The Amazon in Times of War by Marcos Colón

The Amazon in Times of War is a collection of essays by Marcos Colón featuring first-hand accounts that detail physical assaults, economic and institutional harm against the ‘lungs of the earth’, the Amazon region. The essays traverse diverse themes while adhering to a chronological sequence, zeroing in on a pivotal period commencing in 2018 when Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of an already fragmented nation. His calculated political agenda aimed at the obliteration of the world’s largest biome and its peoples, which encompasses nine South American nations. Bolsonaro was consequently dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics.” Marcos Colón denounces this destruction and calls for the protection of the rainforest and its inhabitants.

Published: 8 October 2024
Pages: 222
eBook: 9781788534390
Paperback: 9781788534376

About the author

Marcos Colón is an academic, journalist, and filmmaker. His articles have been featured in the Jornal Público, Folha de São Paulo, Harvard Review of Latin America, and El País. He is founder of online journalism platform Amazônia Latitude and director of documentary films ‘Beyond Fordlandia‘ and ‘Stepping Softly on the Earth‘. Colón is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass communication. His research focuses on Brazilian literary and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on the Amazon, Indigenous studies, and representations of natureculture in documentary film and world cinema.

Voices from the Amazon: Ailton Krenak

“We are watching this genuine attack on a part of the world where for thousands of years people have developed ways of living inside the forest in sufficient equilibrium to produce culture and life. In the last two or three centuries it has received new inhabitants, besides the Indigenous peoples – it received colonisers, who constructed a certain humanity, learning to live within the forest. This gathering of peoples, the Indigenous and those that went there in the last two to three hundred years, makes up a large group of people living in the Amazonian forest – in the Brazilian Amazon as well as the Amazon of our neighbours Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and Colombia. All of the Amazon basin, which affects Brazil’s neighbouring nations, is now shaken by this violence on the forest, but it hides another violence, which is the production of poverty, uprooting people, tearing them away from the places where they always lived supported by the forests.”

Ailton Krenak, Indigenous leader and author of ‘Ideas to Postpone the End of the World’

Praise for ‘The Amazon in Times of War’

Blighted by violence since the arrival of the colonizers, the Amazon is crying out for help. Marcos Colón’s book is an urgent call for the action and courage needed to free the forest from plunder and pillage. This is the greatest challenge of our generation.

– CRISTINA SERRA, Brazilian journalist and Author of ‘Tragédia em Mariana: A História do Maior Desastre Ambiental do Brasil’.

Colón, through his compelling images and testimonials from the Amazonian peoples, has exposed to humanity the tragedy of the Amazon’s destruction at the hands of the most nefarious interests of logging companies and garimpeiros, associated with multinational corporations and the blind pursuits of global capitalism.

– ENRIQUE LEFF, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Colón offers a politically engaged ecological reading of some of the most pressing issues of our time: ancestral knowledge, territory, climate, and the devastating impacts of colonialism and capitalism in one of the world’s most important regions.

– JESSICA CAREY-WEBB, Assistant professor, University of New Mexico; author of ‘Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier’

Thoughtful and thoroughly reported, The Amazon in Times of War is a must-read for all who care about the future of the rainforest — and planet Earth.

– SCOTT WALLACE, Author of ‘The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazons Last Uncontacted Tribes’

These essays are fresh and heartfelt and together are a powerful call for humanity to heed the voices of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, to learn from them, and to act now.

– FIONA WATSON, Campaigns Director, Survival International

The Amazon has finally become political news. This outstanding collection shows why.

– MARK HARRIS, Professor and Head of School, Humanities, University of Adelaide; Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of St Andrews; Author of ‘Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798–1840’

Book contents:

Foreword by John Hemming

Introduction

Part 1 – The Amazon in Times of War

1. Environmental Fascism is Haunting the Amazon
2. The Fire Balance Sheet
3. A Brief Overview of Violence in the Amazon
4. The Year of Killing
5. Two Men Missing in the Amazon’s ‘Wild West’
6. ‘Letting the Herd Through’: Changes in Environmental Laws During the Pandemic
7. Will the Amazon Rainforest Become a Commodity?

Part 2 – The Amazon and the Pandemic

8. Hunger in the Amazon – The Invisible Companion of Covid-19
9. Deregulation and Deforestation Fuel the Pandemic in the Amazon
10. Healthcare Means Going to the Community
11. Brazil’s Yanomami People: Silence, Devastation and Fear
12. Above the Marombas: The Pandemic in the Amphibious Amazon
13. The Amazon and the Enigma of ‘Pure Luck

Part 3 – Beyond War: Life in the Amazon

14. A Paradise Under Suspicion
15. Only a Global Coalition Will Save the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon
16. Amazônia Redux: A Re-evaluation of Urgent Needs
17. Stepping Softly on the Earth
18. COP26: Cognitive Dissonance
19. Another Brazil is Possible

Epilogue: The Amazon Is Still At War

Afterword: We Are All Amazonians by Scott Slovic