Destruction

By the late 1990s, 80 percent of all logging in the Amazon was illegal. There were few incentives to replant trees, and this led to a loss of habitat and biodiversity and overhunting of the wildlife. Instead of replanting the trees that were lost, farmers converted some of what remained to agricultural use or as pasture for cattle. Elsewhere, ranchers clear-cut forests to use for cattle grazing by setting fires. Today, cattle ranching accounts for 80 percent of current deforestation throughout the Amazon region. Gold mining has expanded since the early 2000s. Miners dredge rivers and mix liquid mercury with the sediment in order to separate out the gold. But there’s little regulation. Gold mining causes deforestation, and the extraction process pollutes the air and rivers.

The Brazilian photojournalist Victor Moriyama has been documenting the impact of logging, burning, ranching and mining on the Amazon for years. Based in São Paulo, he was part of the New York Times teams that won the George Polk Award for investigative reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2022. Moriyama specializes in documenting rural conflicts, the battles to conserve tropical forests, the genocide of Indigenous populations and the impact of climate change.

His photographs of the Amazon tell a story of destruction: a forest has been clear-cut, leaving just stumps, loamy soil, clumps of grass and burnt spindles where trees once stood; workers, their faces weathered, process the wood; images chart the destruction of forests by fire from both the ground and the air; villagers cover their noses and mouths with their hands in a dense fog of smoke; herds of cattle dominate cleared areas of forest; dead fish lie on the ground next to a stream, victims of the toxic fallout of mining. It’s a bleak but necessary visual depiction of the myriad negative forces acting on one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.