Several thousand years ago, in the inland mountains of what is now São Paulo state, a massive animal pressed its way through the underbrush. Full, chocolate eyes scanned the ground for fresh buds sprouting from the earth. Dark lips closed gently around each new shoot, indulging the sweet and heady flavors of spring.

At some point in foraging, the creature broke through a patch of vegetation to find itself on the ledge of a 250-meter gash in the earth. As it tried to turn, it lost its footing under more than one and a half tons of weight. Its bones, and those of hundreds of other prehistoric creatures, now populate the underworld of the Upper Ribeira Valley, resting in the caves below the jungle.

In 1839, fossil hunters in central Brazil would give the species the name Catonyx cuvieri, one of more than 40 species of giant ground sloths discovered in South America. Although one of the smallest species, C. cuvieri was still more than a meter tall, about the size of a grizzly bear.

The Upper Ribeira sits riddled with caves and ravines, sliced through the limestone rock by water. While the complex terrain has made life in these hills difficult for thousands of years, it has also been a blessing for the creatures that populate them today. Cavernous terrain is not well disposed to the coffee cultivation that spread across São Paulo in the 19th century. The ravine where the C. cuvieri specimen was discovered is surrounded by the largest remaining section of Atlantic Forest in the world—tapestries of bromeliads, mosses, ferns, and nearly 5,000 species of trees. Ecologically speaking, the valley is a refuge. The species that survive here cannot live in the agricultural fields that surround it. But to me, to move through this place seems less to be a place of safety than a retention pool, a drainage site, a place where things go accumulating—species, bones, ghosts.

The human impact on this landscape may have begun as early as 16,000 years ago (although the earliest date of human arrival in Brazil is pushed back further every year). In the intervening years our practices of living—hunting large prey, setting fires—inadvertently led to the extinction of creatures like giant ground sloths by 8,000 years ago. Since the moment we arrived, our presence here has dictated the shape that nature has taken. It has never been humans and nature apart—civilization and wilds. Our lives, in the various forms they have taken here, have exerted themselves on the Upper Ribeira. Today, even as caves have kept the valley alive, this configuration of landscape is a product of human choice—a negative space left behind by agriculture. While the shape of the land itself has kept us out, it was also our vision of the world—the desire and capitalistic demand to grow coffee and not, say, mine limestone, has worked in tandem with this sort of self-governance. Extractive usefulness and extractive uselessness play hand in hand.

The enigma of these caves engaged with us in another way as well. In 1958, the government of São Paulo elected to protect them, establishing the Upper Ribeira Touristic State Park (PETAR), which today is one of the oldest protected areas in the state. PETAR protected the spectacle of over 250 caves, and today draws tourists and extreme sports enthusiasts from across the country. Just as caverns kept farmers out, they also invited in a contingent of Brazilians that would lead to their protection.

The possibility of PETAR also attracted the interest of the emerging biological sciences in Brazil. Part of the appeal of PETAR in the 1950s was the presence of a huge chunk of virgin Atlantic Forest within a four-hour drive of the University of São Paulo (USP), the largest and most prestigious university in the country. To formalize the natural refuge as a protected area was also a chance to solidify access to a prime research site for ecologists. Now part of the second largest contiguous stretch of Atlantic Forest in the world, it has also played a central role in imagining what Brazilian nature should look like—a thick forested jungle. The kind where a ravine can be hidden from sight.Conservation work here frequently highlights the fact that 40 percent of plant species and 60 percent of vertebrates here are endemic, found nowhere else on Earth. It is easy to press on into a mythology of primordial jungle, of a unique natural wonder present since time immemorial.

But I think the ground beneath the trees is telling another story. I want to let the ghosts speak.The individual of Catonyx cuvieri recovered in the Upper Ribeira was unearthed in 2012, in a cave called Ipatemi Abyss, outside the town of Apiaí. It is one of five species of giant ground sloths found in the caves, alongside tapirs, giant armadillos, and Ice Age horses. What is striking about this assemblage of herbivores, however, is that it does not suggest that all of these animals were passing through dense forest at the time of their death. Giant armadillos, horses, and at least two of the sloth species found here would have been associated with far more open environments—grasslands, forest edge, or dry scrublands. Others, like tapirs or C. cuvieri, would have preferred dense, hot, humid jungles. At some point in recent time, large swathes of this forest were, just as they are now, not forest.

Pollen records in the region suggest that the Atlantic Forest likely pulsed with the melt of the glaciers at the Earth’s poles. During the most recent glaciation, 12,000 years ago, the area where the forest's southern edge currently sits would have been much drier and as much as 7°C cooler. The forests here survived only in warmer river valleys further to the north. In the past 2.5 million years, the Earth has undergone 18 of these glaciations, eighteen pulses of forest and grassland.The Atlantic Forest we know, or the Atlantic Forest we imagine, stretching over nearly an eighth of the continent at the arrival of the Portuguese in South America, has only existed in its current size for less than 6,000 years. The rainforest is only expanded at present because we are in an interglacial period, the anomalous bouts of warming when South America has been humid and hot enough for the Atlantic Forest to grow. For over 90 percent of the last 2.5 million years, glaciers and grasslands ruled. The forests are, and have always been, temporary.

So then, what does it mean to protect a temporary forest? A 6,000-year blip? Humans have inhabited this place for far longer than that. The first Brazilians are older than the country’s ancient woodlands.I think a typical ecologist can find refuge in the idea of cycles—that while forests are meant to retreat and expand, we have decimated an ecosystem when it is supposed to be at its greatest expanse. But climate change has likely altered our planet’s movement through periods of glaciation. At best, it has delayed the next Ice Age by as much as 100,000 years. At worst, it has moved us into a completely novel stable state. Regardless, both us and the forest are living in times we do not understand. The future is covered with underbrush.Most conservation policy with respect to the Atlantic Forest, and indeed with respect to most threatened ecosystems across the globe, point out how much has been lost to anthropogenic change (usually set to the period after the year 1500). Only 8 percent of the forest’s expanse in that year remains. But it has weathered retreat before. Yes—the rate of change is too fast. Yes—the scale is global. But my point is that natural systems are not fixed. The forest is not primordial.

In North America, the conifer and deciduous forests that cover much of the eastern United States and Canada have seen a similar story. The tree communities that today define particular ecosystems—American elm, basswood, and sugar maple in Minnesota’s Big Woods, or the pitch pine and oak species of New Jersey’s coastal pine barrens—are novel encounters. Tracing pollen records across North America’s glaciations, tree species here have also moved north and south with the ice. Species that never existed together during the last interglacial may have found themselves in neighboring refugia when the ice sheets reached their peak. As the ice receded, the northwards march of the trees produced new communities each time. Things go accumulating. Ending up here.

My intention here is not so much to say that there is a problem with protection, but a problem with constancy. The human vision of this planet is based on a particular point in time. Conservation, in its hegemonic definition the “protection” nature, does not really protect nature at all. It protects a human image of nature. Any and everything we “conserve” is conserved because we see some value in it. Because we attribute something to a patch of protected forest.Then, are we meant to return the forests to their state before 1500? Why would we want the Atlantic Forest to reflect a particular point in a cycle that will never again occur? To restore the forests would be to select an arbitrary point in this land’s history. To maintain them as is would be to as well.This is not to say that conservation is worthless. It is not to say that the non-human lives that truly are protected by declarations like state parks should be obliterated by extractive development. Instead, I want to ask how we can value those lives. Not just to draw arbitrary boundaries around a place, but to understand the reason why we are doing so. If what we value is forest, or the types within that forest, or the individuals within that forest, what is the state of affairs that will bring good to all of those beings that we value? This may seem like a particularly pedantic gripe with conservation—if protected areas still protect those things, then why make such an effort to illustrate the social constructedness of the ecological findings they rely upon?

Tearing down the image of nature primeval lets us do a lot. What does it mean to say that a species’ presence in a place is an act of chance? What does it mean to say that human presence is as well? The Ribeira Valley belongs as much to the species here now as it does to the caves. To dead bones. To people. The same is true of the coffee plantations or the concrete canyons of Brazil's largest cities.

We cannot see the cavern ahead. Look around. Who is there to move with us through the darkness?

Upper Ribeira Valley, São Paulo state

sloth bones

The former pasture that now surrounds Iguatemi Abyss (behind the trees at bottom left), in Apiaí

A small creek, flowing over bare limestone, feeds into the Rio Betari in the western reaches of the Upper Ribeira

Fossilized remains of Eremotherium, a larger relative of C. cuvieri, at the Musuem of Natural history in Taubaté, São Paulo state

Each time children inherit genes from their parents, there is a small chance of mutation. The speed at which these mutations diffuse across populations is etched in the genetic code of the generations that follow.Even for changes in gene flow millions of years in the past, biologists can reconstruct the signals that indicate a species' previous population size from the genome of just a single individual.

In 2023, a team of researchers at the University of Aarhus dated the mutations in the genomes of 139 of the largest living mammals on the planet: camels, kangaroos, chimpanzees. In doing so, they charted the population sizes of these creatures for the past 2.5 million years.

For almost every species, abundance has declined by 80 to 99 percent, with these declines coming, each time, just after human arrival to a species’ native range.We talk a lot about extinctions, about the loss of a species. We don’t talk about this. The world we are living in is quieter than it should be. Missing more life than it ought to have. At least for the large mammal species documented in the Aarhus study, 80 percent of the life on our planet is gone.Many of the small remaining Atlantic Forest fragments suffer from a condition known as “empty forest syndrome,” otherwise healthy forests empty of large-bodied mammals. In the past ten years, Brazil has been at the center of a conservation initiative known as refaunation, which aims to restore these missing animals to the habitats they would have once filled.

In São Paulo state, authorities have turned to Ilha do Cardoso, a large, forested island separated from the mainland by a large estuary, for source populations of two species: lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris) and brown howler monkey (Alouatta guariba).

When I visited Ilha do Cardoso, I asked Henrique Rangi, an environmental monitor and one of the roughly 50 people living in the small community of Pereriquinha, on the island’s north coast, about the efforts to relocate howler monkeys and tapirs from the island. To Henrique, this wasn’t much of an issue. “We have plenty of monkeys here… and tapirs and crab-eating foxes and caimans… lots of deer too. Oh, and of course pumas.” The island is, in a quite literal sense, overflowing with life—enough to subsidize the biodiversity debts piling up in the empty forests in the rest of São Paulo state.

Henrique's perspective is one I was especially interested in. Not only because he knew the island well as an environmental monitor, but because his family has lived there for nearly a century, and defied the orders of Brazil's military dictatorship to do so. They, more than anyone else I have spoken to thus far, understand what it means to live in an Atlantic Forest full of life. And their efforts to remain on Ilha do Cardoso tell a story about what it is worth to live here.

Cardoso was declared a state park in 1962, also making it one of the oldest in the state of São Paulo. The 300 people who inhabit the island today still hold that, at that time, the state government did not declare the park because of any real conservation concerns. Per Ezequiel de Oliveira, who lives in the community of Marujá, on the island’s southern end: “In sixty-two we really didn’t understand why they were declaring a park. Firstly because a worry about environmental issues didn’t exist anywhere in the country at that time. And secondly, it was very strange because the park was extremely well conserved.”

Brazil’s big push for environmental conservation, particularly for the Atlantic Forest, did not begin in earnest until the 1980s. Some say that the centrist state government in 1962 declared the park to protect the island from the hands of large coffee cultivators, who were buying up land in the surrounding valleys. This is a political motivation, not one borne out of environmental concern. Conservative coffee barons’ influence over local populations very frequently extended to the ballot box. The parties they controlled would go on to win state elections that year in São Paulo and in several neighboring states. Two years later, in 1964, they would be instrumental in bringing to power the repressive military dictatorship which ruled Brazil for the next 17 years.Through the military dictatorship, the Brazilian government undertook several soft campaigns to expel the local population. This included threats of financial penalties or intimidation with armed soldiers. In the community where Henrique’s great-grandmother, Silvina, lived, government officials bulldozed existing homes. The small-scale fisheries that sustained the island's population were closed. Even subsistence farms and gardens, often managed communally, were uprooted.

Still, an estimated eighty percent of the islanders remained. With the aid of the Catholic parish in the neighboring village of Cananéia, the islanders filed suit in federal court to remain on the island—noting that their occupation outdated the declaration of the park, in some cases, by hundreds of years.

A state protected area did not change this. The islanders’ occupation lasted longer than the dictatorship. By the time of the transition to democracy in 1985, government efforts petered out. By the 1990s, Brazil was at the forefront of recognizing long-term human use of the environment in its protected areas legislation. Relentless activism by indigenous communities and Chico Mendes’ rubber tapper union brought policies like extractive reserves into state law by 1996.On Ilha do Cardoso, São Paulo’s state government has gradually worked to return local control to the island’s inhabitants. In 2008, the state research station was officially shut down. In 2010, the island’s seven remaining communities co-organized into a shared council structure that would draft a shared management plan with the state government. In 2023, local communities were granted control over, quite literally given the keys to, all remaining government buildings on the island.

Although the island’s total population likely never exceeded a few hundred people, its wealth of animal life has long occurred in cohabitation with a human presence. If the state had succeeded, if Ilha do Cardoso had emerged from the 1970s as a completely de-peopled landscape, its animal life might retain similar levels of abundance. But I would argue that culturally, ontologically, it would have been poorer for it. There is a value in human engagement with this place—a value not simply in having present a large number of animals, but in living alongside them.Henrique takes us past the footprints of a puma (Puma concolor) on the sandy paths that lead from the beach to his home. He talks about his mother’s attempts to raise chickens—how the big cats always seem to find a way to slip past the fence. Still, they share space on the island with pumas. There is no effort to eliminate them. They exist on the island just as people do. Being present in this place is also to be present among the cats, incorporating their desires into our own, finding out how to live alongside. Building higher, tighter fences.

In the American sensibility, a "wild landscape," especially a protected area, is one devoid of people. But coming to know Ilha do Cardoso is a social experience. I know about the life of big cats on the island only because of Henrique.Henrique shows me the white scar on his knuckle, the result of a childhood attempt to dig a red mangrove crab (Goniopsis cruentata) out of its sandy burrow. The crabs are a delicacy throughout Brazil’s coastal zone. Living in the same place as them is, of course, to establish ways of knowing how to find these crabs, how to prepare them, and, of course, how to dig them out of their burrows.

Other things, other beings, other peoples, have other desires. I cannot know the nature that is present here with a solitary hike through the woods. Stepping onto the island is not entering into an empty landscape. It is entering into a place where nature and people have already taken efforts to understand one another—have built rich and full and meaningful relations.I think an understanding of why the island's inhabitants have fought for so long to live here flows so easily from that description.

If we are to re-wild the planet, to bring species back to their full densities, we are also asking ourselves to re-establish ways of knowing other creatures. I think, in this light, of howler monkeys. I remember the first time I heard them, booming croaks from the far side of a cattle pasture. Living in the Pantanal, where we regularly had to watch the sky for incoming storms, I would often mistake them for thunder. The genus howler monkeys belong to, Alouatta, is the only living species to have a pneumatized hyoid bone. The hyoid, for most mammals, is a small arc unattached to the rest of the skeleton, that floats in the front of the throat. It acts as an anchor for your tongue and vocal cords. In howler monkeys, it swells to the size of an orange. When they call, the sound is magnified by this giant, bony chamber.

Our forests could be ten times louder. Animal thunder billowing out from the treetops.

The first phase of São Paulo’s refaunation efforts began in April of this year, when a group of 17 brown howlers were collected by state authorities at Ilha do Cardoso. These monkeys have been brought to another state park, Cantareira, which abuts the city of São Paulo, the largest urban center in the Americas, with over 22 million people. It is now these people who must come to know these monkeys.Traditionally the question of “living alongside nature,” or anything resembling a romanticized vision of human harmony with the natural world, is a task relegated to rural populations or indigenous peoples. It is never a demand we ask of the parts of the world we consider “developed,” “unnatural.”

For the population of reintroduced howlers to survive, the people of São Paulo will have to know their monkeys intimately. Ten years ago, Cantareira supported several families of howler monkeys, until the forest fell victim to a wave of yellow fever outbreaks that had been slowly creeping across Brazil’s primate populations.Howler monkeys are incredibly susceptible to yellow fever. A disease which kills around 3 to 8 percent of infected humans (already a staggering number) is fatal for upwards of 80 percent of infected howlers.

In places where it is endemic, the virus that causes yellow fever circulates in wild primate populations, spread between infected monkeys by mosquitoes. Human vaccination has largely eliminated the issue of the virus in cities in Latin America—but yellow fever still occasionally spills back into the human population under certain conditions: when there are high concentrations of wild primates—and when these dense primate populations occur in close proximity with people.

In Brazil, health agencies forecast upcoming yellow fever outbreaks using howler monkey deaths. Places with more dead howlers are targeted for vaccination campaigns. Prior to human habitation of the continent, yellow fever outbreaks likely only affected howlers intermittently. But now, with susceptible primates—humans—blanketing the surface of the country, and facilitating fast transit between previously far-flung populations of howlers, the disease is a serious threat to the species’ survival.

So how do we help howler monkeys survive alongside us? How do we survive alongside them, given that more dense monkey populations, especially near cities like São Paulo, will contribute to higher concentrations of virus in mosquitoes? I think this notion of greater wildness is also something we’re not fully prepared for. What if we are to ask ourselves to live a a wilder world?In Cantareira, park managers have vaccinated the 17 monkeys brought from Ilha do Cardoso. But future survival of this troupe will, just as in humans, also mean the vaccination of their offspring. So we will have to keep track of them, to extract and inoculate unvaccinated monkeys, to monitor disease outbreaks. The individuals working with these monkeys are going to have to know them by name, assess their behavior, follow their lives.

In their second chance at wildness, São Paulo's howler monkeys will be closer to humans than they were before they were extinguished. For them to survive, we must make relations with them. To make the world fuller again we must make ourselves a part of it.

Ilha do Cardoso, São Paulo state

monkey shots

One of the 15 permanent homes currently built in Pererequinha. A path frequented by humans and big cats is visible at right.

Signage denoting entry to the state park, referencing multiple transitions of authority since its initial declaration in 1962

The highest peak on Ilha do Cardoso, as viewed from the island's northern shore

Puma tracks in the sand

High above the city of Rio de Janeiro, great rock monoliths graze the clouds. Spilling over them like green velvet is the work of generations of couriers. The rainforest at the heart of the city has been planted time and again. The forest lives and breathes and dies. It is regenerated thousands of times over. In each new iteration, it does not solitarily will itself back to life. The other beings on this land play a part in the making of their home. Seeds, held in trust in burlap bags or stomach linings or tangled mats of fur, take root at the behest of the creatures of the forest.Tijuca National Park is one of the largest urban forests in the world, dividing Rio from west to east. However, in 1817, the forest only existed in fragments. The original jungle that covered the mountains around Guanabara Bay, where Rio sits, was made over into coffee farms and pasture in the initial centuries after colonization. By the 1810s, as the growing capital city found itself preoccupied with a reliable supply of fresh water, the highest echelons of Brazilian society turned to the declining agricultural landscape in the mountains around the settled areas. Rio de Janeiro would replant its forests.

Tropical trees are reliant on the dispersal of their seeds by animals. For their seedlings to survive, most species need to ensure, somewhat paradoxically, that the apple falls far from the tree. Plant diseases and predators in tropical forests are often highly specialized, meaning they only target a single or very few species. However, because of this specialization, they are very good at doing so, particularly for younger individuals with weaker defense systems. For adult trees, then, the best chance for their offsprings’ survival is often to get as far away from their parent as possible. Animals provide an excellent means to carry this out. Grow bright, juicy fruit, let a bird or a monkey or some other jungle critter swallow it, and wait. As the animals traverse the jungle, the seed, eventually, will pass, able to germinate in soil much further from home than would be the case for seeds lifted by wind or water. Without seed-dispersing creatures present in a forest, less tree species are present, unable to effectively space themselves apart from threats.Ecologists categorize phenomena like seed dispersal as ecological functions—the mechanics that an ecosystem needs in order to work properly. Tropical forests do not require seed dispersers in order to exist, but they do need them in order to thrive.

One of the principal effects of the spread of our species across the planet has been the loss of this function. The systems that maintain nature, that in turn sustain us, are weakening. They are functioning with less vigor than they had before. In different ways than they had before.

In popular parlance, many of South America’s seed dispersing species, including large birds like guans and macaws, are referred to as “forest gardeners.” I think this is an interesting juxtaposition because it places these creatures in an especially human role. Obviously, this is a construction made to make it easier to understand the role that these creatures play in ecosystems. But for me it also begins to blur the line on the things we are calling “functions.” There are acts in the reproduction of ecosystems that humans play a part in. Not just in the role of indirect effects, but in fully conscious, involved creation.Agricultural and horticultural landscapes see functions of seed dispersal subsumed by humans. We are a seed dispersing species. Gardeners think and plan their plots. They pull together an assemblage of plants—ones that, for some reason or another, are important enough for the gardener to want to establish. They transform space from one state of affairs to another. They sustain the species they want to see present.

For me, this underscores that any notion of functional loss is culturally informed. What difference is there between an agouti and a human moving coffee seeds? One of those beings is able to attach cultural or economic or social importance to its role in an ecological system. Culture shapes ecologies.

Tijuca lived as a diverse tropical forest for millions of years prior to human arrival—built and sustained by creatures like agoutis and guans and tapirs. When Portuguese colonists arrived, cutting trees and hunting game and planting coffee monocultures, they did not eliminate the laws of seed dispersal, of gardening. They inserted themselves into the process. Our place in shaping landscapes is not new. It was usurped from the creatures that inhabited the forest.

So then, the question that follows: if humans can and do play roles as functional agents in an ecosystem, is there any real natural state of affairs? Is there any real point of functional efficiency to return to?We can choose how much of these functions we allow to occur “naturally,” how much we control, and now, if we are to take functional restoration seriously, how much we return back to other beings or construct altogether.

The forests at Tijuca were brought back to life by eleven people. Eleven enslaved Brazilians. We know their names. Eleutério, Constantino, Manoel, Mateus, Leopoldo, and Maria planted the seedlings that would grow into the largest section of the forest, in the western half of the city. Sabino, Macário, Clemente, Antônio, and Francisco planted the seedlings near what today is the forest surrounding Rio’s iconic Christ the Redeemer. Each of these people would have intimately known the land they worked on. They would have known how to raise and care for the 12 species of trees that were used in the forest’s first replantings—at the time one of the only multispecies reforestations in the world. They would have understood where to plant thousands of seedlings so they could be nurtured even in a steep and rugged terrain. They would have watched their forest grow.We have no way of speaking to these people. As far as I know, they left no written records of their lives. I do not hope to presume anything they may have felt, but I can only imagine the immense tension at the heart of that act. Bringing into being something so vital and lifegiving, yet having done so without being seen as human. Making life under an act of violence. Making life at the command of others.

The lives and desires of these people were superfluous for the slavers that held the eleven horticulturalists at Tijuca in bondage. The considerations of the men that decreed the replanting of Tijuca, in 1861, had little to do with a concern for forest or non-human creatures. Trees were planted at Tijuca to capture water for Rio de Janeiro, then the imperial capital. The choice to reforest saw the presence of a jungle, fundamentally, in a functional light. The forest is and was a project of the state.

By 2014, a diversity of trees had returned, but the forest’s fruit trees were struggling to produce new offspring—and to spread them across the landscape. A group of ecologists at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), led Alexandra Pires, one of the country’s eminent voices in species reintroduction, translocated a small population of agoutis (Dasyprocta azarae), plump rodents that bounce around on delicate, antelope-like legs, to the park. The agoutis were followed by two other seed dispersers, the red-footed tortoise (Chelonoidis carbonaria) and brown howler monkey (Alouatta guariba).

Returning this vitality to the forest has been the next step for advocate's of urban nature in Rio and for conservationists across the Atlantic Forest biome.

But the existence of forests in urban centers like Rio are not without complications. They require tradeoffs.The place where the forest presently exists, the high mountain ridges of Rio, are also exactly the places which have served as refuge for Brazil’s poor for over a hundred years. The informal settlements lining the hills of the city, popularly known as favelas, have been a means for the country’s landless to access thriving urban economies, to stake out homes and see themselves as in control of their lives in many cases for the first time. I know from my time in Jakarta, another city where informal settlements predominate, that open green space within the city is often the first target for these communities—the easiest place in the urban landscape to exist without pushback.Tijuca has continued to exist through force—through the construction of “ecolimits”, massive concrete walls separating many of the most rapidly growing favelas from the forest.

A few notes: favelas are permanent, inhabited places. Unplanned communities are no different from planned communities in the moral realm of land-use change—they are ways for people to live in cities the same way planned developments are. The key difference is solely where the nexus of power in shaping those communities lies—with capital and the leasing power of governments, or with the residents of a city. Informal communities tend to usurp green spaces simply because these are the places where the state or the city are least likely to assert ownership. Ecolimits, then, are the state’s attempt to hedge and control. To enforce its ownership. To view Tijuca as, for whatever reason, of greater value than homes for the poor.

The reason these communities emerge is simple: people cannot afford housing in existing cities. High rents and land prices are driven by speculation. Are driven by the treatment of land not as a place of dwelling but as a material asset. Here, again, is the same crisis.The ability for natural processes to “carry themselves out” in Tijuca is deliberately enabled. I think I will end up pulling all of these threads together rather clumsily, but I left Tijuca struggling over this fact. Tijuca, at once, is the beautiful little bundle of how cultures and ecologies intertwine. But it is also a site and symbol for intense exploitation. Here, refaunation, restoration, whatever word we want to use for our undoing of the simplification of the natural world, is not carried out for any other purpose than to have a more complex urban fabric—one that is also composed of non-human creatures.

How do we evaluate environmental goods? In Rio, people planted a forest, at the expense of enslaved persons, for water quality. They maintained it, at the expense of the poor, for cultural value—for the richness of having wild species near the city. The latter is certainly more defensible than the former, but I think these contradictions underscore the notion that “ecological function,” on its own, is not a value we can easily attach to. It matters to us for specific reasons. The abstract of a “less complex” world is not painful because of mechanical simplicity. There are deeper relations here. Complexity and function evoke something for us. They mean something for us. They imply other lives. They imply other sorts of wellbeing.

Regardless of a functionalist view or an agentist view, there has to be some sort of understanding of what is good and what is not. How humans should act in a complex world. Is function a question of wellbeing? For whom?

Tijuca NP, Rio de Janeiro

the gardeners

Massive ceiba and ironwood trees inside of Tijuca

Rainforests and mountains punch up into the clouds above Rio's Vila Canoas neighborhood

Signage announcing the reintroduction of brown howlers in Tijuca