The first time Virgilio Viana saw the Amazon, he was a 16-year-old traveling with two school friends, moving along dirt roads, then continuing by boat as the forest rose around them. The trip set something in motion. It stayed with him through a forestry degree, a Ph.D. on the region, and later a professorship in São Paulo that he eventually left for the more complicated work of trying to help govern the forest itself. Viana served as secretary for the environment and sustainable development in Brazil’s Amazonas state, where he found himself in the thicket of politics, land disputes, and the slow work of explaining why conservation matters to people who already live inside the ecosystem outsiders imagine as empty green. It was during this period that he coined a phrase now repeated across Brazil: the forest must be worth more standing than cut. An economist’s idea, reduced to the kind of line that spreads because people recognize something true in it. Today, he leads the Foundation for Amazon Sustainability (FAS), built around a principle that sounds obvious but was long resisted by some big conservation organizations: local people first. Much of what remains standing in the Amazon is there because Indigenous peoples and local communities have protected it. Caboclos, quilombolas, ribeirinho families — they are the center of Viana’s argument that conservation without them will fail. In a recent exchange, he spoke bluntly about the risks ahead. Some parts of the region, he says, have already passed a tipping…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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