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Amid Devastation in the Amazon, Diamonds Were Their Best Hope

News Feed
Wednesday, December 11, 2024

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years. “New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforestThe diamond was so big the women said it resembled “God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” “Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors. He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.” The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right. The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.) The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism. Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years. “New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforestThe diamond was so big the women said it resembled “God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” “Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors. He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.” The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right. The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.) The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism. Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

An editorial in the June 1, 1852 edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.

This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.

The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.

In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.

As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultra-wealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost fifteen years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.


Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet.

Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.

Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.

The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than twenty years.

“New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.

In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.

In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.


The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-natives people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforest

“Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors.

He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, the diamonds could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”

As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians roughly sixty years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.

When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.”

The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory…near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “if we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right.

The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.)

The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of indigenous peoples—“our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism.

Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?

Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.

At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of indigenous people.

Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “in the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.

As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “if the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Measles Misinformation Is on the Rise – and Americans Are Hearing It, Survey Finds

Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely as Democrats to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease.

By Arthur Allen | KFF Health NewsWhile the most serious measles epidemic in a decade has led to the deaths of two children and spread to nearly 30 states with no signs of letting up, beliefs about the safety of the measles vaccine and the threat of the disease are sharply polarized, fed by the anti-vaccine views of the country’s seniormost health official.About two-thirds of Republican-leaning parents are unaware of an uptick in measles cases this year while about two-thirds of Democratic ones knew about it, according to a KFF survey released Wednesday.Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely (1 in 5) as Democrats (1 in 10) to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease, according to the survey of 1,380 U.S. adults.Some 35% of Republicans answering the survey, which was conducted April 8-15 online and by telephone, said the discredited theory linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism was definitely or probably true – compared with just 10% of Democrats.Get Midday Must-Reads in Your InboxFive essential stories, expertly curated, to keep you informed on your lunch break.Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S. News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy.The trends are roughly the same as KFF reported in a June 2023 survey. But in the new poll, 3 in 10 parents erroneously believed that vitamin A can prevent measles infections, a theory Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought into play since taking office during the measles outbreak.“The most alarming thing about the survey is that we’re seeing an uptick in the share of people who have heard these claims,” said co-author Ashley Kirzinger, associate director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.“It’s not that more people are believing the autism theory, but more and more people are hearing about it,” Kirzinger said. Since doubts about vaccine safety directly reduce parents’ vaccination of their children, “that shows how important it is for actual information to be part of the media landscape,” she said.“This is what one would expect when people are confused by conflicting messages coming from people in positions of authority,” said Kelly Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.org, a vaccination advocacy group.Numerous scientific studies have established no link between any vaccine and autism. But Kennedy has ordered HHS to undertake an investigation of possible environmental contributors to autism, promising to have “some of the answers” behind an increase in the incidence of the condition by September.The deepening Republican skepticism toward vaccines makes it hard for accurate information to break through in many parts of the nation, said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer at The Immunization Partnership, in Houston.Lakshmanan on April 23 was to present a paper on countering anti-vaccine activism to the World Vaccine Congress in Washington. It was based on a survey that found that in the Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma state assemblies, lawmakers with medical professions were among those least likely to support public health measures.“There is a political layer that influences these lawmakers,” she said. When lawmakers invite vaccine opponents to testify at legislative hearings, for example, it feeds a deluge of misinformation that is difficult to counter, she said.Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Ladera Ranch, California, which was hit by a 2014-15 measles outbreak that started in Disneyland, said fear of measles and tighter California state restrictions on vaccine exemptions had staved off new infections in his Orange County community.“The biggest downside of measles vaccines is that they work really well. Everyone gets vaccinated, no one gets measles, everyone forgets about measles,” he said. “But when it comes back, they realize there are kids getting really sick and potentially dying in my community, and everyone says, ‘Holy crap; we better vaccinate!’”Ball treated three very sick children with measles in 2015. Afterward his practice stopped seeing unvaccinated patients. “We had had babies exposed in our waiting room,” he said. “We had disease spreading in our office, which was not cool.”Although two otherwise healthy young girls died of measles during the Texas outbreak, “people still aren’t scared of the disease,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has seen a few cases.But the deaths “have created more angst, based on the number of calls I’m getting from parents trying to vaccinate their 4-month-old and 6-month-old babies,” Offit said. Children generally get their first measles shot at age 1, because it tends not to produce full immunity if given at a younger age.KFF Health News’ Jackie Fortiér contributed to this report.This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF. It was originally published on April 23, 2025, and has been republished with permission.

Evangelical churches in Indiana turn to solar and sustainability as an expression of faith

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

Will the next pope be liberal or conservative? Neither.

If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change […]

Pope Francis meets students at Portugal’s Catholic University on August 3, 2023, in Lisbon for World Youth Day, an international Catholic rally inaugurated by St. John Paul II to invigorate young people in their faith. | Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change church doctrine, didn’t dramatically alter the Church’s teachings, and didn’t fundamentally disrupt the bedrock of Catholic belief. Catholics still believe there is one God who exists as three divine persons, that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that sin is still a thing. Only men can serve in the priesthood, life still begins at conception, and faith is lived through both prayer and good works. And yet it still feels like Pope Francis transformed the Church — breathing life into a 2,000-year-old institution by making it a player in current events, updating some of its bureaucracy to better respond to earthly affairs, and recentering the Church’s focus on the principle that it is open to all, but especially concerned with the least well off and marginalized in society. With Francis gone, how should we think of his legacy? Was he really the radical progressive revolutionary some on the American political right cast him as? And will his successor follow in his footsteps?   To try to neatly place Francis on the US political spectrum is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s precisely because Francis and his potential successors defy our ability to categorize their legacies within our worldly, partisan, and tribalistic categories that it’s not very useful to use labels like “liberal” and “conservative.” Those things mean very different things within the Church versus outside of it. Instead, it’s more helpful to realize just how much Francis changed the Church’s tone and posturing toward openness and care for the least well off — and how he set up to Church to continue in that direction after he’s gone. He was neither liberal nor conservative: He was a bridge to the future who made the Church more relevant, without betraying its core teachings. That starting point will be critical for reading and understanding the next few weeks of papal news and speculation — especially as poorly sourced viral charts and infographics that lack context spread on social media in an attempt to explain what comes next. Revisiting Francis’s papacy Francis’s papacy is a prime example of how unhelpful it is to try to think of popes, and the Church, along the right-left political spectrum we’re used to thinking of in Western democracies.  When he was elected in 2013, Francis was a bit of an enigma. Progressives cautioned each other not to get too hopeful, while conservatives were wary about how open he would be to changing the Church’s public presence and social teachings. Before being elected pope, he was described as more traditional — not as activist as some of his Latin American peers who embraced progressive, socialist-adjacent liberation theology and intervened in political developments in Argentina, for example. He was orthodox and “uncompromising” on issues related to the right to life (euthanasia, the death penalty, and abortion) and on the role of women in the church, and advocated for clergy to embrace austerity and humility. And yet he was known to take unorthodox approaches to his ministry: advocating for the poor and the oppressed, and expressing openness to other religions in Argentina. He would bring that mix of views to his papacy. The following decade would see the Church undergo few changes in theological or doctrinal teachings, and yet it still appeared as though it was dramatically breaking with the past. That duality was in part because Francis was essentially both a conservative and a liberal, by American standards, at the same time, as Catholic writer James T. Keane argued in 2021. Francis was anti-abortion, critical of gender theory, opposed to ordaining women, and opposed to marriage for same-sex couples, while also welcoming the LGBTQ community, fiercely criticizing capitalism, unabashedly defending immigrants, opposing the death penalty, and advocating for environmentalism and care for the planet. That was how Francis functioned as a bridge between the traditionalism of his predecessors and a Church able to embrace modernity. And that’s also why he had so many critics: He was both too liberal and radical, and not progressive or bold enough. Francis used the Church’s unchanging foundational teachings and beliefs to respond to the crises of the 21st century and to consistently push for a “both-and” approach to social issues, endorsing “conservative”-coded teachings while adding on more focus to social justice issues that hadn’t been the traditionally associated with the church. That’s the approach he took when critiquing consumerism, modern capitalism, and “throwaway culture,” for example, employing the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life to attack abortion rights, promote environmentalism, and criticize neo-liberal economics. None of those issues required dramatic changes to the Church’s religious or theological teachings. But they did involve moving the church beyond older debates — such as abortion, contraception, and marriage — and into other moral quandaries: economics, immigration, war, and climate change. And he spoke plainly about these debates in public, as when he responded, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about LGBTQ Catholics or said he wishes that hell is “empty.” Still, he reinforced that softer, more inquisitive and humble church tone with restructuring and reforms within the church bureaucracy — essentially setting the church up for a continued march along this path. Nearly 80 percent of the cardinals who are eligible to vote in a papal conclave were appointed by Francis — some 108 of 135 members of the College of Cardinals who can vote, per the Vatican itself. Most don’t align on any consistent ideological spectrum, having vastly different beliefs about the role of the Church, how the Church’s internal workings should operate, and what the Church’s social stances should be — that’s partially why it’s risky to read into and interpret projections about “wings” or ideological “factions” among the cardinal-electors as if they are a parliament or house of Congress. There will naturally be speculation, given who Francis appointed as cardinals, that his successor will be non-European and less traditional. But as Francis himself showed through his papacy, the church has the benefit of time and taking the long view on social issues. He reminded Catholics that concern for the poor and oppressed must be just as central to the Church’s presence in the world as any age-old culture war issue. And to try to apply to popes and the Church the political labels and sets of beliefs we use in America is pointless.

Grassroots activists who took on corruption and corporate power share 2025 Goldman prize

Seven winners of environmental prize include Amazonian river campaigner and Tunisian who fought against organised waste traffickingIndigenous river campaigner from Peru honouredGrassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency. Continue reading...

Grassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency.This year’s recipients include Semia Gharbi, a scientist and environmental educator from Tunisia, who took on an organised waste trafficking network that led to more than 40 arrests, including 26 Tunisian officials and 16 Italians with ties to the illegal trade.Semia Gharbi campaigning in Tunisia. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeGharbi, 57, headed a public campaign demanding accountability after an Italian company was found to have shipped hundreds of containers of household garbage to Tunisia to dump in its overfilled landfill sites, rather than the recyclable plastic it had declared it was shipping.Gharbi lobbied lawmakers, compiled dossiers for UN experts and helped organise media coverage in both countries. Eventually, 6,000 tonnes of illegally exported household waste was shipped back to Italy in February 2022, and the scandal spurred the EU to close some loopholes governing international waste shipping.Not far away in the Canary Islands, Carlos Mallo Molina helped lead another sophisticated effort to prevent the construction of a large recreational boat and ferry terminal on the island of Tenerife that threatened to damage Spain’s most important marine reserve.Carlos Mallo Molina. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe tourism gravy train can seem impossible to derail, but in 2018 Mallo swapped his career as a civil engineer to stop the sprawling Fonsalía port, which threatened the 170,000-acre biodiverse protected area that provides vital habitat for endangered sea turtles, whales, giant squid and blue sharks.As with Gharbi in Tunisia, education played a big role in the campaign’s success and included developing a virtual scuba dive into the threatened marine areas and a children’s book about a sea turtle searching for seagrass in the Canary Islands. After three years of pressure backed by international environmental groups, divers and residents, the government cancelled construction of the port, safeguarding the only whale heritage site in European territorial waters.“It’s been a tough year for both people and the planet,” said Jennifer Goldman Wallis, vice-president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation. “There’s so much that worries us, stresses us, outrages us, and keeps us divided … these environmental leaders and teachers – and the global environmental community that supports them – are the antidote.”For the past 36 years, the Goldman prize has honoured environmental defenders from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions, recognising their commitment and achievements in the face of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. To date, 233 winners from 98 nations have been awarded the prize. Many have gone on to hold positions in governments, as heads of state, nonprofit leaders, and as Nobel prize laureates.Three Goldman recipients have been killed, including the 2015 winner from Honduras, the Indigenous Lenca leader Berta Cáceres, whose death in 2016 was orchestrated by executives of an internationally financed dam company whose project she helped stall.Environmental and land rights defenders often persist in drawn-out efforts to secure clean water and air for their communities and future generations – despite facing threats including online harassment, bogus criminal charges, and sometimes physical violence. More than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed globally between 2012 and 2023, according to an observatory run by the charity Global Witness.Latin America remains the most dangerous place to defend the environment but a range of repressive tactics are increasingly being used to silence activists across Asia, the US, the UK and the EU.In the US, Laurene Allen was recognised for her extraordinary leadership, which culminated in a plastics plant being closed in 2024 after two decades of leaking toxic forever chemicals into the air, soil and water supplies in the small town of Merrimack, New Hampshire. The 62-year-old social worker turned water protector developed the town’s local campaign into a statewide and national network to address Pfas contamination, helping persuade the Biden administration to establish the first federal drinking water standard for forever chemicals.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionLaurene Allen. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThree of this year’s Goldman recipients were involved in battles to save two rivers thousands of miles apart – in Peru and Albania – which both led to landmark victories.Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika not only helped stop construction of a hydroelectric dam on the 167-mile Vjosa River, but their decade-long campaign led to the Albanian government declaring it a wild river national park.Guri, 37, a social worker, and Nika, 39, a biologist and ecologist, garnered support from scientists, lawyers, EU parliamentarians and celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, for the new national park – the first in Europe to protect a wild river. This historic designation protects the Vjosa and its three tributaries, which are among the last remaining free-flowing undammed rivers in Europe.In Peru, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 56, led the Indigenous Kukama women’s association to a landmark court victory that granted the 1,000-mile Marañón River legal personhood, with the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination.Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe Marañón River and its tributaries are the life veins of Peru’s tropical rainforests and support 75% of its tropical wetlands – but also flow through lands containing some of the South American country’s biggest oil and gas fields. The court ordered the Peruvian government to stop violating the rivers’ rights, and take immediate action to prevent future oil spills.The Kukama people, who believe their ancestors reside on the riverbed, were recognised by the court as stewards of the great Marañón.This year’s oldest winner was Batmunkh Luvsandash from Mongolia, an 81-year-old former electrical engineer whose anti-mining activism has led to 200,000 acres of the East Gobi desert being protected from the world’s insatiable appetite for metal minerals.

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