Guardians of the Amazon

Around them, the forest hums: toucans gossip in kapok trees, a harpy eagle’s shadow glides over untouched canopy. This is the lie we tell ourselves, she thinks. That the intact parts mean the whole is safe.

Her fingers trace the dragon’s scales—chlorophyll-green and cool as riverstone. The beast moves like a season, its breath stirring orchids on samaúma roots. But threats coil in her mind: beef herds erasing jaguar trails, soy fields choking floodplains, mercury seeping into the dragon’s veins. Two degrees hotter, air strangling the forest’s breath. Seventeen percent gone. Twenty, and the rain forgets itself. The dragon pauses, nostrils flaring—ash? Diesel? Twenty-three million hectares by 2025, whispers the wind. A kingdom of absence.

But here: the harpy’s cry. The kapok’s roots. The dragon’s eye reflecting survival’s stubborn green. We are the bridge, she thinks. Between what’s taken and what still grows. The lie falters. The forest hums.