Fortress Yellowstone
April 16, 2026 at 07:30PM
What links ranches in Montana and the Brazilian Amazon? The ultra-rich—who extract monumental wealth from one landscape and then store and protect it in another. In this tale of ecological hypocrisy, Joseph Bullington explores the radically different standards imposed on two ecosystems. One is being lost, the other we can never enter. The ultimate case of “Not In My Back Yard.”
Outside the car windows, fields of barren red earth unfurled for miles beneath the glare of the Amazonian sun. These manufactured deserts ended abruptly against dark, squared off walls of the forest from which they were carved. In the growing season, these fields, which dominate the planalto, produce soybeans and corn in rotation, largely animal feed for export to Europe and Asia. When I visited, in October 2025, the only signs of life were some roadside weeds, the broken gray stalks of harvested corn and the occasional lone figure of a Brazil nut tree, illegal to cut under Brazilian law and a reminder of the kind of forest and foodways that lived here before the onslaught of monocrop agriculture.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/16/fortress-yellowstone-amazon-jungle/
via IFTTT
Watch