Zuker’s urgent dispatches chronicle the myriad threats to the Amazon rainforest—extraction industries, the monocultures of soy and rice, political instability, climate change—and, through his deeply reported and compassionate portraits of Indigenous peoples, suggest how the destruction of this complex natural ecosystem negatively impacts all of humanity. These themes are treated especially powerfully in the moving title essay, which follows the plight of a whale stranded some 1000 miles from the Atlantic and the efforts of the riverside communities—which also face displacement—to save it. Zuker’s writing in this vital testimony to the ravages of capitalism and the escalation of threats to the Indigenous under Bolsonaro is often heartbreakingly beautiful, throwing into relief how an attack on nature is also an attack on the native peoples, who from time immemorial have known that “plants make worlds. They are creators of realities,” and have fostered “a true sphere of kinship with the vegetation around them.”
