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 out ecosystems that rarely burned in the past. Fires in recent years have given governments a stark reminder: the global climate fight may not be won in the Amazon, but it can be lost there.
He argues the forest’s future also depends on recognizing its agricultural and medical potential, from cassava diversity to fungi- and animal-derived compounds with possible therapeutic uses. And he points to the growing role of Indigenous communities, whose political and technological capacities have strengthened.
His conclusion: the Amazon has more supporters than ever, and more threats than ever. Whether the glass fills or drains will depend on which forces move faster.
Read the full commentary by Mark J. Plotkin here.
Banner image of the Amazon Rainforest by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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