The Severed Lifeline: Rebuilding a Fragmented Amazon

About this episode

This episode explores efforts to reconnect fragmented ecosystems in the Amazon through the work of Indigenous communities and conservationists.

In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I follow the broken edges of the forest—the roads cutting through Indigenous territories, the degraded corridors between ecosystems, the unprotected landscapes sitting just outside national park boundaries—and the people stitching it back together. Juliana Martins, a road ecologist and PhD candidate at Imperial College London, has spent years working alongside the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon, whose nightly closure of the BR-174 highway has produced the longest-running citizen science roadkill monitoring project in road ecology history and measurably higher wildlife diversity inside their territory than outside it. Ben Valks of the Black Jaguar Foundation is six years into one of the largest rewilding projects on earth: a 2,600-kilometer biodiversity corridor reconnecting the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna through a 17-step restoration approach, farmer by farmer, across a landscape the size of the distance from Boston to Miami. And Bruno Paladines of Nature and Culture International helped unite six Ecuadorian provinces and Indigenous nationalities under a single conservation agreement, the…

People in this episode

Host: Brooke Mitchell

Guests: Juliana Martins, Ben Valks, Bruno Paladines

Topics covered

• rewilding
• biodiversity
• Indigenous communities
• conservation
• road ecology
• landscape restoration

Keywords

• Amazon rainforest
• biodiversity corridor
• roadkill monitoring
• Indigenous territories
• landscape scale
• conservation agreement

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Imperial College London, Black Jaguar Foundation, Nature and Culture International

Places: Brazil, Amazon, Cerrado, Ecuador, Boston, Miami

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