The florest is not a backdrop. It is a character, an author, a mother
The forest is not a backdrop: It is a subject, a memory and a mother. Listening to it is the first political act
by Chris Zelglia
The forest is not a backdrop for progress.
It is not the green that counterbalances the gray of the metropolises, nor the view that beautifies sustainability initiatives.
The forest is a subject: it reflects, feels, communicates. It tells its own story in the language of wind, rain, sap, and silence.
Yet Brazil still sees it as scenery, something to be exploited, represented, commercialized.
By ignoring its voice, we perpetuate the colonial logic that turns everything alive into a resource.
The Amazon does not need to be rescued; it needs to be heard.
The belief that humans are the axis of the Earth fuels ecological tragedy.
This worldview casts the forest as a supporting actor, a space waiting for management and protection.
But Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cosmologies have always known: the forest is a living entity, with will, spirit, and memory.
To ignore this is to continue telling the planet’s story in the first-person singular.
When we treat the forest solely as “the environment,” we diminish the emotional and spiritual connection that native peoples have with it.
It is within this connection that true ecological knowledge can be found — a knowledge based on reciprocity, coexistence, and listening.
The forest does not need to be taught by Western science; it is the one who teaches.
COP30 has the opportunity to challenge this worldview.
However, this will only become possible if the places where decisions are made are occupied by those who speak from the forest, not about it.
The ecology of tomorrow is anticolonial, and it begins when we recognize that the planet is not an object, but a community.
The forest is a political and emotional subject; it generates life, language, and meaning — not just oxygen.
Rediscovering the deep Brazil means relearning how to listen to the voice of the forest, not merely quantifying it in hectares.
As long as we continue treating it as scenery, we will perpetuate the same narrative of destruction.
It is urgently necessary to change the author.
