Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. After five decades studying the plants and peoples of the Amazon, Mark Plotkin, an ethnobotanist and co-founder of the Amazon Conservation Team, is still asked whether the rainforest’s glass is half-full or half-empty. His answer is unchanged. “By definition, any glass that is half-full is half-empty.” The point, he argues in a commentary for Mongabay, is not optimism or pessimism, but accuracy about a region where progress and peril now coexist. When Plotkin first arrived in the 1970s, the Amazon barely registered in the global imagination. Scientists such as Richard Schultes, Tom Lovejoy and E.O. Wilson helped shift that view, reframing the forest from “green hell” to a storehouse of biodiversity. Indigenous leaders and activists like Payakan and Chico Mendes added political force. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro marked the high-water line of global attention. Since then, trends have swung sharply. Brazil’s deforestation soared in the late 20th century, plummeted in the early 2000s, rose again after 2019 and fell once more in 2023. Similar cycles now shape Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Yet millions of hectares are today under some form of protection, and Indigenous territories generally show lower rates of loss. Plotkin is quick to note the other side of the ledger. Criminal networks have expanded into mining, logging and land grabbing. Mercury contamination, violence and corruption undermine local governance. Climate disruption has pushed rainfall patterns off balance, drying…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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