Dr Tatiana Schor

Caitlin Morrissey

Tatiana, what is an Amazonian city?

Tatiana Schor

What is an Amazonian City? I’ve been thinking a lot on these new archaeological studies that have been appearing, especially those done by Eduardo Neves and his team, which have been revealing in the past maybe 15 years to 10 years about all this intrinsic networks of possible very big population sites, which maybe we don’t call them cities, but they’re very big population sites. Recently, with the development of this LiDAR, this new technology that looks through the forest, again, they’ve been just revealing this enormous network of human agglomerations throughout the Amazon ever since. And he has in many of his interviews, but one specifically that he gave recently, was asked, ‘why doesn’t Amazonia have the pyramids as Egypt has pyramids?’ And he said,’ well, because this is our infrastructure, the forest is our infrastructure.’ The way he’s revealing the role of the people in the forest and the human agglomeration in the forest reveals a lot of what we can now start looking into: what are Amazonian cities? Of course, we are not talking about the same aspect of Amazonian cities and the Amazon, if we put the eight Amazonian countries together, territorially they would be the sixth-biggest country in the world, and that means you have as Saint-Clair says an urban diversity of different types of cities. So Amazonian cities can be many things. They can be boomtowns. They can be old cities. They can be Indigenous-led, small human agglomerations. They can be riverine cities. They can be many things.

I think what would be interesting is to look into this past role that the cities had that archaeology is showing us, and look into what could they be in the future? Why should we look into the future of Amazonian cities as something specific, not as any city that could be anywhere else? I think of this integration of urban, modern, technological, sometimes deprivation, sometimes poverty, cities within the context of a forest that is still a living forest. A lot of the questions we should think of is why has the Amazon survived until now? And then we can look into the role the peoples in the forest have and the role the forest have in maintaining itself. If we look throughout the world, I think Amazonia is the biggest standing tropical forest. And the question we should ask ourselves is what has it done that has made it impossible for us modern people not to destroy it? Then I can see the future and the role of the cities.

What would be the future of role? As if we were looking into this future DNA of Amazonian cities, not of the past, the recent past, but getting into that real back past, like if we were discovering the tomb of Cleopatra and thinking of what would be the new Amazonian city? I think the new Amazonian city should be a city which understands and relates to the forest in much more integrated ways, learning not only from how the Indigenous people work the forest because even now, the Indigenous people that we’re looking at, they’ve had their issues with modernisation, but looking even more ahead.. So how can these Amazonian cities look into the forest as infrastructure, not nature-based solutions for infrastructure, but the forest as infrastructure? How is this relationship not only a physical relationship with the forest, not by the fact that it is beside a river that it’s an Amazonian city, but a much more cosmological understanding that the fact that the river is beside the city, it is an Amazonian city.

Greg Clark

Why has the Amazon and its populations survived so far? I think it’s good for you to give us an answer to that. And then what does it mean when we say the forest is the infrastructure, not The forest is a nature-based solution for another problem, right?

Tatiana Schor

That’s a good question, and I’m probably not able to answer it. But what it makes me think and is if you look at least along the Amazonas-Solimões River, at least in the Brazilian side where I know well but I think it also is the same in the Colombian and in the Peruvian side is that this is a place where you had the most number of cities that changed places. I think this is something that is forgotten about Amazonian cities, that many of them just changed places. There’s like a whole bunch of them that moved from one spot that they were to another spot. That’s a lot due or to natural phenomena or due to the way modernisation is coming through. So some cities were located not at the front of the Solimões River but more inside but when the Solimões River started having more transport and more fluxes, they moved to the front of the city. A good example is Airão and Novo Airão. So Airão is a city that started, I think it was in the 1700s and then by 1960, it changed to another location where there’s Novo Airão due to a road that was built. The people literally moved, and the city moved to the other place. So I think this capacity of these old cities, not the boomtowns because this is another conversation but of these cities that have been located in the Amazon for so long, is their ability to interact and to change location and re-establish themselves without losing their characteristic of being a city in the Amazon, which would be understanding their environment.

When we say this person is a riberenõ, what makes him a riberenõ? It’s not because he lives beside the river that he’s a riberenõ, but much more that he has in the river and in the forest, his personal security. So he has his food security, he has his personal security, he has his cosmological security. It’s part of the world. So for him, his ability to go and come from the city is very important. And the city is a very important nodule in this intrinsic network that the Amazon is. Not only in commercial types, but also in relationships between the different populations, between the different cosmologies, between the different markets, and then you can go like all the migration. But I think the ability that the cities have to move and move with its people, move with its function, it might be unique. I haven’t seen so many cases, I haven’t heard of many cities being able to move and take it with itself and just go to somewhere else.

Greg Clark

It sounds like you’re describing nomad cities.

Tatiana Schor

It’s a little bit nomad with some fixtures in the territory, fixos as we would say. These fixos are very important because they help coordinate. What I think this archaeology is discovering is that these cities that survive as Amazonian cities have been placed in strategic locations, which the old and the prehistoric cities were, and so there’s a lot of relationship in what it was and how it is now, and this ability to navigate in another circumstances. I think that is very interesting.

Greg Clark

Tatiana, this is wonderful. I’m going to pose to you another question you asked which is when we think about the forest as infrastructure, and we think about the river as infrastructure what do you mean, and what’s the difference and the similarity there?

Tatiana Schor

Because there are two entities, if we can say it like that, it’s like yin and yang. There are two entities, they’re different, but they’re together. So you can speak in like, when the river is high, you can say, ‘oh, it’s the high season of the river’, or, which I’ve heard already, ‘it’s the time when the forest is small.’ And the same thing, when the river is low, you can say, ‘it’s the low season of the river’, or you can say ‘it’s the time of the big forest.’

I think this relationship as the river has a very systematic cycle, the hydrological cycle, the hydro-climatological cycle of the Amazon it has this yin-yang conversation between the forest and the river. So they’re different, but they’re united and are the same. I’m talking about the Amazon of the big rivers. Again, this is not the boomtown. This is the process which I’m more interested in. I think this is the idea of what are we talking about as the forests of infrastructure and not as a road which you have the development around the road, and you build those boomtowns. That is a classical that happened in many places. So I’m talking about these places that have not followed this pattern because all the forest hasn’t been able to be cut by road, not that people haven’t tried yet, and they will continue trying, but it has maintained itself.

When I’m talking about forest as infrastructure, it’s also understanding that a lot of the forests which we see, and this is Eduardo Neves, he says the forest is like a garden, it’s a landscape. That’s why it’s surviving because it’s a landscape. It was made for survival. Because if you look at where you have the castanhas and this has been going on through anthropology, archaeology for some time, so they call it like the cultural forest. I think William Balée started saying this is a cultural forest. What he means is if you look at some specific woods and the distribution of these woods, and if you look inside where these woods are, you will find a reminiscence of human settlements which are big, we would call them cities, right? I think that is interesting. So it’s the yin-yang is again, human populations and the forest have also been very closely knit. So closely knit that we don’t see the division. Because it’s different on the pyramids. You see the pyramids. In the forest, you don’t see it if you don’t look closely and if you don’t have the eyes to look.

Greg Clark

And I remember you said once, Tatiana, that nature and culture in the Amazon are the same thing.

Tatiana Schor

Yeah, they are. I think that’s what’s most interesting. Maybe when I’m talking about this cosmology, it’s because it’s difficult to separate, especially when you’re talking with riverine people or when you’re there or if you allow your sensitivity to grow. I always use this example. I don’t dream in Washington. I don’t know why, but I don’t dream in Washington. It’s just I’ve been thinking about it for the past years. But when I go to Manaus or when I go to Novo Airão, I always dream a lot, you know? Coherent dreams and I dream and I talk to them, you know. Here I don’t dream. Something’s missing here. This lack of being able to connect to something more cosmological, be it what it be, call it what you want to call. Our modern society in different ways, we will talk to our environment. It might be on mute or it might be a dialogue, and where you can manage to build dialogues will give you other understanding of other possibilities.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much, Tatiana, for everything that you’ve said so far. You mentioned in your opening answer that there are Indigenous-led cities and riverine cities, and there’s an enormous urban diversity in the Amazonian region. And can I ask you to say a little bit more about that diversity and the sort of distinguishing features between some of these cities?

Tatiana Schor

This is something like around maybe like 25 years ago, we started when I was in Amazonia in the university, and we started looking at the difficulty in classifying Amazonian cities and calling all the same. In fact, in the case of Brazil, calling them all small cities because of population size we weren’t, in fact, recognising anything. And also, we saw that if we just stayed on the key of the don’t haves, you know, ‘this city doesn’t have this, doesn’t have that, doesn’t have that, doesn’t have, doesn’t have, doesn’t have’, you won’t see what they have. So we started looking into the cities and I say we because it was a group, we were organised under the Center for Urban Studies in Amazonas. We started looking and saying, we have to find a different typology for the cities. We have to understand them differently so that we can, in fact, approach them as different entities. We started looking into the functions of the cities in the territories.

At the same time, Saint-Clair and his lab and his people in Pará – so I was in Amazonas, he was in Pará – also started looking at that. And then we started growing on these possible different typologies. Then we started looking. Where the city is located is very important, but it’s not the only question, of course. So you have the boom cities, the cities that grew out of the processes of the government, especially in Brazil, but in other areas also, opening roads and making plans for agriculture expansion in the Amazon. That’s one thing, that’s one character of the cities.

But if we look into these more riverine cities along the big rivers, you can have two cities that they look as if they are positioned geographically in the same environment, but they are very different cities. One city can have its economic dynamic outside of the network, and this city, if you look at the numbers, you can have a big GNP, can have a bigger headcount of institutions but the function of that city in the region, in the network, was completely different than its neighbouring city. The neighbouring city had much more what we call territorial responsibility. So what is a territorial responsibility? Looking at these two cities, so one with an economic, external economic dynamic and one with a territorial responsibility. The city with a territorial responsibility had attached to it in its network a whole other myriad cosmology, ecosystem of smaller cities, smaller villages and fluxes of people, and you could only understand this region if you understood that city. In terms of public policies that was very important because, you know, what is more effective if I do a public policy in this city that really doesn’t talk to its region and will not impact like a wave the other cities? Or do I look at this city and say ‘if I solve a problem here, I will be able to reach out a much more number of people’? So we started looking at these different classifications, and we started understanding that some key aspects, especially related to this straight or stronger relationship between the city and the forest, you know, like coming in, coming out, bringing products, taking products, boats, vaccines, money, you know, the dynamic, this urban dynamic is very important. You have to look at that. You have to look into the city and see where the city is functioning as a hub to this territory.

Then later on, there was this other professor that started working on this urban, riverine, territorial system. Because he went to Italy and he looked at the urban territorial system, and he started looking into Amazonia, and he chose a city and he really started detecting how important this was, this territorial system based on this urban riverine relationship. Then you can go into any areas and understand. You can look into the production of boats, the production of festivities, the production of food, bioeconomy products, fish – everything had a link through the city and passed through the other cities. So it is, again, a very complex urban outlook. Because usually people would tell you, this is not a complex, this is a very simple urban. I said, no, no, no, no. On the contrary, it’s not at all simple. It’s very complex. It’s a complex economy with a complex urban system. Especially when you’re thinking of regions where sometimes you have a bank in one of these cities and in the other cities that are two days’ distance don’t have a bank. Now we have internet, but five years ago, we didn’t have. Now internet and connectivity and digital connectivity, which is reaching Amazonia more and more and more, you know, I think that’s not going to be an issue of access. It will be an issue of quality of access and security of data, not of access. But before when that was a very big issue, access of not only digital but telephone, normal telephone, we didn’t have so much access. Then these cities and the distances and the relationships are very important.

What I also like about this is what I think is very unique of Amazonian cities that it’s different for you to hear in other places. For example, this is very common. The guy gets tired of his family. He’s tired of the wife, all those children in the house, all the chickens. He’s tired of his family. So he goes to where the boats are. He gets on a boat and he says to his family, ‘I’m going to go up the river to get some piassava.’ I’m going to get some bioeconomy product up the river. I’ll be back. And he goes. And he disappears for six months. And it’s so common. I know many friends of mine that the husband just disappeared for six months and then they come back. And you don’t have news, you don’t know where the guy is, you know, but it’s okay. The family just pieces down and everybody’s back when they’re back, everybody’s missed him. So this is like the security of people. And COVID was very interesting for that. People went into the forest and said, just let us give a time for modernity. Even I did that before. I went to North Airão.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much. I just wanted to ask, you’re talking about Eduardo Neves’ work and all the sort of archaeological studies that he’s doing on the cities in the forest and the prehistoric cities. Is there anything yet that we know about why some cities have survived in the Amazon, and why some cities are being rediscovered now and perhaps didn’t survive?

Tatiana Schor

There are many, many old cities in the Amazon that people don’t even know. You know, there are cities from the 17th Century, from the early 18th Century, and they’re there. They, as cities, as colonial cities, so I’m calling them colonial, most of them were built on top of these ancient cities or human agglomerations or areas where there were crossroads for something. There’s another which is very important, for me, it talks a lot about the biogeography and city geography. So if you look, there’s this interesting catfish migration process. So the catfish, they are born in the upper rivers, and they come down the Solimões and Amazonas and they will grow in the region of Belém. In Belém, the main fish dish is called Filhote, which means a small fish, a puppy fish. But it is a puppy fish because when this fish, this catfish, reach maturity age and reproductive age, they come back like salmons. So like 5,000 kilometres they come back and they more or less go back to their original areas. There have been studies on DNA of these fishes, and they show the diversity of DNA of these fishes in the estuary, and they show how it’s much more concentrated DNA diversity in the upwaters – it’s not this way that they talk about it, but that’s the way I understand it. But when they are big and mature, they come down, and they stay more or less where it was an old lake. This old whole prehistoric lake that existed in this area. As it’s an area of confluence of these big fishes, probably, you had a lot of people going there all the time, so a lot of old cities along it. And when they established Tefé, which is this old city in the Amazon, very important, the main example of a territorial responsibility city, it’s established exactly where the lake was. So there’s a relation, I think. It’s not proven, you don’t have data, you don’t have models, but there’s a relation. You can say whatever you want. But for me, there’s a clear relation, inclusively, why the Portuguese and the Spanish fought over that territory and put their churches there. Probably they didn’t see the fishes, they didn’t understand the migration of the cities, but probably that was the region where all the Indigenous groups were crossed because there you will get the big catfishes. So that’s how much we still don’t know of the biology and the ecology of the Amazon, and less even how much we don’t relate that to the urbanisation processes of this deep Amazonia.

Greg Clark

I think that one of the things that you have been saying is that the Amazon as a whole has been endowed with these incredible traits from the climate and the planet, the water, the shape, the forest, and that this has produced an incredibly rich ecosystem of biodiversity. This is all obvious, but you’re making the point, think, Tatiana, that the human settlement patterns have been logical or wise according to the resources that were available there.

Tatiana Schor

If we could overlap this incredible diverse ecosystem with the incredible diverse human settlement that happened in the Amazon and this close interaction between both, we would understand the forest that we have now. Because without this human settlement and this diverse system, we cannot understand what is the forest today. Or we’ll see it as a forest and don’t understand the role that human settlements had, so we won’t understand the role of future cities in the Amazon. Or we just see it as, you know, these cities like if they’re like spaceships in the middle of the forest that we can simply eradicate. No, you know, no, no, no, no, no. If we look at both of them, nature and society as separate in the Amazon, we are not understanding which is the most beautiful thing and probably the most beautiful thing we have to learn from the Amazon. And then again, I go to this DNA, the future DNA.

Greg Clark

And then Tatiana, by the way, you’ve said that brilliantly, as usual. But then you’ve also said that there’s another urban phenomena happening in the Amazon, and you’ve called it the boomtowns. Why don’t you just say a little bit more about what these boomtowns are, what’s driving them, and to what extent you see them as being part of that ecosystem you’ve just been describing or are they parasites upon it?

Tatiana Schor

The boomtowns is a very general name for a lot of processes that is going on on the ground in the different countries. But basically the boomtowns, when I think about them, they’re more related to the economic processes and the economic drivers that the modern state in the countries have. So they are towns that they have developed or they became spontaneously or they were incorporated to old towns that have much more like a modern, dynamic and economic world. They are in the Amazon, which gives them a challenge because we hear a lot of this, like it’s very difficult for you to introduce cultures from other areas into the Amazon because as we were saying, it’s so intrinsically knitted that for you to like, cut this cloth, you know, this tissue, it’s hard. It’s possible to do. You’re able to do this a little bit. But at the same time, you’re also changing the people that have come from other places. It’s not that these people also have to change when they come to the forest. So these boomtowns, they’re much more related and they’re much more looking into the forest or as something they have to deal with so that they can modernise and get scale and production and produce more. Something that is really, really hard for them to recognise is other aspects such as beauty. You know, a lot of people that migrate into Amazonia, when they look into Amazonia say, ‘ we have to clean these fields’ you know? The idea of cleaning, the idea of organising the landscape. They don’t recognise what is forest and what is not forest. Because if you look into the Amazon forest from outside, it’s a very dark shade of green. So you have to have other eyes to understand that there’s a lot of shades of greens, and these shades of greens are important for many things. When you don’t know, you just see this like a barrier, like a wall of green that you have to clear, you have to occupy. You have to understand the people that feel that because biodiversity is beautiful until the moment you’re attacked by a lot of ants and they eat everything and they eat your house. That’s the myth of why Airão moved was because of the ants. The best book to understand cities in the Amazon is A Hundred Years of Solitude. Do you want to understand cities in the Amazon? That’s the best book. Much before A Hundred Years of Solitude was published, Novo Airão changed place because of the ants. And they say the ants went with it. So there’s a lot of ants in Novo Airão. So it’s still there. So not only ants, people don’t like spiders, don’t like serpents, and insects in general. So, they say let’s clean and clean.

Caitlin Morrissey

May we ask you to tell us a little bit about how the urbanisation of Amazonian cities, recognising their plurality, is different to the urbanisation of other cities in South America, Latin America, and the other nation states in the Amazon region?

Tatiana Schor

I think a lot of this organisation of Amazonian cities, what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to put is, look, we have something special. It’s not easy, you know, we know it’s not easy but we have something special. If we really want to talk about the conservation and protection of Amazonian peoples, we have to understand this dynamic. It’s not something outside. It’s not external. Before, maybe five years ago, not so far away, when you talked about cities in the Amazon, that was never in the conversation with conservation. That was never in the conversation with protection of vulnerable peoples. Never. Never. I can guarantee. Never. Every time I tried to put this in the story, was,’ no, we’re not going to talk about cities. Cities? No. Manaus? No.’ But what we’re doing now, and I think this has been recognised by other people also. One, because we have more and more studies about Amazonian cities. So also like when I started working on Amazonian cities, it was just like two or three people. You couldn’t carry them in a hat. Now you have more people, including because we had a lot of students and we worked a lot, all of us, in the Amazon. We didn’t let others say about the Amazon cities without knowing. Every time everybody says Amazonia has only small cities, I always say no. So what we’re trying to put is what is central.

If we really want conservation, and I believe in that, it’s central to understand the cities. It’s central to think of the future of the cities and its people. It’s important not to think of the cities as separate. So a lot of discussions like there’s urban, rural, no. In Amazonia, there is no urban rural. You know, you can say the cities and the interior. You can say the cities and the outer lands, the hinterland, anything, but not urban. It’s not a dichotomy. I think that’s important. It’s not an easy pledge. And it’s not an easy pledge to throw it even further on into innovation. Now everybody’s talking about resilient infrastructure, climate change, sustainable infrastructure, nature-based solutions. Okay, that’s a good pace. But we need to go over that. We need to understand the forest as our infrastructure and ask what is this DNA of the future? What do we want from that? Because we’re still very much locked into the vision of the city in separate of the forest.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you. What you’ve just said really brings us onto the question about what is it that is needed for Amazonian cities to be more sustainable and prosperous, while also supporting the Amazonian identities and human flourishing in these places? And obviously, you’ve just started to talk a bit about that and what is needed in, for example, conservation efforts to actually recognise the city from the Amazonian vantage point. Is there anything else that you’d like to add to that? And you mentioned that even over the last five years, there’s been perhaps more recognition of cities. Has there been any other sorts of trends or changes in that time? And sort of where is that conversation going as you see it?

Tatiana Schor

I think we still need to look into the cities within itself, you know, like the city now just this week was launched a study and everybody’s talking about it that the most slums, the cities with the biggest percentage of slums, favelas in Brazil are Amazonia cities. Manaus, Belém, Macapá, you know. If you look into all the indicators for sanitation, for access to water, to access to energy quality, they’re all in Amazonian cities. So basically, they’ve become very poor, very poor, in the midst of this richness. As they grow, and cities start to grow a lot, and I think maybe with this new climate normalisation of droughts in Amazonia, maybe the cities will grow more. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. We’re going to have to follow that. Because what I see is not only a migratory movement from the smaller communities to the smaller cities, but maybe from the smaller cities to the bigger cities because at least these past two years, these past two big droughts, there was a serious water shortage. There was a serious shortage of energy, which is based on diesel. If these cities are going to grow more, and they are already in the situation they are, you know, all this cosmology will die, you know. Forget about it. Then we’re just talking about Latin American cities with violence, with poverty, with inequality, with concentration of richness. We are already losing the opportunity of reversing the status quo of this one. And with that, we will lose the forest. I think if we lose the cities, we surely will lose the forest.

If we understand this intrinsic relationship between the human settlements, cities and the forests, not as two, but as one complete, and that is very important and that’s what archaeology is showing us, and if we lose this intrinsic relationship due to extreme poverty, you know, extreme lack of point zero access to sanitation, electricity, education, a good city. If  these Amazonian cities become what they are becoming, the big ones at least, highest poverty rates, violence, homicides, we are losing the cities. And with the cities, this intrinsic relationship is broken. Once it’s broken, things tend to go all over the place and there we will lose the forest. We will lose the possibility to conserve the forest if we don’t understand this intrinsic role that the cities have in maintaining the forest. It’s not that I’m saying something that is from today. What archaeology is showing is that if we look at the Amazonian forest as an infrastructure which was built and related to the human settlements in the Amazon, you know, it’s not new. We’ve been breaking it throughout the centuries and maybe we’re at the last point where we will, in fact, break this relation, and we will lose the cities, and we will lose the forests.

Greg Clark

So it sounds to me like you’re saying very, very clearly that these cities are part of the ecosystem of the forest and the river. And these Cities have their challenges. Some of these cities are sick. Some of these cities are undernourished. Some of these cities are at risk of being in a serious decline. But because these cities are connected to the ecosystem of the forest, if we allow the cities to die or to become permanently sick, they will make the river and the forest sick as well.

Tatiana Schor

Yeah, it’s like if we allow them to separate themselves from the forest, you know, we will lose this ability of thinking into the future of how this connectivity was important for the forest. The cities and the human settlements are an intrinsic part of the biome. It’s not something that just appeared in the last 500 years. I think what archaeology is showing us is if we understand Amazonia as biodiverse as it is, it is its intrinsic relation with all the beings that are in the forest, and we’re part of the beings, we’re part of the animals that are in the forest, right? So we’re part of this making, the seed dispersion by birds and mammals, we’re mammals. We’re mammals with the ability of doing things. So we not only disperse seeds in an aleatory way, but we produce forest. Now we’re trying to copy that with agroforestry systems, which is really cool, you know, because that’s what we’ve done. So if you look at the castanhas, if you look at the distribution of açai, if you look at the distribution of ipês, what archaeology is saying, if you see a lot of ipês or castanhas together, if you had an helicopter and go in, you will find human reminiscence of big civilisations. That’s what they’re saying. This is completely different than what we were taught in school, right, Greg? Of what was the Amazon, like the virgin forest. We know already it’s not a virgin forest. It’s not the lung of the world. No, it’s another entity.

Greg Clark

Imagine Tatiana then that we’re talking to the rest of the world about why Amazon cities might need something different from what other cities have had in Latin America, in Europe, in North America, Africa, Asia. What is it that they need that’s different that we need the world to understand?

Tatiana Schor

I think that the world needs to understand that if we want to, if we’re as preoccupied with the global climate, as we say we are, and if we’re preoccupied with the maintenance of life, honour, as we say we are, and if we have this enormous, still big and important forest, standing forest, and in this forest we understand that the cities have a part and have an important role in maintaining these forests and protecting the people, we need to look at these cities differently. One, we need to incorporate them in any conversation about conservation of the forest and climate conservation and biodiversity conservation. They’re not an exception. They’re part of the solution, I think. Then how we do that, we have to look into each city, and we have to look into each context, we have to have patience of listening. I think that’s the way.

Caitlin Morrissey

And more broadly, how well do you think that the world now understands the Amazon?

Tatiana Schor

That’s not well understood. I think there’s a lot to be done in terms of understanding what that is. There’s still not a lot of understanding. There’s a lot of romanticism and there’s a lot of people, and it’s not their fault. They’ve grown and reading in books and understanding and talking about the virgin forest. It’s still very mystical. I think that is something which is good, but it also brings a little bit out of reality and what the people wish of the Amazon. Sometimes you talk to people, and it feels as if they wish you could simply just take the cities away and just leave the forest.

Caitlin Morrissey

What is the stories or messages that the Amazon region should be telling the world? And what is the benefit of telling them and perhaps some of the risks too?

Tatiana Schor

I think, something may be very harsh, but I think you should say just look around yourself. Do you want us to become like you’ve become? And then people say, your cities are horrible. They’re not nice cities to be in. It’s good to talk about them from a distance. But when you’re in there, it’s not easy. So how can we make those cities good to live? This has been a big fight before we started. In Tabatinga it’s difficult to live there. It’s far away, it’s hot, there’s no sidewalks, there’s no cultural benefits. The people that are there, they’re very resilient people. They’re very resilient. That’s why Indigenous people stay in the city but have their places in the villages because they have to come and go, come and go, come and go. The way these cities have become due to this last 400 years, 300 years, 100 years progress, is they’ve become very tense places. Amazonian cities are tense. It consumes your energy if you go into one of them. This has to be reversed. They have to be good cities. They’re good if you know how to see them. But if you don’t know how to see them, they’re not good.