NATURE'S KEEPERS

Brazil's vast, varied landscapes are home to enigmatic creatures like the jaguar, the spider monkey, and the maned wolf. Stanley Stewart visits three eco-lodges that are leading preservation efforts to help the animals make a comeback.

- Stanley Stewart

Going up the Amazon River, it was easy to imagine the world was still brand new, untouched by progress or technology. Our little boat was like a time machine, the millennia falling away beneath the bow. This must be how things were at the beginning, I thought, before the arrival of mankind.

Birdsong rang from the jungle. A half-submerged caiman, the South American cousin of the alligator, watched us from the shadows of the bank, only its eyes visible. A giant river otter surfaced with a half-eaten fish. Spider monkeys, dancing through the trees, suddenly stopped to gaze down at us.

Amazonia, the famed 6.4 million-square-kilometre rainforest, is never just a destination. In the popular imagination, it’s an image of prelapsarian wilderness—and the manifestation of our environmental nightmares. According to satellite data, an estimated 2,48,900 square kilometres of rainforest in Brazil (an area the size of Nevada) have been lost this century so far, much of it to monoculture agribusiness. And the pace of deforestation, which had been slowing, spiked under the administration of the anti-conservation president Jair Bolsonaro, which lasted from 2019 to 2022.

But I had come to Brazil to explore a more hopeful narrative, to learn how conscious travel can be a tool in the pursuit of habitat protection and wildlife conservation. I visited three eco-lodges that run preservation programmes in the country’s most vulnerable habitats: the central Cerrado savanna, the southwestern Pantanal wetlands, and the sprawling Amazon rainforest. At each property, surrounded by natural beauty, visitors are encouraged to learn about and help protect these remote biosystems and the species that live there.

THE CERRADO GRASSLANDS—POUSADA TRIJUNÇÃO