Manaus is advancing a project to connect forest fragments, parks and urban reserves across the city. The green corridor is designed to protect biodiversity while reducing heat, improving air quality and bringing residents closer to the Amazon forest.
In Santarém, plastic removed from the Tapajós River is being turned into 42-square-meter homes for river communities. The project links recycling, housing and protection of Amazonian biodiversity.
Not private property, not a fenced park. Brazilian extractive reserves hand the land to the people who live from it, and in Para they turn out acai, Brazil nuts, oils and managed fish without felling the forest.
The forest lifts 20 billion tonnes of water a day and redistributes rain, heat and reflected sunlight far beyond South America.
In the Amazon, deciding where fishing is allowed often comes down to a meeting on the riverbank. River-dwelling communities sort their lakes into three categories, and studies indicate the arrangement outperforms remote state enforcement.
A ten-meter clearing is enough to stop hundreds of species. Forest fragmentation turns the Amazon into isolated islands, leaving jaguars and harpy eagles without territory or prey.
In the 1980s, Amazonian rubber tappers stopped chainsaws with their own bodies in actions called empates. From that resistance, led by Chico Mendes in Acre, came the extractive reserves, made official in 1990.
Biodiversity is how ecologists measure the health of an ecosystem, and the concept can be read in the field. Seven concrete signs any visitor can spot inside an Amazon conservation unit, from the harpy eagle to the tambaqui.
The yearly rise and fall of the Amazon River, known to ecologists as the flood pulse, decides where and when rare species such as the pink river dolphin, the giant otter and the Amazonian manatee feed, breed and migrate.
The Rubber Boom turned a small river outpost in the Amazon into a city with electric trams, imported opera and streets paved in rubber. This is the urban history of Manaus, from Belle Epoque splendour to the collapse of 1912.
