vox--2019-12-30--The controversy over Bret Stephens’s Jewish genius column, explained

Any conservative columnist writing for the mostly liberal audience of the New York Times op-ed page is bound to attract their share of controversy. But Bret Stephens’s latest column, on the subject of Jewish genius, drew so much criticism that it now appears on the website with an editor’s note saying it was a mistake to cite a study whose co-author has a long track record of racist statements.  According to the note, “Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views,” but citing the study left “an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent.”  That’s an interesting media controversy in its own right and a prime example of the dangers of discussing complicated science based on casual googling. But the controversy is so intense both because of growing concern about anti-Semitism and because time and again arguments about Jewish achievement seem to morph into efforts to paint blacks as inferior and efforts to help the poor as misguided.  One of the many oddities of this story is that the citation Stephens got in hot water for included factual assertions:  The 2005 paper in question — “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence” — advances a number of controversial claims, and one of its authors, the late Henry Harpending, has a long track record of advancing racist anti-black views in other contexts. Interestingly, the paper that Stephens and the Times opinion section is disavowing received a somewhat favorable write-up from the New York Times at the time from Nicholas Wade. Wade was a science correspondent for the paper who eventually left to write a book about race and IQ that geneticist David Reich characterized — again in the New York Times — as advancing the “unfounded and irresponsible claim” that “genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.”  All that said, the fact that across all categories and nationalities over 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish is both striking and true and can be verified by sources other than a paper co-authored by a notorious racist.  Stephens’s column, as written, did not dwell on the ideas advanced in “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” but he did repeatedly make specific reference to Ashkenazi Jews — those descended from Jews living in the Holy Roman Empire about a thousand years ago, rather than Jews of Spanish or Middle Eastern origin — which have since been changed to simply refer to Jews. The controversial paper, however, is specifically about Ashkenazim.  The paper by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending is not exactly about geniuses. It asks why Ashkenazi Jews have IQs that are higher on average than the general population. They are also clearly only interested in Ashkenazi Jews, writing: “It is noteworthy that non-Ashkenazi Jews do not have high average IQ test scores, nor are they overrepresented in cognitively demanding fields.”  The theory they advance about this is that compared to other medieval peoples, Ashkenazi Jews were unusually likely to be concentrated in occupations where intelligence was likely to lead to financial success. Early on, for example, they write that “the Ashkenazim specialized more and more in one occupation, finance, left particularly open to them because of the Christian prohibition of usury.” Later in Poland, Jews branched out from moneylending and “became tax-farmers, toll-farmers, estate managers, and they ran mills and taverns.”  Under premodern conditions, richer people had more surviving children than poorer people. So the unique occupational profile of the Ashkenazi community, allegedly, created a unique situation in which elevated intelligence led to elevated earnings which led to elevated reproductive success.  They then further speculate that there is a relationship between the genetic underpinnings of high intelligence and the genetic underpinnings of sphingolipid disorders — Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and mucolipidosis type IV (MLIV) — all of which are unusually common among Ashkenazi Jews.  As these are highly deadly diseases, you would ordinarily expect them to be bred out of a population. But if the genes that cause these illnesses are also associated with high intelligence, then under social conditions where high intelligence is intensely associated with reproductive success they might survive anyway.  This is a multi-step argument that could be questioned at virtually every turn. And notably, the fact that Jewish people have won a lot of Nobel Prizes is not the crux of this paper. Indeed, though I’m not sure whether this makes Stephens’s decision to cite the paper better or worse, he actually advances a very different account of why there are so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners.  Stephens’s column is titled “The Secrets of Jewish Genius.” While he did originally write that he believed Ashkenazi Jews are smarter on average than the average person, his thesis is that this intelligence advantage does not explain Jewish super-achievers.  “Aside from perennial nature-or-nurture questions, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose,” Stephens writes. “One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship. One can also apply brilliance in the service of a mistake or a crime, like managing a planned economy or robbing a bank.”  Stephens instead sketches a cultural explanation for Jewish genius, arguing that “there is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree” and also “the never-quite-comfortable status of Jews in places where they are the minority — intimately familiar with the customs of the country while maintaining a critical distance from them.” He then pivots to what’s essentially a complaint about political correctness, Trumpian nationalists, and Palestinian rights activists, mixed with alarm at recent anti-Semitic assaults in the New York area.  At its best, the American university can still be a place of relentless intellectual challenge rather than ideological conformity and social groupthink. At its best, the United States can still be the country that respects, and sometimes rewards, all manner of heresies that outrage polite society and contradict established belief. At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they aren’t. They are representational. The West, however, is not at its best. It’s no surprise that Jew hatred has made a comeback, albeit under new guises. Anti-Zionism has taken the place of anti-Semitism as a political program directed against Jews. Globalists have taken the place of rootless cosmopolitans as the shadowy agents of economic iniquity. Jews have been murdered by white nationalists and black “Hebrews.” Hate crimes against Orthodox Jews have become an almost daily fact of life in New York City.  Since Stephens ends up not advancing a genetic theory of Jewish genius, it’s a bit unclear why he originally cited a paper that does. And it’s very unclear why his first draft repeatedly singled out Ashkenazi Jews, who are the subject of the genetics paper but who do not differ from other Jews in the cultural factors he mentions.  It’s also worth saying that if you accept the validity of modern IQ metrics at all (read here, here, and here for more on that), then Ashkenazi Jews having moderately higher average IQs is probably a fully adequate explanation for winning so many Nobel Prizes.  People who write grants and organize scientific experiments have not been incredibly eager to organize credible studies that would definitively answer whether or not it’s true that Ashkenazi Jews have above-average IQs. What we have instead is a series of non-ideal studies, often undertaken by somewhat disreputable researchers who appear motivated by a larger prurient interest in race science.  Brian Ferguson, a professor in the department of anthropology and sociology at Rutgers-Newark, concluded from his view of the fragmentary evidence that, “Taking all the information together, it is fair to say that most, though not all, studies give Ashkenazi descendants a higher IQ than non-Jewish whites. How much? Take your pick.”  An important thing to note, however, is that small average differences can have big impacts on outliers. Many people, for example, struggle intuitively to understand why a 3- or 4-degrees Celsius increase in average global temperatures could be catastrophic given that temperatures swing by that much all the time.  The reason, as shown here, is that even a small rightward shift of a bell curve leads to a wildly disproportionate increase in the number of extreme climate events.  That’s a chart about climate change specifically, but the same logic applies broadly to all kinds of domains. A difference in average intelligence levels that is not particularly large or noteworthy could lead to a drastic difference in the share of the group that is capable of doing Nobel-level work.  It’s possible to believe that IQ science is all bunk or that the studies showing an Ashkenazi IQ advantage are wrong, but if you believe those studies, they provide a fully adequate explanation for the phenomenon Stephens was investigating. There’s no need to posit a separate quality of thinking differently.  Indeed, the reason the “Natural History” authors brought up the Nobel Prizes in the first place is that the large number of Jewish achievement outliers is clearly true. The evidence in favor of higher average Ashkenazi intelligence, by contrast, is somewhat fragmentary and disputable so they were trying to bring the geniuses in to bolster support for their premise. Stephens appears not to have really understood the argument of the paper he was citing, though of course what got him in hot water was citing race scientists in the first place rather than mangling their statistical evidence.  The fraught history of Jews, genes, and IQ  Most disfavored racial or ethnic groups are stereotyped as inferior.  But as Tara Isabella-Burton has written for Vox, anti-Semitism typically casts Jews as puppet masters who are working together to manipulate world events. In part, this simply serves a necessary structural role in racist narratives. If non-whites are so inferior, why worry so much about them? The trope of a group of Jewish schemers who undermine the master race helps make the story work, and in somewhat modified form can be pressed into service as an explanation for why Israel can prevail against numerically much larger groups of Arabs.  Under the circumstances, Jews are typically not eager to hear the “good news” about our genes.  But beyond that, arguments about Ashkenazi intelligence that have no particular policy relevance are typically the thin edge of the wedge of an argument that ends up being about black inferiority. The Times’s note says that “after publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, [Harpending] who died in 2016, promoted racist views.”  Political scientist Charles Murray, for example, takes a strong interest in questions about Ashkenazi IQ. But he’s better known for his work promoting the idea that spending money on education and social assistance is at best useless and at worst actively harmful because it encourages low-intelligence people to breed.  Murray also, and relatedly, believes that efforts to attribute gaps in black/white outcomes to racism are fundamentally misguided. All of this, however, is clearly wrong — not as a matter of genetics but as a matter of policy analysis. There is overwhelming evidence, for example, of racial discrimination in hiring, that affirmative action admissions policies lead to better outcomes for black students, that social assistance programs genuinely help kids, that pollution has important cognitive consequences, and that generally speaking genetics-driven pessimism about improving society is mistaken.  Murray-style views of these pressing policy questions have been broadly influential in the United States. We have, for example, by far the highest relative child poverty rate in the Western world because the United States is unique among our peers in not providing cash assistance to parents of young children.  The stakes are quite high in the argument over whether outcomes for African Americans and people who grow up in poor households represent remediable matters of social justice or genetic realities that it would be counterproductive to try to solve.  The stakes in the Ashkenazi intelligence debate, by contrast, are a little bit hard to discern. The debate appears to arise primarily because people with an anti-black agenda see it as a useful entry point into race science. This provokes antipathy from progressives less because of strongly held views about occupational choice in premodern Poland than because they see where the argument is heading over the long term.


The Wounded Mind

There’s something fundamentally wrong with how the world is right now. Don’t you see it – feel it? We are a species with noble character, with a great spirit, and with a sacred soul. In our hearts we wish only for the betterment of all people; for love and justice and communion. And yet what we see going on in the world is nothing less than complete madness. We have to say it exactly as it is – there is a sickness going on and this pathogen is being perpetrated on a vast scale.  I propose the possibility for the existence of some kind of infection/invasion/contagion that produces a form of mental ‘madness’ that is so normalized within us that we hardly recognize its presence. That is, this ‘presence’ has embedded itself into our various forms of social conditioning (or perhaps even produces this conditioning) in order to veil its existence. This normalized madness then usurps genuine thinking patterns, with the result that when everyone shares the collective psychosis then the madness of the world appears to be a ‘normal feature’ of human civilization. And those people who are ‘awake’ to the genuine human spirit and mind are considered the crazies – the anomalies – as the following tale shows:  There was once a wise and powerful king who ruled in a remote city of a far kingdom. And the king was feared for both his might and his love of wisdom. At the heart of the city was a well whose water was cool and crystalline, and all the inhabitants drank from this well, even the king and his courtiers, because there was no other well in the city. One night, while everyone was asleep, a witch entered the city and poured seven drops of a strange liquid into the well, and said: ‘From now on, anyone who drinks this water will go crazy.’ The next morning all the inhabitants drank the water from the well, except the king and his lord chamberlain, and very soon everyone went mad, as the witch had foretold. During that day, all people went through the narrow streets and public places whispering to each other:   ‘The king is mad. Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Naturally, we cannot be ruled by a mad king. We must dethrone him!’ That night, the king ordered a golden cup of water from the well to be brought to him. And when they brought the cup the king and his lord chamberlain drank heavily from it. Soon after that there was great rejoicing in that distant city of a far kingdom because the king and his lord chamberlain had regained their reason.  The King and his love of wisdom (Genuine Mind) was corrupted by the poisonous drops of the witch’s liquid (virus/pathogen) that resulted in the mass epidemic of craziness (psychosis/Wounded Mind). This corrupted mind then became the dominant narrative that influenced social behavior. This Wounded Mind is like a contagion that infects.  Our collective ‘cultural mind’ is continually being shaped by dominant social-cultural narratives that normalize our mental and emotional behavioral patterns. These norms are then transferred into cultural myths that serve to transmit and reinforce these mass-minded belief systems. We end up validating our own corrupted thinking through unconscious affirmations. Once this seed of psychosis is planted then it aims to propagate and strengthen through diversions and manifestations that legitimate its own ‘logical’ existence. Like a mental cancer it ingratiates itself into our own neural pathways as an insider rather than an outsider so that we fail to notice its toxic presence. Yet there remains a niggling sense of something being ‘not-quite-right’ deep within any sensible/sensitive person.  This strange reality of ours becomes internalized so that we adapt to a form of ‘normality’ and anyone who speaks up or questions this ‘paradigm of normality’ is considered either odd, eccentric or, at worst, crazy. A more recent category for such people is now to be designated as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ which is a quick brush to dismiss people with ideas or thinking contrary to this ‘norm.’ And those people who appear to accept and encourage such norms are quickly brought ‘into the fold’ and supported in their career paths. The majority of those manifesting the Wounded Mind are not in psychiatric care but running most of our social, political, and financial institutions. Positions of great power necessitate their own specific mindset, one that is generally provided by the corrupted mind.  The presence of the Wounded Mind is like a sickness of the soul, and it manifests as a disturbance in the collective unconscious. Just like any other virus or pathogen, it seeks to spread itself by infecting as many carriers as possible. Those people who carry the Wounded Mind (whether knowingly or not) act as transmitters and amplifiers for it, strengthening its frequency within the collective nonlocal field of consciousness. A collective possession is what we refer to as a psychic epidemic, or a disturbance in the field. Such disturbances can have varying affects upon people’s mental health and well-being.  People who suffer from a Wounded Mind may carry it as an ‘undefinable’ trauma within them, and it is common to turn to alcoholism or drug dependencies as a way of coping (or of escape). When a person feels stressed or traumatized they are like an open wound for further mental invasion. And it can be quite subtle at first as our modern societies have devised endless ways for our interference. We are distracted to look away from our own minds and thus miss the psycho-pathogen in action. As a person further integrates the Wounded Mind they may find themselves vulnerable to victimization; such as through social harassment and bullying (especially online nowadays), or as addicted-consumers of sexual deviancy, pornography, and socially-sanctioned extreme experiences. The monk Thomas Merton said that our modern societies suffer from a crisis of sanity:  If all modern institutions are infected by a corrupted system of mental thinking patterns then, as Merton suggests, this instability will be amplified and made worse. Individual neuroses are given institutional sanction and support within a culture that has based its social norms upon such irrationalities. The irrational has broken through and implanted itself as the rational standard rule. It is perhaps little wonder that people can be so susceptible to this mental pathogen when it comes to us dressed up in sheep’s clothing. As is always the case, those people most vulnerable are usually those who are conditioned to authority and/or passivity. This trait, unfortunately, is one that is first implanted through compulsory schooling.  Likewise, people who are easily influenced by external opinions, and whom are prone to group-thinking, are amongst the first to give away their mental independence to external sources. The virus of the Wounded Mind preys upon such ‘group-think’ individuals as they are the mass open playing fields for psychic epidemics. The ‘mass mind’ of humanity helps in the transmission and proliferation of the psychic pathogen – the wounded mind. As the famous psychiatrist R.D. Laing once said – ‘The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man…normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.’2 Conscious awareness is perhaps our greatest antidote.  If we are to see human history from a wider perspective then it is important we view major events, human actions, propaganda, social disturbances, power struggles, and the rest, from this standpoint of the wounded mind. The modern human mind has been formed from many traits that include greed, lust, ambition, materialism, insincerity, and a ‘split’ personality. In all, these are traits that mark a lack of authenticity. The Wounded Mind seeks to develop greater degrees of inauthenticity and lack of empathy within the individual. We can see such personalities walking across the world stage.  The peril of the Wounded Mind is that resistance may also help to spread it. That is, people who often start out resisting and fighting against this corrupted mindset often find themselves adopting it’s values in order to survive. It’s the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ type of thinking. And this cliché too is very likely to have been a product of the Wounded Mind intending to verify itself. It may seem that we are struggling to awaken against our very own spell of sleep.  It has often been said – by mystics, sages, and wisdom traditions – that humanity is collectively asleep. Our ignorance over our condition, and the absence of real knowledge, indicates we are asleep. Similarly, the Gnostics viewed humanity as being ‘asleep’ under a trance – a form of material spell – that has severed us from contact with a genuine divine source. Instead, we are ruled by a false or ‘flawed god,’ a demiurge, that has malevolent intentions to keep us trapped within the material realms.  The more we breed this Wounded Mind within our societies and cultures the more people will behave and live like automatons. We will live within a tighter range of conditioned stimuli that programs specific opinions and thinking patterns that validate the pathogen. A person who is more conditioned to obedience is more susceptible to receive the mental virus. Perhaps this is why our modern societies are establishing rigid orders of control and obedience, such as when we travel, pass through airports, etc. It can be likened to a preparation for automated behavior as a requisite for an automated mind. The mystic George Gurdjieff wrote:  By adopting the mentality of the Wounded Mind, we participate in our own suppression and further the behavior of an automaton. We need to recognize that many of our incumbent social systems are set-up to corroborate and reinforce the consensus mind-set. Any genuine resistance cannot come from any ‘mass movement’ but only from those persons who can think and act independently.  It is important to recognize that the Wounded Mind is a field phenomenon, and that our own mind and thoughts do not exist securely guarded within our heads. Since we are all interconnected within the non-local field, we are all susceptible to the infection of this predatory virus. The first step we can take is to accept the possibility that the pathogen virus exists. The Gnostic text The Gospel of Philip says: ‘So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes…’ The danger lies in our distraction.  We must guard against being diverted away from our authenticity and lured into the modern distractions of hedonistic pleasure-seeking, greed and materialism, and the running after shallow satisfactions. After all, this illusive psychosis offers false promises. Our modern cultures appear to want to prevent the majority of people from pursuing their own genuine developmental paths. This is no doubt because our capitalist-consumer based societies require a regular mass of workers and consumers whom live a regulated, predictable, and conformist life.  Yet it is now necessary to see the Wounded Mind for what it is – recognition and acknowledgement is key. If we cannot bring harmony and good sense to the world around us, then we should at least bring it upon ourselves. We are the wounded ones who can become our own wounded healers.  Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax?, The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.  Extracted from the book Healing the Wounded Mind: The Psychosis of the Modern World and the Search for the Self.  1 Cited in Levy, Paul. 2013. Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. Berkeley,  2 Cited in Levy, Paul. 2013. Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. Berkeley,  3 Ouspensky, PD. 1950. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p316  Like Waking Times on Facebook. Follow Waking Times on Twitter.


vox--2019-01-15--The Pussy Grabber Plays puts the stories of Trumps accusers onstage

“The Pussy Grabber Plays” puts the stories of Trump’s accusers onstage

After Natasha Stoynoff wrote that Donald Trump had forcibly kissed her during a 2005 visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, she says she was approached many times to tell her story again.  She always said no, until she heard from Kate Pines and Sharyn Rothstein. The two wanted to create a play bringing together women who had accused Trump of misconduct, allowing them to tell their own stories.  “Anything I’d been approached to do before was sort of me on my own, and I just didn’t want to be out there on my own,” Stoynoff told me. “If I was with a group, I felt a little bit stronger.”  She decided to work with Pines and Rothstein, along with a team of playwrights and six other women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, to create The Pussy Grabber Plays, which premiered on Monday in New York.  The plays tell the stories of women, including Rachel Crooks, Tasha Dixon, and Jessica Leeds, who haven’t seen the kind of closure that the #MeToo movement has brought for some people. Most of the plays do not depict sexual misconduct by Trump — as a character, he never appears onstage. Instead, they deal with the women’s decisions to come forward, and what happened afterward — for many, jobs or friendships lost, and for some, a sense of catharsis and healing.  More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct — most, like Stoynoff, coming forward in fall 2016, after the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about his ability to grab women “by the pussy” was released. Since then, some have called for Congress to investigate the misconduct allegations against Trump. One, Crooks, ran for state legislature in Ohio, eventually losing to the Republican incumbent.  But so far, Trump has faced essentially no consequences in connection with the many allegations. The stories of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who say they had consensual affairs with Trump, have captured more public attention, in part because of nondisclosure agreements that implicate the president and his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, in campaign finance violations. (Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison.) And as women and men have come forward to report sexual misconduct by men from producer Harvey Weinstein to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the accusations against Trump have sometimes taken a back seat. President Trump has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct.  When the #MeToo movement was gaining steam, Pussy Grabber Plays creators Pines and Rothstein realized that although the women who spoke up with allegations against Trump had laid the groundwork for the movement in many ways, “their stories had been forgotten,” Rothstein said.  Pines and Rothstein aimed to change that by pairing the women with playwrights to craft short plays based on their experiences. On Monday night, a team of actors — including Dixon, who played herself — performed the resulting plays at Joe’s Pub in Lower Manhattan.  The creators said they hope the plays will one day be performed around the country, perhaps reaching people who would not otherwise hear stories like Stoynoff’s. If that happens, audiences will be reminded not just of the allegations against Trump, but of the difficulties women face in speaking up about sexual misconduct, and the consequences that can await them when they do. If The Pussy Grabber Plays has a unifying message, it’s that the decision to come forward is a fraught one that can wreak havoc on a survivor’s life, even as it brings a measure of relief.  “We have nothing to gain from this,” Dixon told me of her decision to speak out about Trump. “You don’t get paid anything — you’re just trying to do the right thing.”  The short segments that make up The Pussy Grabber Plays take a variety of forms, from the comedic to the serious.  Jessica Leeds, who says Trump groped her on an airplane in the 1970s, and playwright Bess Wohl collaborated on an absurdist take on Leeds’s 2017 appearance on Megyn Kelly Today, during which Leeds described her experience with Trump and Kelly asked if her decision to come forward was politically motivated. In the play, the Today set is reimagined as a hellscape where vampire bats flap overhead; hailstones “the size of Labradors” fall from the sky; Matt Lauer, a family of chinchillas, and a giant Oreo cookie lurk in the wings; and “the only way out is through.”  In a more somber segment, actress Clea Alsip plays Karena Virginia, a yoga instructor who says Trump grabbed her breast in 1998 as she waited for a car service in New York — “he held it like you might pick up a box of Tic Tacs,” Alsip says in the play. Isabel Keating plays her mother, a proper Englishwoman who learned from her own mother never to speak up or make trouble — “who likes a woman who’s coarse or loud?” Together, the two begin to break down the layers of social conditioning that keep them from speaking up about their lives. “It’s not fair that that’s what you were taught,” Virginia tells her mother.  Most of the women, like Virginia, were portrayed by actresses in their plays. An exception was Tasha Dixon, who played herself in “Five Beauty Queens Walk Into a Bar,” written by Julia Brownell. Dixon, an actress and former Miss Arizona, says that when she was a Miss USA contestant in 2001, Trump came backstage while she and other young women were changing.  “He just came strolling right in,” she told CBSLA in 2016. “Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.”  Dixon told me that after she came forward, she got angry emails from people who hadn’t really listened to her story. Some assumed that she was accusing Trump of sexual assault, though she never did, and said things like, “how can you say he touched you,” Dixon said.  “It’s really disheartening to realize people aren’t even listening to what you have to say,” she said.  “Five Beauty Queens Walk Into a Bar” takes a somewhat lighthearted view of Dixon’s experience, as Dixon chats during the 2016 presidential campaign with four other former Miss USA contestants who are trying to decide whether they should speak out about Trump too. After she came forward, Dixon tells them, reporters gathered outside her door: “It was like Notting Hill, but scary.”  Understandably, the others are concerned about what will happen if they speak publicly. The former Miss Michigan worries about how the decision might impact her at work. The former Miss Maine, who is gay, says she’s “not sure I want Fox News to brand me a ‘lesbian beauty queen.’”  “Five Beauty Queens Walk Into a Bar” ends on a note of foreboding. “He can’t win, right?” Dixon asks.  “He might, though,” the former Miss Michigan replies.  The Pussy Grabber Plays is one of many #MeToo-inspired works of art proposed or announced in recent months. Several of the most high-profile announcements, however, have been by men.  Producer Ryan Murphy, for instance, told the New Yorker last year that he wants to create a Black Mirror-style anthology show based on #MeToo, called Consent, in which “every episode would explore a different story, starting with an insidery account of the Weinstein Company.” Director Brian de Palma, meanwhile, told the French publication Le Parisien that he was at work on a film inspired by the allegations against Weinstein.  “It will be a horror movie, with a sexual aggressor,” he said.  These proposals have inspired some criticism. “If Murphy is actually interested in dealing with the horrors of sexual assault, abuse, harassment, and rape, instead of using those stories for his own profit, perhaps he should start by putting in the hard work to help stop the very real systemic horrors that are still happening to women and men every single day,” wrote Emily Kirkpatrick at i-D.  The prospect of powerful Hollywood men making money from stories of other powerful Hollywood men’s misconduct doesn’t feel much like the change many in the entertainment industry, and elsewhere, have been demanding. But increasingly, women are coming forward with projects that deal with sexual misconduct, like a planned #MeToo docuseries spearheaded by Jennifer Lawrence and former E! anchor Catt Sadler.  The Pussy Grabber Plays is part of that emerging tradition, with the added distinction that many of the women involved actually have the experience of coming forward with allegations of misconduct by a powerful man. “No one can know a story as well as someone who’s actually gone through it,” Dixon said.  Pines and Rothstein hope their play benefits survivors around the country and even the world, they said. To that end, they’re donating the proceeds from Monday night’s event to the New York Women’s Foundation Fund for the #MeToo Movement and Allies, which provides grants to organizations working against sexual violence, with a focus on activists of color.  They have also made the play available royalty-free and hope it will be performed widely. They were inspired by projects like The Vagina Monologues and the Every 28 Hours Plays, short plays that address police violence and the contemporary civil rights movement, they said. They have already received a number of requests from others who want to put on a production of The Pussy Grabber Plays, they said.  Monday night, however, was unique in that six of the seven women whose stories were featured were in the audience for the show. It was a chance for the audience to applaud them, not just their stories — at the end of each play, the cast introduced the woman who inspired it. Some of the women were meeting each other that night for the first time, Stoynoff said. At the curtain call, some embraced onstage.  “It was surreal to see someone play me,” Stoynoff told me after the show. Asked what she thought Trump’s reaction might be to the production, she said, “he likes people who are tough, so I hope he appreciates what I wrote.”  The Pussy Grabber Plays ended on a note of defiance. In “The Interview,” written by Stoynoff and playwright Melissa Li, actress Lora Lee Gayer related Stoynoff’s experience with Trump in song. The chorus: “Fuck you! Fuck you!” She closed the show with both middle fingers raised.


thevaccinereaction--2019-11-23--Samoa’s Measles Outbreak and Response

Samoa’s Measles Outbreak and Response

More than 1,000 cases of measles have been reported in Samoa this year. The government has declared a state of emergency and closed all schools, including the nation’s only university. Samoan health authorities are developing plans to implement compulsory MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) vaccinations on Nov. 25, 2019.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8  According to the AFP, when declaring the state of emergency the Samoan government issued a statement that, “MMR vaccinations for members of the public who have not yet received a vaccination injection is now a mandatory legal requirement for all of Samoa.” It is unclear how the MMR vaccinations will be administered or what types of sanctions people will face for refusing to comply.9  Sixteen deaths, including at least 14 children under five years of age, have been attributed to the measles outbreak and Samoa’s Director General of Health, who expressed concern that the epidemic may worsen. “The way it is going now and the poor [vaccination] coverage, we are anticipating the worst to come,” said Dr. Leausa Toleafoa Take Naseri. He estimated that 66 percent of the country’s population of 200,000 people has been vaccinated against measles.3 4 5 6 7 8  The relatively low rate of vaccination in Samoa has been cited by that country’s Ministry of Health as the main reason for the 16 deaths.6  But is this necessarily true?  However, there is some question about whether the high measles mortality in Samoa this year is solely due to the 66 percent vaccination rate among Samoans. While the fact that only two-thirds of Samoa’s population has been vaccinated for measles may explain the high incidence and spread of the disease, there may be other factors that account for the high mortality rate associated with Samoa’s current measles outbreak.10 11  While measles is a highly contagious infection, it very rarely causes death or disability in the United States and other developed nations.11 12 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that there are one or two associated deaths for every 1,000 cases of measles.10 11 However, this year in the U.S. there have been 1,261 confirmed measles cases reported in 31 states as of Nov. 7, 2019 and no deaths.13  Why such a disparity between the U.S. and Samoa in the number of deaths associated with measles? One reason reason might be the wide disparity in social conditions between the two countries.  One reason might be the wide disparity in socio-economic conditions between the two countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO):  There is also the issue of the impact of diet on the susceptibility of people to become severely ill or die from infectious diseases like measles. Malnutrition, for example, is a significant and growing problem in Samoa, particularly among the country’s children.15 16 17  The nonprofit organization The Borgen Project, which focuses on poverty and hunger around the world, says on its website:  Malnutrition in Samoa occurs in a variety of forms. In Samoa, the most common form of malnutrition is Protein-Energy Malnutrition, or P.E.M. Because P.E.M. is caused by an inadequate protein intake, it has its greatest impact on children, due to the low intake of protein in their diet.15 As it does in the rest of the world, malnutrition leads to many health problems in Samoa. In 2014, four children died and 19 were hospitalized as a result of diarrhea outbreaks. A ministry of health report connected poor dietary practices, and the use of Devondale milk as a substitute for both adequate baby formula and poor nutritional practices, to pediatric ward visits during the outbreak.15 The impact of malnutrition on Samoa, and particularly on the children of Samoa, is shocking.15  Given the malnutrition among Samoan children, it is reasonable to assume that part of the reason for the high measles mortality rate in that country’s ongoing measles outbreak has do with environmental factors that raise risks for measles complications. A study by Peter R. Belamarich, MD published in the journal Pediatrics in Review noted:  Clearly, the nutritional status of a country matters when it comes to lowering mortality from measles. This has certainly been the case in the United States, where measles mortality rates in the U.S. dropped by more than 90 percent during the first half of the 20th century prior to the introduction of the first measles vaccine in 1963.19  Deaths from measles had decreased from 21 deaths per 1000 reported cases during 1911-1912 to less than one death per 1000 reported cases in 1953-1962. This improved measles morality rate was owed to several factors unrelated to the measles vaccine, including better sanitation and living conditions, as well as better nutrition and improved access to health care.19


thesun--2019-08-24--Patsy Palmer on surviving the party years her A-list life in Malibu and Biancas explosive return t

Patsy Palmer on surviving the party years, her A-list life in Malibu and Bianca’s explosive return to EastEnders

ANYONE looking at Patsy Palmer’s Instagram feed with its blue skies, sun-kissed beaches and smiley, happy people all living their very best lives would be hard-pushed not to feel a pang of envy.  She is, by all accounts, having a ball in California, a world away from the one she left behind when she and husband Richard Merkell moved the family from London to America five years ago in search of a new beginning.  “We just wanted to try something new,” she says. “I’d always loved Ibiza and being away for long summers, and maybe subconsciously I just really needed a break. Like, a big break.”  She paints an idyllic picture of life in Malibu, just west of Los Angeles, where her days are filled with yoga, meditation, walking and family time.  She has a sideline career as a DJ and hangs out with A-list friends such as Mary J Blige and Cindy Crawford, although she very modestly plays down those connections.  “It’s such a small industry, so you do meet people who say: ‘Oh, do you know so and so?’ And it’s just like that. I don’t have any real friends who are A-list and who I’m sitting having dinner with.  "It’s not like that. I just know people and everyone knows everyone. We have a pretty normal life in an extraordinary place.”  Patsy is softly spoken, thoughtful and so Zen that talking to her is a slightly dreamlike experience.  Her focus is very much on the present rather than dwelling on the past: being present is a theme she keeps coming back to, as well as the importance of self-care and mindfulness.  It’s almost impossible to reconcile this serenity today with the Patsy who partied her way through the ’90s and survived years of heavy drinking and drug-taking.  “I look back and think: ‘I was so young,’” she says. “I’m grateful that I’m alive and I got through it. It feels so foreign now, I’m so far removed from it. All I’ve got is right now. Whatever has gone on in the past is finished. I can’t even entertain it. It’s gone.  “I’ve done so much work around it, I’ve had so much therapy and now I feel my life is more balanced than it’s ever been.”  When asked how she managed to keep a lid on the situation back then, holding down a full-time, high-profile job on EastEnders and living in the public eye while self-destructing in private, she shakes her head.  Patsy has previously described turning up on set to work straight from clubbing, still high from the drugs she’d taken.  “Imagine if there were phones back then? I was just lucky, I guess. I don’t think there’s many people who have been through their teens and 20s and not partied hard.  "And now that I’m years through it, I crave meditation and yoga and I’m so grateful for that. I couldn’t even do yoga when I was in my 20s because I couldn’t sit still.  "If someone had told me to meditate, I’d be sitting there going: ‘It’s not working for me, I don’t know what to do,’ and talking all the way through it.  "But I wouldn’t change anything. I’m grateful that I can look back on it with more of a kindness to myself.”  Was she unkind to herself in the past?  When was the turning point?  “I can’t remember, it was so long ago. It was just awful. Terrible being in that kind of mad, party atmosphere. That’s not my life any more.  “Right now is the happiest I’ve ever been. I’m always in the now and it’s the only place I want to be.”  Her face is untouched by surgery and she plans to keep it that way, preferring to embrace the ageing process head on.  “In Malibu I never really look at myself in the mirror. I get up in the morning, make breakfast, go to yoga, walk the dogs, meet my friend, have the best chat and feel f**king great.  "Then I’ll go and get my youngest from school and do something with the other kids, make food – I don’t get time to sit there looking at myself. But I know my age and we need to learn to love ourselves older.”  She despairs of the current cosmetic surgery culture and young women having Botox in their 20s.  “It should be illegal. They shouldn’t be allowed to do anything until they’ve at least earned their wrinkles.  "There should be a wrinkle assessment. Like, how much heartache have you had in your life? Have you been married, how many deaths have you experienced, how many children or grandkids do you have?  "OK, now you can have a bit of Botox, we’ll let you in. Kids going in and filling themselves up with Botox and fillers – how’s that happened?”  Patsy’s three eldest are all following their mum into the world of showbiz. Charley Palmer Rothwell, 27, from a previous relationship, is an actor, while Fenton, 19, and Emilia Merkell, 18, are in-demand models – Emilia recently graced the cover of Tatler.  Does Patsy worry about the temptations they might come across in the industry given the darker periods of her own past?  “Of course. You’ve just got to keep them alive, don’t you? My kids are lovely and I don’t want to project that stuff on to them.  "They’re doing whatever teenagers do and I can’t be under illusions about that. But it’s my story, it’s nothing to do with my kids. They are their own people.  "The most important thing for us is having dinners together as a family and trying to get together as much as possible. For me and Richard, it’s being solid and being there for them.  "We let them go, but they always know we’re there. I know it’s different for everyone, but that’s us.”    Next week sees Patsy take a break from the bliss of Malibu to return to her old stomping ground of Albert Square.  Bianca Jackson – surely one of soap’s most iconic characters – is back in Walford for adopted daughter Whitney’s wedding, marking Patsy’s third spell on the show, having originally left in 1999, returning in 2008 and then quitting again in 2014.  “It’s been so much fun and it’s like going home,” she says. “I know literally everyone from when I walk in the door at reception.”  Coming back to the UK means giving up, albeit temporarily, the anonymity she’s grown used to in America.  Stateside, she goes by her real name of Julie and can conduct her everyday business without anyone spotting her and (hilariously) shouting “RICKAAAAAAAAAY!”  “I’m a people person, but over the last few years I’ve got used to not having it so it’s kind of weird to come back to at first. In LA I can be myself, I know people have no pre-conceived ideas of who I am.  "I say my name’s Julie Merkell and we just chat about normal stuff, whereas every conversation I have in England always ends up coming back round to EastEnders: ‘Can I take a photo of you in my shop?’ ‘Can we do a selfie?’ ‘Bianca!’”  The option of returning to the soap on an ad hoc basis whenever a juicy storyline crops up has been discussed with EastEnders bosses, and Patsy is keen.  But going back full-time isn’t an option, not least because the gruelling schedule has knocked her sideways this time round.  “Even after just three weeks at work, I’m exhausted and I’m looking at them all and thinking: ‘God, this is hard.’ Me and Danny Dyer were talking about it.  "He was new when I was there last time [Danny joined the cast in 2013] and back then he was full of energy and now he’s like… I mean, he’s there six days a week, 13 hours a day banging out one scene after another.  "There’s hardly any rehearsal and they’re all trying to organise their lives and be with their families and have relationships outside of work. It’s difficult.  “No wonder I needed to do something else! But it’s great fun and I told them that they don’t realise how close they all are.  "I’ll go back to LA and I won’t keep in contact with most of them, but when I come back, I’ll slot back into those friendships where I can talk about anything and everything.”    Patsy was just 20 and a single mum to baby Charley when she landed the part of Bianca back in 1993. She didn’t tell producers she had a child, fearing it would count against her if they knew.  “I thought there was no way on earth I was going to get the job if they knew so I kept it really quiet. The industry didn’t favour people with children, especially women.  "It was very hard back then for women. So I didn’t tell them until I started working there and they were really shocked.”  After a brief marriage to producer Nick Love in the late ’90s, she settled down with cabbie Richard, who now works for an American design company, and went on to have three more children – Fenton, Emilia and Bertie, who is eight.  For their final year of education, Fenton and Emilia quit school and completed their studies via online classes in order to give them the flexibility to travel to castings as and when they needed to.  “They’d got to the age of around 16 where you’re deciding what you want to do and they just wanted to be at home getting little jobs,” says Patsy.  “They’re just being teenagers, really. They’re good-looking kids and always get asked to model, so they’re doing it. Emilia does it to pay for her car. They both have things to pay for, cos I’m not paying for it!  “Emilia likes acting and she’s a good designer. She goes to thrift shops and buys stuff and sells it online, so she’s getting a business sense, trying a bit of everything.  "Charley is doing amazingly well. He’s all over the place travelling for work. He’s always doing movies and he loves to write as well.”  Bertie is a promising athlete and hopes to be a footballer (or a “soccer player” as he puts it, having grown up in the States) and Patsy says she’s cherishing every moment with her youngest baby.  “I’m hanging on to him for dear life. He still sleeps with me in my bed. I’m hanging on to that kid. He keeps trying to go in his own bed but I’m like: ‘No, come back!’  "There wasn’t really a plan for a fourth child, but I always wanted another and it happened. I’m so glad it did.”  There have been rumours about the family starring in a Kardashian-style reality series. Patsy reveals today that they are in discussions with producers.  “Yes, it’s happening. We’re talking about it seriously with an American production company. The Kardashians are great – I know a couple of them and they’re really nice people, but we’re not them.  "We’ve got a lot more male energy in the family for a start, even the dogs are boys. And there’s me and Emilia trying to sort it all out.  “My daughter has an extremely close relationship with her father, which I love. It’s something I didn’t have personally.  "Girls need male role models whether they’re dads or friends – just honest, good men in their lives.”  A feminist, Patsy is fascinated by the social conditioning of males and females and the effect it has.  In Malibu, she single-handedly set up Commonwealth Lifestyle, a foundation that sees women come together over breakfast to connect, network, share ideas and raise money for the Downtown Women’s Center in LA.  “It’s a safe place for women because I think when we’re vulnerable it’s sometimes very difficult having that biological male energy around us.  "When people have been through stuff and they want to talk about it, they feel safer in a group of women.  "I was sure that women could do some amazing things for other women, sitting in lovely places and networking and helping each other.”  Patsy found the #MeToo movement stirred up a lot of emotion in her and triggered memories of things from the past she’d unconsciously buried.  “Men are learning a lot now, which is good. But I feel angry as a woman. All the stories brought up a lot of things for me that I’d maybe just accepted over the years.  “I think a lot of women had those realisations that: ‘OK that wasn’t acceptable’. When and why did we think that was OK?  "Past incidents from growing up came back and it was like: ‘Oh, yeah, I’d blanked that one out.’ And quite a few of the: ‘God, I must have really blanked that one out.’  “But it was also very healing for a lot of women to be able to share this stuff. It could be healing for men as well, because they had to look at their behaviour.  "I think it’s changed a lot of men. The conditioning goes back years and years and it takes a lot for us to unlearn.”  She’s still pals with her Enders co-stars Natalie Cassidy, Jessie Wallace and Tamzin Outhwaite, who she’s been staying with while filming. It’s friendships she misses most living so far away.  “You never have friendships like you do at home. I have amazing American friends, but it’s not that kind of family comfort thing, and I don’t feel I’m ever going to have that. The culture and the humour are very different.  “I love the differences, though. They’re very open-minded over there and there’s a lot more of the holistic stuff that I love going on.  "Although having said that, in the five years I’ve been away, the UK has moved on so much with loads of retreats and events and the focus on the holistic, which is great.”  There are tentative plans to write, but Patsy is just happy to see where life takes her next.  “I just want to be honest, authentic and open. If there’s something I want to do, I just don’t want to get in the zone ever again where I’m told not to do something.  “I want to experience as many things as I can without worrying about what others think. That’s what stops us – fear. It’s stopped me doing lots of things over the years. You know, thinking: ‘That’s not cool, that’s cringey, I don’t want to be seen doing that.’ It’s nonsense.”  She’s not in therapy any more, although wouldn’t hesitate to go back if she felt herself slipping again.  “If I needed help I’d ask for it. Self-love has to come first – yoga, meditation, walking, being around nature. Thankfully I’m good. I’m good with myself right now.”  GOT a story? RING The Sun on 0207 782 4104 or WHATSAPP on 07423720250 or EMAIL exclusive@the-sun.co.uk


theintercept--2019-07-06--On the Front Lines of Bolsonaros War on the Amazon Brazils Forest Communities Fight Against Clima

On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe

at the center of Latin America called the Amazon is roughly the size of Australia. Created at the beginning of the world by a smashing of tectonic plates, it was the cradle of inland seas and continental lakes. For the last several million years, it has been blanketed by a teeming tropical biome of 400 billion trees and vegetation so dense and heavy with water, it exhales a fifth of Earth’s oxygen, stores centuries of carbon, and deflects and consumes an unknown but significant amount of solar heat. Twenty percent of the world’s fresh water cycles through its rivers, plants, soils, and air. This moisture fuels and regulates multiple planet-scale systems, including the production of “rivers in the air” by evapotranspiration, a ceaseless churning flux in which the forest breathes its water into great hemispheric conveyer belts that carry it as far as the breadbaskets of Argentina and the American Midwest, where it is released as rain. In the last half-century, about one-fifth of this forest, or some 300,000 square miles, has been cut and burned in Brazil, whose borders contain almost two-thirds of the Amazon basin. This is an area larger than Texas, the U.S. state that Brazil’s denuded lands most resemble, with their post-forest landscapes of silent sunbaked pasture, bean fields, and evangelical churches. This epochal deforestation — matched by harder to quantify but similar levels of forest degradation and fragmentation — has caused measurable disruptions to regional climates and rainfall. It has set loose so much stored carbon that it has negated the forest’s benefit as a carbon sink, the world’s largest after the oceans. Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky. The catastrophic loss of another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest could happen within one generation. It’s happened before. It’s happening now.  April, a dugout powered by a small outboard motor appeared at a bend just upriver of the village of Kamarapa, a settlement of Apurinã Indians in Brazil’s southwestern Amazon. The dozen Apurinã squeezed inside the narrow craft represented the last of several expected delegations. The boats had been arriving since the previous morning, gliding to rest on muddy jetties after four, six, 10-hour journeys through the deep-water forest maze of the southern Amazonian floodplain during the winter rainy season. The Apurinã were gathered to discuss the emergency. In recent years, outlaws with chainsaws, known as land-grabbers, or grileiros, “locusts,” have been cutting deeper into Brazil’s Indigenous territories and other protected forests throughout the Amazon. Emboldened by the October election of Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s president, they are pushing more brazenly into places like Apurinã land in the roadless depths of Amazonas, the country’s biggest state and home to the world’s largest standing tracts of unbroken rainforest. “With Bolsonaro, the invasions are worse and will continue to get worse,” said Francisco Umanari, a 42-year-old Apurinã chief. “His project for the Amazon is agribusiness. Unless he is stopped, he’ll run over our rights and allow a giant invasion of the forest. The land grabs are not new, but it’s become a question of life and death.” Over the next two days, a hundred Apurinã men, women, and children met in a riverside thatched-roof meeting hall to confront their fears and make plans. They did so against the ticking of the Amazon’s monsoonal clock. In July and August, the rains will stop and the rivers will fall, adding hours and days of boat travel between villages and the nearest frontier towns. The coming of dry season also heralds the next wave of burnings. Last year, after government satellites detected smoke plumes, a group of Apurinã men arrived to find 1,000 hectares of their ancestral forest gone. “We were shocked at the size of it,” said Marcelino Da Silva, one of the men. To create pasture, the land-grabbers hacked miles of path through the forest with machetes and used motorcycles to transport long-blade chainsaws and drums of kerosene. The land being too remote for logging, they used even the most valuable trees for kindling, seeding the smoldering ashes with orchard grass dropped from helicopters. “We knew the red zone was moving toward us but didn’t expect it so fast from every direction,” said Da Silva, using the local term for the agribusiness frontier that has been advancing by fits into Amazonas from the south and east for five decades. “We know what happens when the state does nothing. We know how quickly the forest can disappear.” “The land grabs are not new, but it’s become a question of life and death.” Imazon, a Brazilian research center, reports deforestation in the first months of 2019 jumped more than 50 percent compared to the amount during the same period in 2018. Half of this deforestation has occurred illegally in protected areas, including hundreds of Indigenous lands that cover a quarter of Brazil’s Amazon and provide a crucial buffer for much of the rest. (In the rainforest bastion state of Amazonas, Indigenous lands account for close to a third of the standing forest.) The Indigenous groups of the region have seen this before. During the runaway deforestation of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, they witnessed and were devastated by an “arc of fire” that blazed along the routes of the first penetration roads into the western Amazon. By the late 1980s, a burning crescent swept down from the northern Amazonian city of Belém, through the states of Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Acre. It burned brightest in Rondônia, where the smoke and ash from hundreds of raging fires were visible to the naked eyes of astronauts in high orbit. Charred forest in Amazonia, Brazil, in August 1989. Since the 1930s, the country’s right-wing governments have called for the settling of the rainforest in nationalist terms. As it did then, today’s reignited arc of fire signals the advance of an agribusiness frontier dominated by cattle and soy. Bolsonaro and his allies in Congress and Amazonian state governments vow to accelerate this advance in the name of progress. Doing so will require eliminating the young laws and agencies established to protect the rainforest, its supernova of life that accounts for most of the planet’s species, and its traditional Indigenous inhabitants, whose very existence Bolsonaro and his ministers have cursed and denied, and whose moral and spiritual challenge they fear but do not comprehend. garrulous affairs even by the standards of participatory village democracy. In their language, Apurinã means “the people who talk,” a habit encouraged by their fondness for awyry, a bright green stimulant made from powdered forest seeds. Punctuated by the sounds of awyry sniffed through polished animal bones, the proceedings in early April lasted until darkness crept over Kamarapa. The people who talk had a lot to discuss: Expanded armed foot patrols. A network of monitoring stations equipped with radios. Deeper cooperation with neighboring ethnic groups, including traditional enemies. Outreach to potential allies in Brazil and the publics and governments of Europe and Asia, the main markets for Brazilian beef and soy. “We are doing what we can, organizing, monitoring, and petitioning,” said Fabiana Apurinã, a bright-eyed woman of 23 who attended the assembly from a village several hours downriver. “We are warriors and will mobilize to defend ourselves and the forest. But we need help.” “We know what happens when the state does nothing. We know how quickly the forest can disappear.” The assembly concluded by drafting a letter addressed to FUNAI, the embattled federal Indian agency, and the Federal Public Ministry, a powerful body of prosecutors within the Justice Ministry. It expressed alarm over the spreading red zone and the gutting of the state’s environmental monitoring and protection agencies. “Our territory is being invaded and we feel abandoned,” the letter read. “We ask the government to value our past and our deep connections to this land. The deforestation is advancing toward us. Our territory must be guaranteed for our children, according to our rights in the federal Constitution. If the government doesn’t do it, we’ll do it ourselves.”  radio signals reach the villages inside the Purús River floodplain of south Amazonas, so news from the outside comes slowly, on boats. On the morning of April 2, one brought word to Kamarapa of blood on the distant streets of Rio and Brasilia, where Bolsonaro supporters had brawled with protesters over a presidential decree that the armed forces commemorate the anniversary of the 1964 military coup. Bolsonaro, an ex-army captain, had campaigned on nostalgia for the scorched-earth policies and torture basements of the dictatorship. In villages like Kamarapa, where the junta is remembered for a regional program that amounted to a de facto extermination campaign, the news landed like a formal declaration of war. “Bolsonaro is upgrading the dictatorship’s model; it’s the same racism, the same plans for the Amazon,” said a 34-year-old villager named Wallace, who wore a Che Guevara pendant under a necklace of jaguar teeth and whose fiery speeches, sprinkled with threats of secession, express the militant end of the Indigenous political spectrum within COAIB, an Amazon-wide Indigenous association he serves as a consulting member. “This government uses the language the generals used when they tried to destroy us and our culture. We fought back then and survived. We will again. What we need now is courage.” Bolsonaro continues a far-right political tradition in Brazil that predates the 1964 dictatorship. It merges authoritarianism and panic over the perceived vulnerability of the Amazon to foreign conquest — or in its modern iteration, “internationalization.” In the 1930s, President Getúlio Vargas, a fascist sympathizer, called for a “March to the West” to settle, develop, and secure the rainforest for Brazil against the designs of its covetous neighbors. Thirty years later, the junta revived Vargas’s unrealized dream with Soviet-style five-year plans to “flood the Amazon with civilization.” Army engineers led dawn-to-dusk work crews that cut the first roads west of Mato Grosso, usually following old Indigenous hunting paths. State television ads promoted land and credit programs to spur transmigration from the overcrowded coasts and over-farmed savannah. They imagined an Amazon transformed: Out of an impenetrable wilderness, settlers would build a dense grid of ranches and small farms, each one connected to coastal ports and global commodity markets by a mighty network of roads and highways. The inhabitants of the forest, both Indians and non-Indigenous people living traditionally, would have to make way, adapt, and integrate. “Amazonian occupation will proceed as though we are waging a strategically conducted war,” said Castelo Branco, one of the generals who led the 1964 coup. A boy observes soldiers during a rally organized by then-President João Goulart in Rio de Janeiro on March 13, 1964. Current President Jair Bolsonaro, an ex-army captain, campaigned on nostalgia for the scorched-earth policies and torture basements of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ruled for 21 years. The junta’s homesteader occupation joined a graveyard of Amazonian dreams. The logistical challenges of settling the “green hell” were greater than the generals imagined, and the quality of the soils far worse. But if the regime failed to build a yeoman’s paradise on the ashes of the Amazon, it did produce the ashes. In 1988, when a new constitution was adopted three years after the return of civilian rule, more than a tenth of Brazil’s Amazon had been burned or degraded by government-supported settlers and industry. Brazil’s Indigenous population fared much worse, dropping from estimates of the low millions at the start of the century to around 200,000 at the end of the 1980s. The Indigenous population has since rebounded fourfold, a resurgence that tracks to Brazil’s halting efforts to contain and reverse the deforestation wave that started swelling in the late 1960s. The 1988 constitution zoned 43 percent of the Amazon off-limits to industrial activity and land-clearing, an area covering hundreds of newly established parks, reserves, and more than 400 Indigenous territorial claims equaling an area twice the size of Spain. (It also placed rules delimiting activity on the other 57 percent.) It established an environmental monitoring and enforcement agency, IBAMA, and revamped FUNAI to help Indigenous communities protect their lands and develop sustainable forest industries. At the same time, international development banks tightened environmental and social conditions on aid and loans, and NGOs and activist campaigns led effective international boycotts, culminating in a landmark soy moratorium in 2006. Though the cutting and burning has never stopped, the rate of deforestation peaked in 2004 and entered a decade of decline. Brazil’s Indigenous population dropped from estimates of the low millions at the start of the century to around 200,000 at the end of the 1980s. The global commodity boom of the last decade put a stop to the progress. Legal and illegal deforestation began to creep up in 2012, driven by an expanding agribusiness sector and the growing political power of Brazil’s landowners in Congress, the ruralistas, who sought to roll back the land-use restrictions of the post-junta period. In 2016, they supported a soft coup against Dilma Rousseff, the center-left president, and provided cover for her scandal-plagued successor, Michel Temer, who lavished amnesty on land-grabbers and tried to loosen Brazil’s slavery laws. That same year, the central Amazonian state of Mato Grosso became the first to lift the ban on correntao, a notorious method for clearing forest that involves two tractors trawling an industrial bulk chain to uproot everything in its path. Kamarapa and other villages of the southern Amazonas floodplain was a large and friendly but often brooding FUNAI official who asked that, to avoid reprisals as a government employee, his name not be used. Deeply versed in the history, biology, and cultures of the western Amazon, the official fit the romantic stereotype of the modern FUNAI employee: respectful and protective of his Indigenous partners, but conscious of the paternalism and worse that has always streaked through the culture of the agency. Watching him drop off jugs of fuel and check in with village leaders on the way to Kamarapa, it was clear the relationships were ones of mutual affection and trust. As our powerboat headed downriver, making wide sweeps around the tops of submerged trees, the FUNAI official described a double emergency in the deep forest communities where he spends most of his time. “Around 2012, things started getting worse every year,” he said. “More invasions. Bigger burns. Budget cuts to FUNAI and IBAMA. Since the election, it gets worse by the day. Every single day there’s something.” A sign marking territory administered by FUNAI, the Brazilian federal Indian agency, was shot through as a signal that the government can’t keep loggers off the land.  Within hours of being sworn in to office on January 2, Bolsonaro moved all forest policy to the Ministry of Agriculture, run by a particularly humorless ruralista named Tereza Cristina. The transfer included FUNAI’s longstanding role in demarcating Indigenous lands, which was added to the portfolio of the assistant minister for land affairs, Luana Ruiz, a lawyer whose family owns land that overlaps with Indigenous territory in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. FUNAI, meanwhile, was moved from its home in the Justice Ministry to a new department housing the likewise demoted Ministry of Human Rights (lawmakers later reversed the move). The government then choked the agency of resources. Since January, FUNAI has been operating on 70 percent of its normal budget. Monitoring posts in high-risk areas across the Amazon have been abandoned, and long-planned operations scaled back, often leaving a single FUNAI employee to mediate violent land conflicts in remote tracts of contested forest. “The Indigenous understood the connections between these fragile systems before we did. … Before anyone was talking about climate change, they were trying to warn us.” Bolsonaro’s 44-year-old Minister of Environment Ricardo Salles has slashed staff and funding at FUNAI’s most important partner in government, the environmental monitoring and enforcement agency known as IBAMA. He has replaced the board of Brazil’s conservation institute, ICMBio, with officers from São Paulo’s military police, part of what Brasil de Fato, a weekly newspaper, calls the “militarization of the environmental sector.” One notable exception is the sustainable development office: After firing everyone, Salles chose to leave it empty. The FUNAI official sketched the stakes of these decisions in stark terms. “In 30 years, maybe 15 with this government, all of the land between here and Lábrea could be deforested,” he said. Lábrea, the nearest frontier town, is hundreds of miles away. He continued, “That would mean goodbye to the Purús and the infinity of plants the Apurinã have been studying for so long. The Purús and its rivers feed the Solimões”— an arm of the Amazon — “and the disruption would have huge downstream impacts in the north, where the deforestation hasn’t reached. The Indigenous understood the connections between these fragile systems before we did. The links between the forests and the rivers, how deforestation effects rain and weather. Before anyone was talking about climate change, they were trying to warn us.” Cattle graze along B.R. 364 near the city of Ariquemes, in Rondônia, in 2018. The western Brazilian state has a $4 billion cattle industry, but by one estimate, a hectare of livestock or soy is worth between $25 and $250, while the same hectare of sustainably managed forest can yield as much as $850.  Rondônia on the two-lane blacktop of B.R. 364, it takes an act of sustained imagination to see the rolling landscape as Arima Jupaú knew it as a boy. Growing up in the late 1960s, the pastureland that now stretches to every horizon was covered by primary rainforest, lush and loud with life. He couldn’t imagine a forest’s edge, because none of the roughly 10,000 Jupaú living at the time had ever seen one. Only after 1970, when army engineers completed a dirt road connecting neighboring Mato Grasso to Porto Velho, Rondônia’s capital, did the concept of the frontier gain meaning. As settlers poured into the region on 364 — a half-million over the decade — the Jupaú learned to fear the frontier as a place of disease and violence, a buzzsaw that would cut them down to the verge of extinction. “We would retreat, and every time, when we looked out from the hills, we felt safe,” remembers Arima, one of 200 surviving Jupaú. “We thought they could never reach us. We thought the forest was too big.”  The brancos, the whites, kept coming. They came to farm, harvest wood, raise cattle, and mine the region’s stores of gold and cassiterite, the raw form of tin. The roughest of the settlers formed kill squads and massacred Indians where they found them. Arima’s first memories include seeing the removed skin of his uncle’s torso stretched out on sticks like a scarecrow, a message left by a group of nearby miners. The Jupaú waged war in return. “We told the whites to leave, but they didn’t listen,” said Arima, who led raids as an adolescent and was celebrated for the accuracy of his longbow. “We killed them and burned their houses. Too many to count.” Deforestation is disrupting micro- and regional climates across the western Amazon and creating a measurable delay in the onset of a rainy winter season that is getting shorter and warmer. In 1981, ravaged by tuberculosis, flu, pox, and measles, leaders from surviving bands of Jupaú met with FUNAI to discuss a truce. (During the meeting, a misunderstanding led an official to believe the tribe called itself the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, which is how the Jupaú are known to the world.) “We accepted the peace because they said they would protect our land,” remembered Arima. Around the same time, World Bank officials in Washington, D.C. accepted similar assurances from Brazilian generals seeking $1.6 billion to pull its failing “March to the West” from the literal and metaphorical mud. B.R. 364, the key artery in their development plan, was a swamp during the rainy winter season, and not much more passable during the dry summer months. To open the west, the road would have to be paved. The World Bank supported the idea over the advice of an in-house advisory group that warned paving 900 miles of B.R. 364 would accelerate the environmental and human rights catastrophes already unfolding in the region. This is exactly what happened. When international outcry forced the World Bank to suspend payments to the generals five years later, Rondônia had the highest deforestation rates in Brazil, led by a 3,000 percent increase in the cattle population, and was on track to be completely denuded by 1990 — the first “green desert” of the Amazon. I left Porto Velho on B.R. 364 with Arima’s soft-spoken 27-year-old son, Awapu, who lives in a four-family village on demarcated Indian land in the south of Rondônia with his parents, wife, and two children. In the following days, I would accompany him on patrols through the edge areas of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory where land-grabbers were active in numbers not seen in a generation. As we drove south along the spine of Rondônia’s $4 billion cattle industry, all parched pasture and soy fields, Awapu described the multiplying flashpoints on Indigenous land erupting across the state. In Rondônia’s west, the Karipuna faced expanding invasions from three sides; in the northeast, the Suruí’s forests were so overrun with illegal diamond miners that the communities had split on whether to resist or resign and take a cut. (In March, the Department of Mines announced it would lift the post-junta ban on industrial mining in Indigenous territories.) It wasn’t just Indigenous lands, he explained. Illegal logging was on the rise in the state’s parks and bioreserves, a direct result of government policies and signals. In April, Bolsonaro personally intervened to block IBAMA agents from destroying heavy equipment confiscated during an anti-logging operation in Rondônia’s Jamari National Forest. The power to destroy the expensive tools of illegal loggers and miners is the agency’s most effective deterrent. But the president said in a video posted to social media: “It is not the orientation of this government to burn machinery.” Its orientation of burning trees instead may soon undermine the foundation of the state’s agribusiness economy. Studies have begun to confirm something the villages first noticed decades ago: Deforestation is disrupting micro- and regional climates across the western Amazon and creating a measurable delay in the onset of a rainy winter season that is getting shorter and warmer. If Rondônia’s Indigenous lands are overrun, the state will become a synonym for disaster for the second time in living memory, only this time it will bring down the industries built on the cinders of the first great clearing. “The protected Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau forests hold the main river basins of the state,” said Daniel Peixoto, a federal police deputy who has led raids on land-grabbing syndicates tied to invasions of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land. “All of the water we have flows out from there. It’s the reason we don’t have drought. Even from the point of view of agribusiness and the cattle ranchers, it’s a strategic place to conserve.”  dawn, I joined Awapu for a breakfast of coffee and unsweetened açaí juice before traveling by canoe to the northwest edge of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land, a forested territory covering nearly 7,000 square miles in the south of Rondônia. The area is at the center of the local red zone, targeted by a rising number of invaders working on behalf of local cattle interests. With us were two older villagers, Djurip, who carried a bow and several bamboo arrows, and Potei, who carried a rusty hunting rifle. “The election made the grileiros fearless,” said Awapu, as we tied the canoe and entered the forest. “They know Bolsonaro thinks the same as them — that we don’t work, that we don’t deserve so much land. There are rumors the president will give them our territory. They think nobody will stop them.” The Pastoral Land Commission has recorded more than 600 land-related murders in the country since 2003, most in the Amazon region, with a 20 percent increase in 2018. For most of the morning we followed a monitoring path in silence, hiking through thick undergrowth draped with curtains of lianas. Potei led the way. He stopped in front of a crude but perceptible path that intersected with our own. The men spread out to investigate its dimensions. They returned wearing heavy expressions. Awapu knelt down, cleared some dirt, and drew a right angle with a stick. “They start with this ‘L’ shape,” he said, motioning toward the path. “A group of 15 men with machetes can clear lines through 20 kilometers of forest in a week. Marking the plot, making entrances. When the rains stop, they come back with chainsaws to cut the smaller trees and clear the way for tractors, if there is a road nearby. They burn what’s left. In November, before the rains start again, they seed the grass. It grows fast. Now it’s pasture. They sell it to a rancher who says he doesn’t know anything about land grabbing. It’s washed clean.” Stopping the process before the burning and planting means confronting gangs of armed land-grabbers in isolated areas littered with the bones of a half-century of land conflict. As the government withdraws from the forest, other forms of deterrence will be needed, including Indigenous patrols that can move and communicate unseen and unheard, and whose serrated arrows may announce themselves with a whisper. But any violence is surely to be asymmetrical, as it has always been. The Pastoral Land Commission, operated by Brazil’s Catholic Church, has recorded more than 600 land-related murders in the country since 2003, most in the Amazon region, with a 20 percent increase in 2018. Most victims are Indigenous and other traditional forest dwellers, killed organizing to protect land from illegal extractive activity.  At the edge of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory, where the forest meets barren cattle lands, is a difference of night and day. Without vegetation, the region’s topsoil dries and depletes quickly, requiring expensive systems of short-term life support and the constant creation of new land. Most pasture is degraded and abandoned within 10 or 15 years. We were an hour into the resumed patrol when we walked into it — the place where the forest stops and the agribusiness frontier begins. The frontier not as a metaphor, or a concept in a U.N. report, but as a physical thing that can be seen, touched, stepped across. Abruptly the cool shadow world of closed canopy forest gave way to the blinding oven-hot world of open grassland baking under the midday equatorial sun. On one side of the split screen, the primordial tangle of what the 19th-century Brazilian historian Euclides da Cunha called “the last unwritten page of Genesis.” On the other, a group of humped zebu cows dumbly chewed their cud. Awapu pointed at the only distinct vegetation on the cow’s side of the line, a spiky forage grass that grew in bunches. “That’s capim,” he said. “That’s what the cows eat.” Then he waved his finger across the distant horizon of pasture. “That was all forest when I was young.” It was here that we made a picnic of crackers and dried fish, on the line between Genesis and Revelation. As we packed up for the hike back to the river, Djurip, the quietest of the three, spoke for the first time. “The whites have never respected our culture because it’s not a money culture, not an agribusiness culture,” he said. “They say we are greedy and ask for too much land. But the whites are the ones with an endless appetite. They are the ones who are devouring everything.”  Amazon was being devoured without check in the 1970s, the forest produced an antibody. A social and political movement coalesced to reject the false choice between conservation and development. Uniting Indigenous and non-Indigenous forest peoples, it spoke the modern language of justice, something new in the Amazon. Its leader was a rubber tapper and union leader from southern Acre named Chico Mendes. As the fires from Rondônia roared west, Mendes organized a coalition of people who depended on a living forest. This coalition pioneered a form of nonviolent direct action called the empate, or stalemate. In some empates, men, women, and children formed human walls around trees, daring the cut crews, their fellow poor, to kill them. In others, armed groups would overwhelm the clearcutters’ camps and hold the workers hostage while smashing chainsaws and decommissioning tractors. The journalist Andrew Revkin witnessed one such empate in which Mendes’s men lectured their captives on ecology and Marxist theory as they prepared to torch the camp. Mendes had earned the mantle “Gandhi of the Amazon” before his assassination in 1988. His renown peaked just as the world began acknowledging the challenged posed by climate change, a development that timed with Brazil’s transition to civilian rule. Because of this lucky confluence of history, Mendes’s legacy survived in the new constitution and government, most notably in the creation of an archipelago of large “extractive reserves” set aside for the harvesting of rubber, nuts, berries, and other sustainable forest industries. In 2007, when then-President Lula da Silva established a conservation institute inside the Ministry of Environment, he named it after Mendes, his fellow unionist and comrade from the early 1980s. Mendes’s name is a curse to the Bolsonaro government but one with the power to rankle. When challenged by a reporter on his disemboweling of the agency bearing Mendes’s name, Environment Minister Salles Mendes’s name is a curse to the Bolsonaro government but one with the power to rankle. When challenged by a reporter on his disemboweling of the agency bearing Mendes’s name, Environment Minister Salles hissed , “What difference does it make who Chico Mendes is at the moment?” This sentiment extends to Mendes’s heavily forested home state in the western Amazon, Acre, which in October elected a second-generation soy baron, Gladson Cameli, to the governor’s office once occupied by Mendes’s political adviser, the forest ecologist Jorge Viana. Cameli celebrated his election by meeting with agribusiness executives in Porto Velho, where he announced, “The economic salvation of Acre is agribusiness. Rondônia, our neighbor and brother, is the proof.” Even on the Chico Mendes Reservation on Acre’s southern borders with Peru and Bolivia, the children and grandchildren of the empate generation — who grew up on stories of monkey-wrenching tractors and sending villainous cattle barons packing — are turning to ranching. The reservation is reported to hold more than 30,000 heads of cattle on cleared land, including many herds well above the legal limit imposed on protected areas. In the long term, Mendes’s vision remains valid: A self-renewing forest bursting with flora and fauna will ultimately pay greater dividends, economic and environmental, than the creation of a semiarid savannah dotted with cows whose expansion is premised on creating the conditions that will ultimately cause drought. But that truth is not swaying families abandoned to the vicissitudes of a global market that prizes hardwoods and hamburgers. “Cattle is a secure market. You can get a good income selling a calf, an ox,” a Mendes Reserve resident told ProPublica reporter Lisa Song in her recent investigation into the failure of international efforts to encourage and buffer sustainable forest economies. A self-renewing forest bursting with flora and fauna will ultimately pay greater dividends, economic and environmental, than the creation of a semiarid savannah dotted with cows. In the Acre assembly, a minority bloc of deputies is working to modernize Mendes’s vision and stop another arc of fire from devouring the state’s largely intact forests. At their head is Jenilson Leite, a 41-year-old Indigenous physician and vice president of the state legislature. I met Leite one night in a conference room at the capital building in Rio Branco. Bespectacled and wearing a sharp navy-blue suit, the politician chose his words carefully and with an intensity that belied his boyish looks. “After the dictatorship, Acre invested in rural communities and conservation, making us more dependent on federal resources. And by some metrics, we and other forested areas appear ‘unproductive,’” said Leite. “I’m not saying the forest is untouchable, but cutting it is not the answer. If we put value on Acre’s Indigenous groups and others who manage forest resources sustainably, they’ll put more into the economy than expanding cattle and soy. The medicinal potential of the healthy forest is enormous. Let’s build research labs. Ecotourism. Sustainable food industries that don’t require annual planting. Açaí, Brazil nuts, fruits.” The biological riches of the Amazon are made possible by the nutrients provided by the constant decomposition of its bountiful vegetation, not the thin layers of soil beneath the forest floor. Take away this vegetation, and the region’s topsoil dries and depletes quickly, requiring expensive systems of short-term life support and the constant creation of new land. Most pasture is degraded and abandoned within 10 or 15 years, meaning the industry’s existence (never mind its expansion) is predicated on a permanent cycle of destruction: More forest must always be cut to keep ahead of the processes triggered by the last cutting, which removed the soil’s natural source of nutrients. The Amazon’s soy industry likewise struggles to keep pace with rapidly fading soils by creating land and saturating it with ever larger dosages of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. (Bolsonaro’s minister of agriculture, the ruralista Tereza Cristina, has earned the nickname “Muse of Poison” for her dedication to ending restrictions on the most toxic pesticides.) A view of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land in Rondônia on Sept. 24, 2016. Around 400 ethnic groups across the Amazonian basin envision a “sacred corridor of life” of contiguous Indigenous territories reaching from the Andes to the Atlantic, which would constitute a 500-million-acre stretch of rainforest. Meanwhile, most of the jobs created are short-term: cutting down trees. Joaquim Francisco de Carvalho, a former chief of Brazil’s Institute of Forest Development, estimates that one hectare of livestock or soy is worth between $25 and $250, while the same hectare of sustainably managed forest can yield as much as $850. But the most important difference is one that can’t be quantified. The latter approach preserves the Amazon’s biodiversity and what the ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis calls its “ethnosphere” — the last remaining cultures that hold a worldview and values fundamentally different from those that brought us the Anthropocene epoch. The rainforest’s original inhabitants are its most effective defenders precisely because they don’t see it as a repository of resources to be extracted and sold, whether it be gold, lumber, or carbon credits. This is not the same as saying the language of trade and development is foreign to the rainforest. Aside from a dwindling number of uncontacted tribes and those living in voluntary isolation, Indigenous groups want development and links to the world. Marcos Apurinã, for instance, is trying to revive Chico Mendes’s Forest Peoples Alliance, which united Brazil’s Indigenous with the quilombolas (forest communities established by runaway slaves) and other groups of traditional small-scale extractivists. “We have our differences, but we share a common enemy in agribusiness and the ruralistas,” he told me. “We need a triple alliance on the front lines unified behind a plan to defend the region and develop it in our own way. We also need Brazil’s courts. The international courts. The NGOs.” Marcos was a founding member of the National Committee of Indigenous Policy, a consultative body established in 2015 to connect Indigenous groups and federal agencies handling development and sustainability policy. “We have alternative development ideas to generate the money we need to live in the modern world,” he said. “We’ve given those ideas to the government. Like everything else, the process froze when Bolsonaro was elected. We don’t know what will happen.” from Acre into Amazonas on B.R. 317 resembles the drive through Rondônia on B.R. 364: a monotonous run of pastureland, with brief forest interludes wherever the road cuts through an Indigenous territory. The pasture ends where 317 terminates, at Boca do Acre, a tidy and growing frontier town of 35,000 people at the lip of the world’s most massive remaining block of rainforest. The ascendant ranching capital of south Amazonas, Boca swaggers with the ersatz Texas style found throughout western Brazil, with cowboy-themed bars and burly men dressed in the region’s take on the Marlboro Man: unbuttoned checkered shirt, cross on a gold chain, blue jeans, oversized belt buckle, boots, and a wide-brimmed hat of straw or leather, pulled low. On my first morning in Boca, I made an unannounced visit to the home of Dilermando Melo de Lima, a local ranching grandee and president of the Rural Syndicate of Boca do Acre. A potbellied 72-year-old with an unexpected cauliflower nose, he was sitting on his porch drinking coffee, with a cat at his feet. He welcomed the chance to talk cattle and was bullish on the industry’s prospects. “Understand,” he said, “from Rondônia, across Acre and into Amazonas, the future is ranching, for the simple reason that it has the best conditions for meat ranching in the Amazon.” When I asked his thoughts on the concerns of Indigenous groups, and others, that allowing the agricultural frontier to move further into the Amazon endangered the natural systems that make ranching and agriculture possible, he gently waved me off. “The forest is going to be cut anyway. The military regime was good for development. Bolsonaro has the same ideas, and ranchers are betting everything on his success.” “We ranchers face many difficulties,” he said. “There are too many restrictions and laws. Too many protected areas. The Camicuã territory near here is 46,000 square hectares of intact land. And we can’t touch it! They should give us the permits. The forest is going to be cut anyway. The military regime was good for development. Bolsonaro has the same ideas, and ranchers are betting everything on his success.” The old rancher relaxed a bit when the conversation drifted from politics. The son of a farmer who’d migrated to the region in the 1930s, his voice softened as he described the sleepy fishing and trading village of his boyhood, before cows followed the penetrator roads north and morning breezes smelled of the slaughterhouse. Remembering that place long gone, he sounded less like a cattleman than an Indian in one of the forested Indigenous atolls along highway 317. “It was all forest and rivers back then,” he said. “From here all the way down to Rio Branco, forest and rivers.” The true value of forest, like this section of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory, cannot be quantified, and its Indigenous inhabitants don’t see it as a repository of resources — whether it be gold, lumber, or carbon credits — to be extracted and sold.  a few weeks after Melo de Lima boasted to me about ranching’s expansion into Amazonas, the United Nations disturbed the world with the findings of a landmark report on biodiversity. Produced by experts across dozens of disciplines, it concluded that only “transformative change” could prevent the looming extinction of one million plant and animal species. These million coal-mine canaries, dropping to the floors of degraded and fragmented rainforests, and floating to the surfaces of overfished and acidifying oceans, foretold a wider disintegration in the web of life that threatens the “very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” The call for “transformative change” was no echo of familiar appeals to somehow “green” the endless growth that is programmed into the genes of industrial-consumer civilization. “We mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values,” said Robert Watson, the British atmospheric chemist who chaired the U.N. panel. As for where humanity should look for help and inspiration during this difficult civilizational pivot, the report urges the “full and effective participation of Indigenous Peoples” in developing systems of environmental governance informed by their “knowledge, innovations and practices, institutions and values.” This is the fruit of a delayed but deepening dialogue between occidental science and Indigenous cultures. After decades of watching from the margins, Indigenous groups have moved close to the center of the ring at global environmental and conservation summits, in tandem with a wave of research that backs up their historical claims to being the forest’s most natural and effective protectors. Last November, an Amazonian delegation delivered a document — the “Bogota Declaration” — to the 14th U.N. Biodiversity Conference held in the Egyptian coastal city of Sharm el-Sheikh. It outlined a plan, devised by 400 ethic groups across the basin, to establish a “sacred corridor of life” of contiguous Indigenous territories reaching from the Andes to the Atlantic. Inside this 500-million-acre stretch of rainforest, Indigenous nations would pool their ancestral knowledge and showcase alternative modes of development and ways of living. The declaration described the proposal as “a first step to guaranteeing the existence of all forms of life on the Planet.”