In buses, private jets, canoes and wheelchairs, Brazilian voters will go to the polls in October in what mainstream commentators have called a “super election year” for democracies around the world. In a freak alignment of the political stars, more people will cast a ballot in 2024 than at any time in history because eight of the world’s ten most populous nations are holding elections.
This global high-water mark for popular political participation ought to be a cause for celebration. Instead, it has seen a series of fraught battles to stave off dictators and demagogues as a climate disrupted world ushers in a struggle against extreme politics that is all too-familiar in the Amazon rainforest.
The first Brazilian to be born along the dictatorship’s symbolic highway through the Amazon has resurfaced to become the poster-child of an unsustainable Brazil
Science has proved that psychedelics, like ayahuasca, can increase the production of new neurons. But reducing the benefits of these ritual medicines to ‘cellular plasticity’ is a dangerous gateway to their appropriation by the market
Liziane Dutra’s family lost everything to flooding in Rio Grande do Sul and went to live in a building occupied by unhoused people. Now, you may be evicted
Photographer Araquém Alcântara talks to SUMAÚMA about his 50 years covering the Amazon and developing a spiritual relationship with the Forest, that is now being destroyed
A nonhuman take on the Amazon story. SUMAÚMA follows the journey of a howler as he explores his forest home and tries to understand the humans who threaten it
