Banzeiro Òkòtó

“Devastating, extraordinary, and unforgettable.”—Rebecca Servadio, Words Without Borders

“In this heartbreaking book, Eliane Brum reports on the irreplaceable realm we are losing in the Amazon—not just the imperiled fauna and flora, but also the people who steadfastly remain, showing us how we can champion their survival and our own. A book of paramount significance.”—Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need

“Eliane Brum’s searing, complacency-shattering testimonial on behalf of the Amazon echoes the brutally violent experience of Indigenous people around the world, and their ongoing resistance to climate apartheid imposed by predatory capitalism. In passionate, transformative language, Brum exhorts us to move beyond the myth of sustainability and embrace the radical, hegemony-busting truth of this Indigenous teaching: we are the earth.”—Diane Wilson, author of The Seed Keeper

“A book that distills a lifetime of listening, wild with empathy, and refines it in the fire of unimpeachable political acuity. Written with diamond intelligence, Brum gives the reader the reforested human: impassionate, courageous, and complete.”—Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey

“In this passionate and eloquent dispatch from the Amazon, Eliane Brum creates her own devastating poetry and politics of deforestation.”—Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters

“Banzeiro Òkòtó is the ultimate guidebook to the Amazon. Not a travel guide, but one that takes you much deeper, right into the forest’s deep soul. The wonder of it, the oneness of the indigenous people with the land, the horror of the genocide they’re still resisting, the corruption and the terrible violence—always inextricably linked—perpetrated by the grileiros and their political allies as they seek to convert one of the world’s greatest treasures into cash. More than anything, Banzeiro Òkòtó is about the battle to save the Amazon from destruction, and this is a battle we all need to care about—the fate of humanity, amongst other species, utterly depends on it.”—Patrick Alley, co-founder of Global Witness

“In Banzeiro Òkòtó, Eliane Brum casts our survival as a species as being on the line with what happens in the Amazon, its forests, lands, rivers, and people. She does so with fierce intensity, putting her whole being into the heat and heart of it. She takes apart the forces of whiteness (including her own), the economic and political structures that colonize, exploit, extract, and enslave. Those same forces threaten and kill those acting against them, and those speaking and writing truth to power—which is exactly what Brum has been doing, and what she does now with this brave, beautiful, and necessary new book.”—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company

“Many books have been written about the Amazon, but this is gut-wrenchingly, mind-expandingly of the Amazon, its joy and tragedy, its violence and beauty. Read it and understand.”—Fred Pearce

“Brum adopts an unconventional form to her work as a way of shedding the uncomfortable colonial connotations of her own Whiteness . . . [A] formidable chronicle of the increasingly deforested world of the Amazon.”—Kirkus Reviews