The first time Virgilio Viana saw the Amazon up close, he was a 16-year-old with a backpack, two school friends and very little sense of what he was walking into. They arrived by land, drifting along dirt roads that had more potholes than surface, then continued by riverboat as the forest thickened around them. Something in that journey stayed with him. It pulled at him long after he returned home, and kept pulling as he studied forestry, completed a doctorate on the region, and eventually left a professorship in São Paulo for the more complicated work of governing the forest itself. That decision—to move not just intellectually but physically into the Amazon—shaped the rest of his life. Viana later became State Secretary for Environment and Sustainable Development in Amazonas, a role that plunged him into the usual tangle of politics, land disputes, and the delicate work of persuading people who live close to the forest that conservation is not an abstract ideal drafted in a faraway capital. It was during that period that he says he coined a phrase now widely repeated across Brazil: the forest must be worth more standing than cut. A dissertation-ready idea distilled into a line that relates well across the region. Today Viana leads the Foundation for Amazon Sustainability (FAS), an organization built on an idea that sounds simple but was, for decades, resisted by many mainstream conservationists: people first. For a long time, environmental policy treated the forest as a wilderness best protected by…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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