- A community in the Brazilian Amazon is transforming fallen trunks and dead trees into everyday items and art pieces.
- Household utensils, furniture, miniature trees and jewelry made with forest seeds are some items being produced by women and youth in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve.
- The woodshop sits in a region where rubber tappers have fought for environmental and labor rights for ago, and which still faces deforestation pressure.
CHICO MENDES EXTRACTIVE RESERVE, Brazil — After crossing the Acre River by ferry and driving 23 kilometers, about 14 miles, along a dirt road in a four-by-four, we arrived at a woodworking shop that’s repurposing what would otherwise be waste from the rainforest. In the Ateliê da Floresta studio, located in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, or resex, in Brazil’s Xapuri municipality, fallen trunks and dead trees are crafted into art objects, providing new and profitable income for local families.
Established in June 2024, the workshop was the brainchild of Raimundo Mendes de Barros, affectionately called Raimundão, and now engages 18 local families.
Raimundão, 79, is a cousin of the late Chico Mendes, an activist for environmental protection and the rights of the Amazon’s traditional rubber tappers, who was assassinated in 1988 by a rancher threatening to deforest a swath of the rainforest in Acre state.
The reserve named after him spans almost 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres), about the size of Jamaica, and straddles seven municipalities near Brazil’s border with Peru and Bolivia. As an extractive reserve, a conservation area where local communities retain the right to practice sustainable forest activities, it provides income for local families, especially from harvesting Brazil nuts and rubber. But prices of commodities like these have always been subject to the seasons and market fluctuations, and diversifying income streams has been a perennial challenge for these communities.
“We focus a lot on working with Brazil nuts and rubber trees, right?” Rogério Mendes de Barros, 26, Raimundão’s son, tells Mongabay. “These sources of income don’t fulfill all of our personal economic needs. So we’re always looking for more alternatives.”
Resex Chico Mendes is one of the conservation units most affected by the pressures of deforestation and the growing expansion of livestock ranches. Providing conditions for forest peoples to remain living there without engaging in deforestation is an important way of keeping the Amazon standing, according to Raimundão.
The Ateliê da Floresta woodshop has become an alternative way of generating this type of income, bringing together women and young people in creative work. “Craftsmanship is a noble profession. With it, we stop cutting down living trees,” Raimundão says.
Pressure for pasture
Resex Chico Mendes is frequently ranked among the 10 conservation units with the highest rates of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, according to conservation nonprofit Imazon. In 2024, it made the list for nine consecutive months starting in March.
“Protected areas, while serving as a refuge for the conservation of the region’s fauna and flora, are also territories that suffer a lot of environmental pressure when they are inserted in a region with intense exploration activity around them,” Larissa Amorim, a researcher at Imazon, tells Mongabay.
The most recent data show deforestation from January to November 2024 is 30% higher than during the same period in 2023, she said.
According to the research collective MapBiomas, by 2023, cattle pastures had encroached onto 11% of the reserve, an area of 105,000 hectares (259,500 acres).
In a region where income diversification is one of the main challenges, locals say they often own a few head of cattle as a way of having some savings in case of emergency; cattle can always be easily sold.
But as demand for pastureland increases, extractivist families are tempted to sell their lots to ranchers, which is forbidden by law, as the land within the reserve belongs to the state. Illegal trading happens anyway, and when it does, locals end up living on a small area of land, often large enough only for a house, and no longer can use the forest as income.
“None of us are forbidden from raising our animals, like cattle. But we can’t turn our allotment into a ranch,” Raimundão says. “We can have up to 15 hectares [37 acres] of pasture. We need rubber trees, Brazil nuts, hardwoods to help the animals graze in the shade of the trees. That’s what we can do.”
Amorim says there’s an urgent need to step up efforts to prevent deforestation in this region. “It is necessary to identify and punish those responsible for noncompliance with the sustainable use of natural resources in this protected area,” she says.
ICMBio, the environment ministry unit that manages federal conservation units, tells Mongabay there are 100 processes of eviction, cattle removal and similar measures currently underway within Resex Chico Mendes. But justice is slow and, according to the agency, it takes between two and seven years for an offender to be effectively removed from within the resex. (ICMBio is also named after Chico Mendes; its name in full is the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation.)
Collecting dead wood
Overlooking the large mango tree from the balcony of his house, Raimundão says the idea for the Ateliê da Floresta woodshop came when he was involved in a timber management project, a form of selective logging that’s one of the extractive activities permitted inside the reserve.
As part of the project, they extracted trees from several species, such as cedar, cherry, cumururana, maçaranduba and entaúba.
Over the course of the project, some issues arose. “We started to realize that when the entaúba bears fruit, it’s excellent food for the animals, and so is the cherry tree, right? The maçaranduba, too. So we started to worry about the distribution of food for the animals in the forest,” Raimundão says.
Another issue caught his attention: When he needed timber for the ceiling of his house, he had to buy it at the local sawmill inside the resex but run by people from outside the reserve.
“We were selling a meter of wood for 60 reais [$10] and when I got there, it was $1,200 reais [$200]. Then I said no, we can’t continue with this business. This is going to deplete our reserve of noble birds, it’s going to reduce the animals’ food supply, and the ones who are going to make money are those who are processing the wood,” Raimundão says.
That’s how the idea of collecting all the dead wood in the forest arose, taking advantage of what was being lost and transforming it into art products from the forest.
“For 15 years, we had been looking for ways to work with wood and establish a stable income,” Rogério says. “The studio was always a goal for Raimundão.”
To turn their vision into reality, Rogério and Raimundão contacted various NGOs working on environmental initiatives in the Amazon. With expertise in securing funding and identifying project opportunities, these organizations helped provide the resources needed to move the project forward.
It started with a monthlong woodworking course attended by 12 women and young people from the local community. Led by an experienced instructor, it focused on designing functional wooden utensils with a modern aesthetic. This initial training served as the foundation for the project, equipping the participants with both practical skills and creative design knowledge.
“The interesting thing about the project is that it has brought possibilities not only for artisans to develop skills, not only for young people, but for women too, by developing skills that can often be dormant,” says Neluce Soares, executive coordinator of the Integrated Legacy of the Amazon Region (Lira/IPÊ), one of the NGOs, which helped secured funding for the initiative from the Amazon Fund and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “There was a design course to help, but they’re developing their creativity and making utensils for their own use too, so that it’s not just something that goes out, but that they can also have the right to wear beautiful things.”
Miguel Scarcello, secretary of SOS Amazônia, another of the participating NGOs, says it’s important to continue developing the artisans’ skills. “The families have already had a training stage and are now in a phase of developing and perfecting the production of objects,” Scarcello tells Mongabay. “They need to invest a lot in this process of improvement in order to meet the demands of the market.”
New challenges
The Ateliê da Floresta Studio is just steps away from Raimundão’s house, but on the short trip you can still hear the loud song of the japu bird, Coryphospingus pileatus. It’s a common Amazonian bird that eats fruit and contributes to the health of the rainforest by spreading seeds far and wide.
With orders from stores in the cities of Manaus and São Paulo, the studio’s sales in the first six months reached 60,000 reais ($9,700). “The Ateliê is quickly making a name for itself. But we’re always looking for partnerships to showcase our product,” Rogério says, adding he’s on the lookout to join trade fairs and associations such as the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (ApexBrasil) to present the community’s products to potential buyers abroad.
“My dream is to reach all over Brazil and abroad and be able to develop other workshops in other communities,” Rogério says.
“When tourists come, they buy a lot,” Fabíola da Silva Feitosa, one of the woodshop’s artisans, tells Mongabay while making jewelry out of natural forest seeds. “It helps our income. It’s not much, but it helps.”
“We’ve already sold a lot here,” adds fellow artisan Elque Brito, who makes the 12-km (7-mi) from her home to the studio by motorcycle three times a week. “Everything we make, we sell together and share.”
Still growing and involving young people and women, the workshop is already facing some challenges. The plan is to find resources to hire a new instructor to develop and improve the artisans’ knowledge and skills, and a technician to maintain the machinery. Some machines are still awaiting repair, as the distance to the nearest repair shops makes service harder.
For Raimundão, continuing and expanding the enterprise is a source of pride. To own an item made in the woodshop is to own a memory of the resex, he says. “With this, they are helping those who are here producing, who are living here in the forest and exalting the name of that rubber tapper who had the courage to stand up to the thuggery of the large landowners and unscrupulous politicians, giving his own life in defense of this cause,” he says, praising the legacy of Chico Mendes.
Banner image: Ateliê da Floresta woodwork displayed at the shop. Image by Sibélia Zanon for Mongabay.
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