The heat falls on the village from the early hours of the morning. Isolated in the heart of the tropical rainforest, this Amazonian settlement follows the rhythms imposed by the river and the land. Along the Uraricoera, a tributary of the Negro River, some children play and cool off in the water. A little further on, several young people return from the bank with a canoe loaded with bundles of cassava: the tuber that sustains Yanomami life. The harvest passes from hand to hand until it reaches the homes, where the mothers wash, grate, and transform it into flour, repeating gestures passed down from generation to generation, as old as the river itself.

Almost five centuries after the arrival of the first European conquerors in the Amazon, the indigenous peoples of Brazil continue to defend the same thing: land and freedom. Since 1542, when the expedition led by Francisco de Orellana reached the great river, nearly 484 years of sustained resistance have passed. Now, this struggle is moving to Brasília. Hundreds of indigenous representatives are settling in the country's political center in a protest camp to halt legislative changes that could allow extractive activities and energy projects within protected territories. The mobilization combines political pressure with cultural expression, turning the institutional space into a stage for collective demand. Despite some recent advances in territorial recognition and environmental protection under the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, hundreds of communities are still awaiting legal guarantees for their lands. In parallel, the pressure from illegal mining and logging in indigenous territories is growing. The Free Land Camp in the Brazilian capital is not an isolated episode, but the continuation of a nearly 500-year history of persistent defense of their ancestral rights and their way of life.

Deforestation is a striking image when seen from the air. The continuous green of the forest ends abruptly, severed by a cruelly straight cut, leaving only barren land. From a bird's-eye view, the visual impact is devastating and helps to capture the tragedy of the destruction of tropical forests. Drones used by Reuters photographers Adriano Machado and Ueslei Marcelino have revealed this deforestation in a southern region. from the AmazonIn the Brazilian state of Rondônia, the destruction even affects part of a protected indigenous territory, that of the Kaxarari people.

When he was six years old, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents in Punjab for a year, hoping he would understand his Indian roots. That experience profoundly marked him. It was nothing like his native Essex, in the United Kingdom, which was much grayer and more industrial, and it instilled in Yadvinder Malhi (High Wycombe, UK, 1968) an admiration, curiosity, and passion for nature. Today, this professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford is one of the world's most recognized scientific voices in the integration of ecosystem ecology into Earth sciences. His work on climate change and biodiversity loss, especially in tropical forests, has been fundamental. For this reason, he was awarded the 21st Ramon Margalef Prize for Ecology 2025, granted by the Government of Catalonia.

"As soon as we heard Dom was dead, there was no doubt in our minds that we would finish his book." Jonathan Watts, Amazonian environmental correspondent for the The Guardian, He remembers his colleague and friend Dom Phillips, who was killed three years ago on a jungle expedition while researching his book. How to save the AmazonOn June 5, 2022, Phillips disappeared while traveling with Brazilian indigenist Bruno Pereira along the Itaguaí River through the Javarín Valley, one of the largest indigenous areas in Brazil. Police began searching for him, and a campaign led by the journalist's wife, friends, and colleagues added pressure, but it wasn't until June 12 that they finally succeeded. the confession of the guilty parties, which would lead to the location of the bodies of the two men.

The Indigenous and Anomami people have a word for global warming: motokari"It's already happening in many places in the jungle," says Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, who visited Barcelona this week at the invitation of the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB). motokari "It has come down to dry up the land," he warns, and asks us "to fight together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous," to protect the Amazon from destruction: "If the land dies, we will die too, and the forest is already beginning to die."