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How a Fantasy Oil Train May Help the Supreme Court Gut a Major Environmental Law

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024

The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the US has seen since the 1970s. But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws. Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration. Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.   “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws.” But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.” The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields: Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the US. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the US Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case. “We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.” Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped. None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public. In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done. Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County. In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.   As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by Petitioners—including the 2018 feasibility study—there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the Railway.” “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio—a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project. DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it because in the three years since the IPO, it has done…nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment. Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies? During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers. “You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement. Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.) While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station. There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them. “This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year.

The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels […]

The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the US has seen since the 1970s.

But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws.

Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration.

Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.  

“The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws.”

But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.”

The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields:

Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the US. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the US Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case.

“We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.”

Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped.

None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public.

In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done.

Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County.

In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.  

As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by Petitioners—including the 2018 feasibility study—there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the Railway.”

“If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.”

Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio—a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project.

DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it because in the three years since the IPO, it has done…nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment.

Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.

Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies?

During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers.

“You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement.

Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.)

While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station.

There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them.

“This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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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.

Activism
Agriculture
Business

20 Environmental Books to Inspire You in the Year Ahead

Our latest group of reviews showcases books that remind us about what we’re saving — and why we do it. The post 20 Environmental Books to Inspire You in the Year Ahead appeared first on The Revelator.

Everywhere I go this holiday season, I hear the same refrain: People are desperate for something to inspire them. That’s why I’ve spent the past several weeks with my head in a series of books, all offering insight into the natural world and how to protect it. Here are 20 environmental books published in 2024 for readers of all ages and experience. They offer vision, knowledge, and a sense of wonder — necessary to help us build a better planet no matter who’s in the White House in the year to come. You’ll find my capsule reviews below, along with the books’ official descriptions. The links for each title go to the official publishers’ pages, but you should also be able to find any of these books through your local booksellers or libraries. A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes From Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown Quite possibly the best ecology book I’ve ever read. An eye-opening memoir that has me looking for life — and often finding it — amidst the broken places in my suburban neighborhood. From the publisher: “During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property — abandoned and full of litter and debris — was an unlikely site for a home. Brown had become fascinated with these empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity and embarked on a 20-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, and how we can heal ourselves by healing the Earth.” Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell A marvelous, melancholy, celebratory book from an internationally bestselling author. Rundell writes brief, moving essays about nearly two dozen imperiled species (or groups of species), with each chapter digging deep into literature (historic, cultural, and scientific) to present a portrait of why these animals are worth saving. She only has personal experience with a couple of these species, but she’s met a pangolin, which is more than most of us can say. “This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes — to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.” H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z by Elizabeth Kolbert Kolbert (best known from The New Yorker and her book The Sixth Extinction) is among our most important and insightful climate journalists. Here she speak to a younger audience in a way that’s sure to click with the next generation. “In H Is for Hope, Elizabeth Kolbert investigates the landscape of climate change — from “A”, for Svante Arrhenius, who created the world’s first climate model in 1894, to “Z”, for the Colorado River Basin, ground zero for climate change in the United States. Along the way she looks at Greta Thunburg’s “blah blah blah” speech (“B”), learns to fly an all-electric plane (“E”), experiments with the effects of extreme temperatures on the human body (“T”), and struggles with the deep uncertainty of the future of climate change (“U”).” Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World by Phaidon Editors This book is a virtual forest. It’s a beautiful collection of hundreds of artistic interpretations of trees, executed in every conceivable medium, with mini-essays putting each image in context. This is what coffee table books were invented for. “Spanning continents and cultures, Tree reflects the diversity of its subject, depicting giant sequoias, cherry blossoms, palms, poplars, ginkgoes and other species found across Earth’s forest biomes, in a wide-ranging selection of visuals dating from Ancient Greece to the present day. Curated by an international panel of botanists, naturalists, art historians and other experts, the images expand the definition of botanical art, together forming a vibrant, vital homage to the natural world.” You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón My favorite poetry book of the year. “Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by 50 of our most celebrated contemporary writers.” We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson A powerful, important book that illuminates global environmental crises and cries out for change. It’s gotten a lot of notice (Reese Witherspoon added it to her book club), so I’m hoping it will generate some action. “Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest — one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s — Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders… Two decades later, Nemonte has emerged as one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She has spearheaded the alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest. Her message is as sharp as a spear — honed by her experiences battling loggers, miners, oil companies and missionaries.” We Loved It All by Lydia Millet A unique memoir from the author of novels like A Children’s Bible (as well as a fellow Center for Biological Diversity employee and The Revelator’s primary copyeditor). The narrative ebbs and flows like the ocean, sharing waves of memories interspersed with eddies of conservation facts and history. Each aspect illuminates the other, and the result is a book that shines a light on pain and wonder. “Emerging from Millet’s quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy, We Loved it All marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others” — the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with exquisite accounts of nonhumans and arresting meditations on the power of story to shape the future.” A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery by Diane K Boyd An eyewitness to history, Boyd unspools an amazing account that makes me wonder what wolf conservation will look like in another 40 years (not to mention the next four). “Called the Jane Goodall of wolves, world-renowned wildlife biologist Diane Boyd has spent four decades studying and advocating for wolves in the wilds of Montana near Glacier National Park… She faced down grizzly bears, mountain lions, wolverines — and the occasional trapper — as she stalked her quarry: a handful of wolves that were making their way south from Canada into Montana…. In this captivating book, Boyd takes the reader on a wild ride from the early days of wolf research to the present-day challenges of wolf management across the globe, highlighting her interactions with an apex predator that captured her heart and her undying admiration. Her writing resonates with her indomitable spirit as she explores the intricate balance of human and wolf coexistence.” Amphibious Soul by Craig Foster A stunning memoir, a testament to the natural world, and a perfect example of why printed books still outshine e-books (although you’ll still need a phone or tablet to access the online extras). “Foster explores his struggles to remain present to life when a disconnection from nature and the demands of his professional life begin to deaden his senses. And his own reliance on nature’s rejuvenating spiritual power is put to the test when catastrophe strikes close to home.” Animal Climate Heroes by Alison Pearce Stevens, illustrated by Jason Ford This profusely illustrated science book presents young readers with engaging facts about four amazing animals. It’s a perfect one-two punch, encouraging species conservation and saving the planet in one joyful package. “In our left corner we have the meanest villain that’s ever existed. Responsible for rising seas and loss of biodiversity, it’s climate change ready to wreak havoc on the Earth. But in our right corner? We have four superheroes ready to save the day! Forest elephants protect our forests by trampling trees. Whales boost ocean health with their massive poo-nados. Sea otters defend kelp forests from purple invaders. And echidnas bury tons of soil to stop climate change. But we can’t leave them in this fight alone. We need to protect our heroes who, in return, defend our planet. Get ready to learn all about these four legged, and two-flippered, creatures and how YOU can be a climate hero too!” Wildflower Emily: A Story About Young Emily Dickinson by Lydia Corry An unexpected joy of a graphic novel that brings classic poetry (and a classic poet) to new life. “Follow along as we delve into Emily Dickinson’s childhood, revealing a young girl desperate to go out exploring — to meet the flowers in their own homes. Wade through tall grasses to gather butterfly weed and goldenrod, the air alive with the ‘buccaneers of buzz.’ And, don’t forget to keep a hot potato in your pocket to keep your fingers warm.” The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan Literary legend meets feathered friends. Tan’s impassioned prose is complemented by her surprisingly accomplished illustrations. We’re lucky this joyful and meditative book exists. “In 2016 Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the world: Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater — an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.” Bay Area Wildlife: An Irreverent Guide by Jeff Miller You need to have a lot of reverence and respect for wildlife to write a book like this fun guide, which centers around one region of California but provides details on species that can be found in many other places. Even though I don’t hail from the Bay area or expect to visit soon, I found this to be an entertaining, informative, and occasionally angry celebration of wildlife and a vibrant part of the country. (Full disclosure: Miller is a fellow employee of the Center for Biological Diversity.) “Jeff Miller’s quirky guide to the coolest animal neighbors in the Bay Area will have you gawking at elk, whooping with cranes, and crowning yourself a crossing guard for newts before you know it. Join Jeff on a local safari to meet more than sixty species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and insects, and discover the fascinating and sometimes bizarre mating, feeding, and athletic antics of our most charismatic animals.” Be a Nature Explorer! by Peter Wohlleben I need to meet more young parents so I can watch them and their families put this book to the test. “Whether you are in the forest, in your own backyard, or in the city, there are so many exciting ways to engage with nature — and forester Peter Wohlleben has the best ideas for doing so. Kids will learn how to press flowers, harvest algae, skip stones, observe spiders, and even how to build their own tiny sailboat.” Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster by Eric A. Cheezum Cryptozoology (the study of wildlife that may or may not exist, like Bigfoot) can be a great lens through which to examine environmental issues like pollution and habitat loss. This book brings the mythical to life and gives it surprising relevance to the very real environmental problems we face. “In the summer of 1978, residents along the Virginia side of the Potomac River were startled by sightings of a strange creature lurking in the water. Eventually dubbed Chessie, this elusive sea serpent tantalized reporters and the public alike, always slipping away just out of reach… As the bay transitioned from a hub of labor-intensive activities to a recreational destination, Chessie became a symbol with multilayered meaning. Environmentalists seized the opportunity to educate the public on the bay’s importance as an ecosystem, while tourists and suburbanites found solace in connecting culturally with the bay. Meanwhile, watermen faced the unsettling prospect of a declining way of life.” Phantom Border: A Personal Reconnaissance of Contemporary Germany by Kerstin Lange Regular readers may remember Lange’s Revelator essay about Germany’s “Green Belt” and what it represents for humans and nature. That essay just scratched the surface — this book-length examination takes us on a powerful journey through the Green Belt’s history, culture, and ecology. “During the four decades the Iron Curtain divided Germany and the European continent, over 1,200 rare animal and plant species found refuge in the border strip — today’s Grünes Band or Green Belt. Lange uses the 1,400-kilometer-long German Green Belt as a map for a personal reconnaissance of her home country and as a prism through which to investigate the transformation of the border, along with the societal reverberations of the division and its aftermath.” The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice by Simon Parkin A vital history book uncovering forgotten heroes faced with making choices few of us have had to make. It has painful relevance in a world where monocultures increasingly squeeze out rare and potentially valuable plants and crop varieties and the threat of war lurks around every corner. “The riveting, untold true story of the botanists at the world’s first seed bank who faced an impossible choice during the Siege of Leningrad: eat the collection to prevent starvation, or protect their life’s work to help end world hunger?” The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer The kind of book that belongs on every end-of-year gift-book list — if only because it celebrates the exact opposite of the season’s crass commercialization. “As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth — its abundance of sweet, juicy berries — to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival.” Notes From an Island by Tove Jansson with paintings by Tuulikki Pietilä, translated by Thomas Teal Long available in Europe, this brief but illuminating tome by the author of the delightful Moomintroll series is finally available on our shores. It’s half diary and half memoir — a love letter to a remote, rocky island, its challenging ecosystem, and its two human inhabitants. (I’m still upset about what they did to Big Boulder, though.) “In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson … raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for 30 summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island’s flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson’s work, most famously in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin. Tove’s signature spare, quirky prose, and Tooti’s subtle ink washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty, a chronicle of living peacefully in nature and observing the island’s ecology and character.” What to Wear and Why: Your Guilt-Free Guide to Sustainable Fashion by Tiffanie Darke We don’t usually cover books that focus on individual action, since we prefer to take a more systematic approach, but there’s no more basic way to help the planet than by looking at the clothes on our backs — especially during this season of endless consumerism. “Reportedly, the clothing industry produces 80 billion garments a year, employs 15% of the world’s population, exploits labor, and seriously pollutes the environment. However, we as consumers have the power to make a difference with the clothing choices we make. Top fashion writer turned sustainability activist Tiffanie Darke sheds light on the unsustainable practices and immense environmental impact of the fashion industry and presents a compelling argument for why transformative change is urgently needed.” Otherworldly Antarctica: Ice, Rock, and Wind at the Polar Extreme by Edmund Stump A richly illustrated book by a scientist who spent four decades exploring the southernmost continent, seeing things few people will ever see. His stories and photographs bring that remote world to life (and remind us that we could lose this hidden beauty in the decades to come). “With stories of Stump’s forty years of journeys and science, Otherworldly Antarctica contains 130 original color photographs, complemented by watercolors and sketches by artist Marlene Hill Donnelly… Many of Stump’s breathtaking images are aerial shots taken from the planes and helicopters that brought him to the interior. More were shot from vantages gained by climbing the mountains he studied. Some were taken from the summits of peaks. Many are of places no one had set foot before — or has since. All seem both permanent and precarious, connecting this otherworld to our fragile own.” That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives. Scroll down to find our “Republish” button The post 20 Environmental Books to Inspire You in the Year Ahead appeared first on The Revelator.

Activism
Agriculture
Animals

Suggested Viewing

Jetty Cats

Jetty Cats explores contemporary animal rights issues through a focus on a feral cat colony that has survived on a rocky, seaside jetty in Southern California for decades. There is an ongoing debate over feral cat colonies involving advocates who support the trap, neuter, and return -- or "TNR" -- model of management, and those who argue that trapping and euthanizing the cats is more humane. This documentary’s point-of-view supports the TNR model and the related “no-kill” animal shelter policy, and features an exclusive interview with Richard Avanzino, the "Father" of the no-kill movement.

Animals
Government
Activism

The Green Amendment: New Mexico, Part One

Join Maya van Rossum, Founder of Green Amendments For The Generations, in her exploration of New Mexico’s biggest environmental issues and the role a NM Green Amendment could play in the fight for environmental justice with: Senator Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, legislative sponsor of the New Mexico Green Amendment; Emma Rose Cohen, CEO/Founder of the sustainable business Final; Beata Tsosie-Peña, Environmental Health and Justice Program Coordinator for Tewa Women United; Artemisio Romero y Carver, founding member of Youth United for Climate Crisis Action (YUCCA); and Dee George and Penny Aucoin, fracking waste accident victims impacted residents of Otis, NM.

Government
Activism
Documentary

The Great Divide

Twenty minutes outside of Visalia, amidst the seemingly endless rows of citrus trees, Yolanda Cuevas packs enchiladas with shredded chicken for her husband Benjamin, their adult daughters and two teenaged grandchildren in her modest single-story home. Their house is the first one off the main drag, one of 83 lining the two crumbling roads that comprise the tiny town of Tooleville. Yolanda must wash the tomatoes for the salsa first in the sink and then again with a splash of clean water from a 5-gallon jug. The process is arduous, and though she’s resigned to do it, she’s not happy about it. Along with Tooleville’s several hundred other residents, Yolanda’s family has survived on bi-weekly delivery of water to their homes for the past 12 years. It’s an annoyance for the family, and it’s expensive for the State of California, which has been paying for the replacement water since the discovery of Chromium-6 (the same chemical featured in Erin Brokovich) in the water. The simpler solution would be to consolidate the town’s water system with that of its larger, affluent neighbor to the west, Exeter. And for this purpose, Yolanda has become a reluctant activist, attending community meetings in Tooleville and lobbying for consolidation at Exeter’s city council meetings under the expert guidance of Pedro Hernandez, an organizer with the Leadership Counsel. While Exeter has resisted the consolidation since it was first proposed, organizers like Pedro feel that this could be the year Exeter finally succumbs to the growing community pressure and brings Tooleville into the fold. The decision will echo around the Central Valley and across the state, as hundreds of similar community water systems find themselves in a nearly identical predicament.

Water
Activism
Documentary

In His Own Home

Heavily armed officers of the University of Florida police department in Gainesville, FL, responding to a 911 call from a neighbor who heard screams, break into the campus apartment of Ghanaian graduate student, Kofi Adu-Brempong. Clad in SWAT gear and ready to attack, they see the disabled doctoral student, sitting with a metal table leg in his hand and within a minute of entry, shoot the unarmed man in the face. Adu-Brempong, who because of childhood polio, needed a cane to walk, and had been suffering from mental illness, now has severe facial injuries, and is charged with resisting arrest. He is guarded outside his hospital door, his legs shackled together when going to the bathroom. The officer who shoots Kofi, and who had previously been caught cruising through town throwing eggs at residents of a Black neighborhood, is not suspended or fired. Student protests lead the administration to drop charges but calls for revoking SWAT-like teams on campus go unheard. Kofi’s shooting is not an isolated incident but part of an ongoing pattern of police brutality against Blacks and a stark reminder of the dangers of increasingly militarized campuses nationwide. In His Own Home came out of outrage by a small group of concerned community members committed to seeing social justice happen on a local level. This documentary is an educational and organizing tool, especially calling for our communities to be safe from violence by racist and over-armed police.

Social Justice
Health
Activism

The Whale Guitar: Instrument of Change

Inspired by Herman Melville's epic tale, "Moby-Dick or The Whale", a late-blooming singer/songwriter and former toy designer, Jen Long, acts on a startling vision and commissions the design and build of a remarkable custom electric guitar. It's body is "The Whale" itself as it snags the mad Captain Ahab in the tangled ropes of his own obsession, and prepares to launch a boat of his whalers to their doom. The entire guitar reinterprets Melville's tale as an Anthropocene climate change warning, with the whale representing the seas and storms of climate change arising on this "third day" of late stage capitalism. Hundreds of guitarists, including J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, have played and signed this "Instrument of Change" to amplify the alarm to turn our ship of over-production and over-consumption around while there is still time. As the embroidered strap featuring Starbuck's last words implores: "oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist."

Music
Activism
Climate

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