permission to build a hydroelectric dam. One third of Saamaka territory was flooded, and nine thousand Saamaka people were forced to relocate — with no prior consultation, consent, or meaningful compensation for what they had lost.

Hugo: “For us, that was the second big violation — after slavery. The first was that they stole our ancestors. The second was that they flooded our territory.”

Then the logging concessions came, and the same pattern repeated itself—the government granting multinational companies access to Saamaka territory without consultation, consent, or any form of benefit sharing. Hugo organized their communities and filed three formal complaints to the Surinamese president. No response. So they took it to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The Commission found the case admissible and asked to visit Suriname. But, Suriname refused.

A Landmark Ruling and What Followed

Hugo: “If they refuse, that was like a sign — do you have something to hide? We had a hearing in Washington — the first time our government was willing to sit at a table with us. And in 2007, the Inter-American Court decided in our favor. Suriname had violated our rights. They were obliged to demarcate our territory, grant us collective ownership, and for any major development project affecting our life, free informed consent and an independent environmental assessment were required.”

Seven years of legal work later, they had a landmark ruling. The president of Suriname stood up and publicly declared full compliance.

And then almost nothing happened.

Hugo: “We are now almost 19 years after the judgment, and we are still struggling for full compliance. They paid financial compensation of 600,000 US dollars — that’s nothing compared to the loss. The full demarcation of our territory, the full legal recognition — that has not happened. And they keep violating the judgment, because the government cannot simply grant concessions for gold mining or logging to their political sponsors if we have full ownership rights. That’s why they don’t want to give it to us.”

Exile, Death Threats, and Still Fighting

Hugo studied law part-time while continuing to organize. Even his own professors told him it was impossible to win a case against the state of Suriname. He won anyway, and in 2009, was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. In 2015, though, the threats against him became serious enough that he was forced to leave Suriname entirely.

Hugo: “My personal life — I faced a lot of threats. I was forced to leave Suriname in 2015, to be in exile for six years in the Netherlands, because my life was under threat. They saw me as the one blocking their economic development. I managed to come back after the government responsible for my threats was no longer in office. But from time to time, I still receive threats. A few weeks ago, there was a death threat — from a businessman who wanted to do gold mining in our territory and wanted to pollute our water resources. We blocked it. And they were angry.”

Hugo arrived at COP30 in Belém with a delegation of 25 Saamaka people — men, women, and youth, which is, as he explains, how his people have always done things. The leader does not go anywhere without witnesses, the women are the backbone of the community, and the youth are the next generation of leaders, and all three must have a seat at the table.

Hugo: “We came to COP30 with the largest delegation of women. We were there with 15 women and youth and seven or eight men. And they showed the audience who we are — with drums and songs, we presented the Saamaka to the world. Everywhere they went in the Green Zone, they were stealing the show.”

But for all the visibility, Hugo is clear-eyed about what COP and the global climate conversation have and haven’t delivered for communities like his.

Hugo: “We hear all this discussion — the forest is the answer to climate change. They came with all these complicated things like REDD+ and climate green funds. But the money never, never reached us. We came back, and the next year at the next COP, the same thing. And then we realized: if you are not at the table, people cannot hear your voice. So we have to be everywhere — any discussion, any forum. We want to be there.”

The Forest, Unchanged

When Hugo finally returned from exile, one of the first things he did was organize a trip back to the farm where his mother had taught him to live in harmony with the forest. The first stretch had been damaged by a tractor-trail cut through for logging. But past that point, the forest was exactly as he had left it, forty years before.

Hugo: “While I was walking, after a certain part, I could see the same part I used to walk when I was 10 and 12 — 50 years, it never changed. And when I was there, I felt like it was a recharge of new energy. Something you cannot describe. I just want to say: come with me. Let’s walk all the way into the forest, and just sit, and connect with the spirit. Then you will feel what I feel — what I cannot describe.”

He is still fighting for full compliance with the 2007 ruling, as well as documenting Saamaka oral knowledge before it disappears, seeking UNESCO recognition for Saamaka villages as cultural heritage sites, and building a monitoring system that connects satellite technology with people on the ground.

Hugo: “I don’t leave any physical thing for my children. But at least there’s something they can be proud of.”

Hugo’s fight has been measured in decades, court rulings, and years in exile. Cesar Carrasco’s fight has been more immediate — rooted in the daily economic choices a community makes when the pressure arrives at their doorstep.

Cesar Carrasco: Mercury, Mines, and What’s Worth Protecting

A Life He Wasn’t Expecting to Tell

When I was planning this series, I knew I wanted to talk to Cesar for two reasons: he’s Ese’eja, a member of the native community of Infierno on the Tambopata River in the Peruvian Amazon, and he’s been the lodge manager at Rainforest Expeditions — one of the most celebrated community-run ecotourism operations in the region — for more than twenty years. I thought I was going to hear a story about conservation and tourism. I was not prepared for the life he actually told me.

Cesar was seventeen when he first went to work in the gold mines on the Inambari River — not because he wanted to, but because the mines were there and the options in front of him were limited. He went, lasted three months, and came home. His cousin stayed longer, and one day, while working underwater, someone cut his breathing line.

Cesar: “I lost my cousin there in the mining area. He died there — they fight for women and they killed him when he was working inside and they cut the line for breathing. So it was so hard. I know I was lucky to be there just three months.”

The Scale of the Crisis

The mines Cesar worked in are part of one of the planet’s worst artisanal gold mining crises. Between 1985 and 2017, illegal and artisanal gold mining deforested nearly 96,000 hectares of rainforest in Madre de Dios alone — an area roughly one and a half times the size of Chicago — with more than two-thirds of that destruction happening in just the last eight years of that period, as gold prices surged.

The forest wasn’t just being cleared. It was being poisoned. Cesar explained how.

Cesar: “You go inside with the pump and move with your hand to suction the sediment — two and a half hours inside the water, with another person outside controlling the breathing line. The gold is not in pieces. It’s a powder. They use mercury to bind it all together, and then they burn it in the open air to separate the gold. And the rest — they throw to the river. That’s the way they make big pollution in the river. The fish eat that. That’s why even in our region we know which fish we cannot eat because they have more mercury. There’s one catfish — we call it mota — nobody eats it in the region because it has more mercury.”

Mercury doesn’t break down. It converts into methylmercury, accumulates in fish tissue, and moves up the food chain, concentrating two to nearly four times within each trophic level. And research in the region has found elevated mercury at both mined and unmined sites — meaning the contamination footprint extends far beyond the mine itself, moving through rivers and food webs into communities nowhere near the mining.

Mercury in His Blood

When Cesar was in Lima years later, recovering from a motorcycle accident, the doctors ran a full blood panel.

Cesar: “When I was in Lima sick with my broken bones, they analyzed all my blood. They told me one day they found a little mercury in my blood. I’m not sure — I’ve been there just three months and never worked for years. But that’s why they took a lot of time to recover. This is how they pollute. The fish eat it, the river water, and then die. Humans too.”

Three months on a mine as a teenager, and mercury was still in his blood decades later. Cesar was one of the lucky ones—he left after a few months and had survived. The people who stayed and the communities who fish those rivers every day, have had no such luck. A 2022 study on artisanal gold mining in Madre de Dios found that approximately 78% of adults tested in Puerto Maldonado, the regional capital, had mercury levels above safe international standards. This is not just in mining camps. This is in the city where Cesar’s family lives.

Not Friendly with Mining

Cesar: “We are not mining, we are not friendly with mining. I know they make a lot of money, but it will be just for short time and they destroy the forest. Doing conservation and tourism at the same time, you will have the chance to have a very nice forest for the future, for your kids, for the next generation.”

Cesar: “Before we work with Rainforest Expeditions, we used to have more culture. We used to do the celebrations with all the local costume, the food — very good organizing, with other communities coming to celebrate. But when we start working, we are losing the culture. That’s why now they are focused on recovering it — we don’t want to lose the language. The government doesn’t pay for the teachers. We pay from our own money that we make in this business. We pay the teachers ourselves.”

The research on what decisions like these protect is striking. Between 1985 and 2020, 90% of Amazon deforestation occurred outside indigenous-managed lands. In territories where indigenous communities hold legally recognized land rights, just 1.2% of native vegetation was lost over that entire 35-year period. The forest around Infierno is standing, and the Tambopata River is still clean enough to fish.

Cesar: “Working with Rainforest Expeditions gives at the same time a lot of benefits to the community — education, better life, electricity, water. We have a lot of people who finished different careers — engineers, lawyers, managers, guides. Everybody is free to decide where they want to work, which career they want to study.”

In a year or two, Cesar plans to retire to his farm, growing citrus, yuca, bananas, and raising seventy chickens. He wants to go back to what his father taught him: how to work the land, take what you need and leave the rest intact. We will explore what his community built with Rainforest Expeditions—and what that model means for communities across the Amazon—in Episode 7.

Rosa Espinoza: To Live Beautifully

The Reason This Series Began

I want to end this episode with someone I introduced you to at the very beginning of this series—Rosa Espinoza, the chemical biologist from Peru who first made me see the Amazon not as a place far away, but as something already woven into the fabric of my daily life. She was the reason I started asking the question that became the basis of this entire series.

When Rosa talked about growing up in Peru, moving between the Amazon, the mountains, and the city, she described a relationship with the natural world that most of us have never had.

Rosa: “By virtue of me seeing my own family interact with the different natural elements, I just had such an ingrained curiosity and respect — whether that is asking permission to the river when people are going fishing, saying thank you to the land where you are opening the ground to get potatoes out, talking to flowers before you grab some leaves or roots to make some sort of medicinal cocktail.”

Her grandmother was the center of that world—working with medicinal plants, making remedies, passing knowledge down the way we humans have always learned: by watching, doing, and asking questions.

I asked Rosa what she thought it would mean to lose that. Not just for one community, but for all of us.

Rosa: “Losing a culture — I see it almost as losing part of the human’s memory. How can we better act in terms of future or changing realities if we don’t understand the past? We’re trying to reinvent the wheel every single time without taking any lessons. It’s not just a culture, it’s not just a language that we’re losing. You’re connected to something deeper.”

And then she told me about a conversation with an indigenous leader that she wrote about in the first chapter of her book. He described what it meant, for his people, to live a harmonious relationship with the natural world.

Rosa: “For them, to honor nature is to live beautifully. To be in sync and happy with everything around them is to live beautifully. That means pausing between the work activities. That means taking time to put a bonfire in your community and dancing around and letting all the kids sing and dance. For the men I was talking with, making sure he has time to go fishing in the mornings when he finds the most peace. Taking care of the self is also a way they describe to live beautifully with nature.”

Rosa: “When we are kind to ourselves, we also want to be kind to the trees around us, to the ocean, to the animals. I think we don’t often hear about just being kind to ourselves — and I do think that is also a way that we will do better for our planet.”

Conclusion

I resonated with that phrase, live beautifully, and it kept coming back to me as I was putting this episode together—because it’s what everyone in this episode is fighting for, whether they used those words or not. The right to fish a clean river, to teach children their native language, and to take what is needed from the land while leaving the rest intact. Hugo is still waiting for full compliance with a ruling that is nineteen years old, Cristina cannot go home, and the mines in Madre de Dios are still running—but so are the people pushing back against all of the threats we explored today, which is, I think, what Rosa was really describing. To insist on living beautifully, in the face of impossible odds.

In the next episode, we ask a different question: not how do you stop the destruction, but how do you make the forest worth more standing than gone.

This is Rewilding Amazonia. I’m Brooke Mitchell. See you in Episode 7.