Learn more

By Fernanda Wenzel Unlike land grabbers and illegal cattle ranchers, who knock thousands of hectares of trees down within a few weeks, illegal loggers leave more discreet trails in the rainforest. Their job is to open winding roads leading directly to the most commercially valuable trees. “They open up roads of up to 200 kilometers [124 miles] in the middle of the forest just to look for an ipê,” Edevar Sovete, an analyst at IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental agency, told Mongabay, referring to the Amazon’s most targeted tree species. Tracking the origin of this illegal timber is also a windin…

cuu