Amazon River Quotes

Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world's great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers. Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso. Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?

Those who think of the Amazon as a Green Hell,” she read in an old book with a tattered spine, “bring only their own fears and prejudices to this amazing land. For whether a place is a hell or a heaven rests in yourself, and those who go with courage and an open mind may find themselves in Paradise.

Mr. D’s idea of fun would have been to turn us all into Amazon river dolphins. I didn’t want to test him.

Male Amazon river dolphins will even insert thier penises in each other's blowholes in the only known example of nasal sex.* *I refuse to make the obligatory "blowjob" joke here. Science writing is very serious business.

I would let her...have adventures. I would let her...choose her path. It would be hard...it was hard...but I would do it. Oh, not completely, of course. Some things have to go on. Cleaning one's teeth, arithmetic. But Maia fell in love with the Amazon. It happens. THe place was for her - and the people. Of course there was some danger, but there is danger everywhere. Two years ago, in this school, there was an outbreak of typhus, and three girls died. CHildren are knocked down and killed by horses every week, here in these streets--" She broke off, gathering her thoughts. "When she was traveling and exploring...and finding her songs, Maia wasn't just happy, she was...herself. I think something broke in Maia when her parents died, and out there it healed. Perhaps I'm mad--and the professor too-- but I think children must lead big lives...if it is in them to do so.

Miss Minton knew she was going to be dismissed, and she thought this was perfectly fair. A governess who let her charge sail up the rivers of the Amazon and live with Indian tribes could hardly expect to keep her job.

Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression Having tinnitus. Scalding my hand on an oven, and having to have my hand in a strange ointment-filled glove for a week. Accidentally setting my leg on fire. Losing a job. Breaking a toe. Being in debt. Having a river flood our nice new house, causing ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage. Bad Amazon reviews. Getting the norovirus. Having to be circumcised when I was eleven. Lower-back pain. Having a blackboard fall on me. Irritable bowel syndrome. Being a street away from a terrorist attack. Eczema. Living in Hull in January. Relationship break-ups. Working in a cabbage-packing warehouse. Working in media sales (okay, that came close). Consuming a poisoned prawn. Three-day migraines.

The currents are not only the longest-running on earth but also the strongest, transporting more than four billion cubic feet of water per second, more than six hundred times the discharge of the Amazon River.

It’s like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.

during his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe.

Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow—incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun. Dying? No—that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset, or the glow of fading embers. This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets and blues and greens of the spectrum in a few fleeting billions of years, and now had settled down to a peaceful maturity of unimaginable length. All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.

We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.

Even more complex and dangerous than the river itself were the fishes, mammals, and reptiles that inhabited it. Like the rain forest that surrounds and depends upon it, the Amazon river system is a prodigy of speciation and diversity, serving as home to more than three thousand species of freshwater fishes—more than any other river system on earth. Its waters are crowded with creatures of nearly every size, shape, and evolutionary adaptation, from tiny neon tetras to thousand-pound manatees to pink freshwater boto dolphins to stingrays to armor-plated catfishes to bullsharks. By comparison, the entire Missouri and Mississippi river system that drains much of North America has only about 375 fish

In its intense and remorseless competition for every available nutrient, the Amazon offered little just for the taking.

It begins as barely a rivulet, this, the mightiest river in the world, mightier than the Nile and the Ganges, mightier than the Mississippi and all the rivers in China.

If this is the ‘Green Hell’ of the Amazon, then hell is where I belong,” said Maia.

Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was one of something beautiful.

If you want to save the snow leopard, or the giant Redwoods, or the Okavango delta, or the Amazon, or the atmosphere, or the Earth, or those you love, or yourself, or the human race, this is the only path that can achieve that–so the truth is the sooner you support and adopt this path of transformation through understanding the better. The choice is self-destruction or self-discovery.

The Zaire River, for example, is 2,900 miles long and has a volume of water second only to that of the Amazon, but its rapids and waterfalls near the sea prevent ocean-going ships from reaching inland.

To understand how the disappearance of Daniel Westcott bewildered the people of Tampa Bay you would have to know that the city was much smaller then. More like a sleepy town, Tampa sprawled out and yawned along the edge of the Hillsborough River. This is the opening of the novel King Danel: Gasparilla King of the Pirates. If you would like to read a sample chapter please go to Amazon.com or download it on your Kindle or Nook.

had a wee in the Amazon. Until Richard told me I should be careful because there are some tiny fish that can swim up from the water through my urine and into my knob! Is that how amazing the Amazon is? The fish in there would really rather live in my knob than the river.

Inland rain requires trees. Rain clouds on their own cannot travel more than 400km from the sea, so rain in the centre of a continent – the very rain that creates the central forest of the Amazon for example – requires continuous forest to the coast. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon comes from its trees. As every school geography student knows, water evaporates from the sea, then falls as rain on coastal forest. Those trees ‘breathe out’ water vapour, which creates new clouds that travel further inland in so-called ‘flying rivers’. Crucially, this is how water reaches the soy and corn plantations in central and western Brazil. Once you destroy the forest you get less rain. A 2019 study showed that the rainy season in the state of Mato Grosso had become a month shorter in a decade,41, 42 and many of the major soy farms in Brazil are now suffering from the very drought that they have caused.

I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.

... on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole world.

He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's.

A tender fan of white threads surfaced up through the dirt, speaking in a hundred tiny whispers. 'It's true. My god, your ignorance about the flora and fauna of the Amazon -- staggering. Do you know there are four thousand species of trees alone that none of your scientists have even named, much less analyzed? You have any idea how many fungi? I heard you finally 'found' a few new species of electric eels, that cobalt-blue tarantula, a couple of new river dolphins. I think also a tree that's a hundred feet taller than the tallest tree you thought you knew of. At what point do you rethink your whole idea that these are 'discoveries?' How does that word even have any meaning for you? Something exists just because you finally 'found' it? You 'discovered' it?

There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called "adrenaline" sports—skiing, surfing and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills. Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport's essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap. It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let's get on with it! Let's run this damn river! And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river— say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you're thrown suddenly into the center of the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don't realize what's happening. It doesn't matter. The results are the same. The world goes dark. The river— the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you— the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You're helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you. Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you— before you see the rescue lines. You're hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear. That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again.

Do you want to go back, Maia? Back to England?” “I did,” she said, thinking about it. “The twins are so awful and there seemed no point in being here, shut up in this house. But not now. I don’t want to go now because I’ve seen that it is there. What I thought was there.” Miss Minton waited. “I mean…the forest…the river…the Amazon…everything I thought of before I came. And the people who live in it and know about it.” Then she told Miss Minton about the boy who had taken her into Manaus. “He didn’t speak English, but he had such a listening face; I couldn’t believe he didn’t understand everything I said. Oh Minty, it was such a wonderful journey, like floating through a drowned forest. You can’t believe it’s the same world as the Carters live in.” “It isn’t,” said Miss Minton. “People make their own worlds.

I would let her…have adventures. I would let her…choose her path. It would be hard…it was hard…but I would do it. Oh, not completely, of course. Some things have to go on. Cleaning one’s teeth, arithmetic. But Maia fell in love with the Amazon. It happens. The place was for her--and the people. Of course there was some danger, but there is danger everywhere. Two years ago, in this school, there was an outbreak of typhus, and three girls died. Children are knocked down and killed by horses every week, here in these streets--” She broke off, gathering her thoughts. “When she was traveling and exploring…and finding her songs, Maia wasn’t just happy, she was…herself. I think something broke in Maia when her parents died, and out there it was healed. Perhaps I’m mad--and the professor, too--but I think children must lead big lives…if it is in them to do so. And it is in Maia.

A tree can lift and transpire vast amounts of water. A single tree in the Amazon rain forest lifts hundreds of liters of water every day. The rain forest behaves like a green ocean, transpiring water that rains upward, as though gravity were reversed. These transpired mists then flow across the continent in great rivers of vapor. The water condenses, falls as rain, and is pulled back up again through the trees. It rises and falls on its westward migration an average of six times before finally hitting the physical barrier of the Andes mountains and flowing back across the continent as the mightiest river on Earth. Similarly, Indonesia, with 114 million hectares (280 million acres) of tropical forest (it is the second most forested country in the world after Brazil) is a vital part of the Asian hydrologic cycle. Around the world, forests constantly replenish Earth’s supply of fresh water and play a key role in weather and climate.

I had never been to the Amazon, my jungle experience had mostly come from Central America with some short trips to Borneo, but the Amazon undoubtedly had a mystique all of its own. Surely the trees would be much bigger, the wildlife had to be much richer and more diverse and the people would be that bit wilder and cut off from the outside world. It gave me butterflies to think of spending time in the Amazon. Not knowing the geography of the area in any detail, my dreams were restricted to what I did know. There was a ruddy great river that virtually crossed the whole continent from west to east, and…that was about it. I had heard of expeditions that had kayaked the entire river from source to sea – phenomenal endurance feats taking five-plus months – the problem was I was a rubbish kayaker. Sure, I’d done a bit on the canals in England as a Cub Scout but that cold, depressing experience had been enough to put me off for life. What a dull, miserable sport, instructed by overenthusiastic dickheads in stupid helmets.

FOR A WOMAN WHO FEARS SHE IS TOO DAMAGED TO LOVE AGAIN A Prayer adapted from the Heart and Soul of Sex by Gina Ogden, PhD. Holy Spirits of Fire befriend and warm me. Earth and Water wrap me in bounty. Spirits of Air guide me to walk the paths of my heart. Sun smile on me. Stones accept me. Stars remind me. Ocean storms burnish my terrors to translucent pearls. Creatures of hills and hollows, beings beneath the ground watch over me, comfort and nourish me. Snakes and rivers, ancient dragons, dance sinuously with me. Swirling spirit of volcano invest me with power. Eagle and sparrow give me wings and sight. Snails of Buddha, saints of God, Great Spirit, Yahweh, Magus, Shiva, Isis, Astarte of the flowing heart, Goddess of Grain, Angel of Sweetness, Higher Power, protect me, fearful, angry, and armored; as I am the giver, healer, striver, survivor and lover. Cherish me—waif and victim, elf and Amazon. See me a holy woman now. Touch me. Brush me with the breath of love. Ganesh, sacred elephant who cries human tears and oversees new ventures, help me begin again.

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French, and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971, and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous, and possibly the least-appreciated, people in all the earth. As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Well who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did, that's who. They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges, and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States. When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. And I was there -- I saw that. When distant cities are hit by earthquake, it is the United States that hurries into help, Managua,

When Dennis McKenna drank ayahuasca , he had a vision in which he became “a sentient water molecule, percolating randomly through the soil, lost amid the tangle of the enormous root fibers of the Banisteriopsis World Tree.” I could feel the coolness, the dank dampness of the soil surrounding me. I felt suspended in an enormous underground cistern, a single drop among billions of drops … as if squeezed by the implacable force of irresistible osmotic pressures, I was rapidly translocated into the roots of the Banisteriopsis tree …” He was “carried through the articulating veins toward some unknown destination”. McKenna found himself within the extraordinary cellular mechanisms that turn light into “the molecular stuff of life”. Pulled on a kind of conveyor belt to the place where photosynthesis occurs. His consciousness exploded as he was “smited by the bolt of energy emitted by the phytic acid transducers and my poor water-molecule soul was split asunder”. As this vision ended, he found himself “embedded in the matrix” of the plant’s biochemical makeup. Suddenly he was suspended above the Amazon rainforest, looking over its vast expanse: “The vista stretching to the curved horizon was blue and green and bluish green, the vegetation below, threaded with shining rivers, looked like green mold covering an overgrown petri plate.” McKenna felt: “anger and rage toward my own rapacious, destructive species, scarcely aware of its own devastating power, a species that cares little about the swath of destruction it leaves in its wake as it thoughtlessly decimates ecosystems and burns thousands of acres of rainforest.” He wept. Suddenly a voice spoke to him: “You monkeys only think you’re running things. You don’t think we would really allow this to happen, do you?

Of the nearly two hundred men who had parted ways with Francisco Orellana’s group, only eighty made it back to Quito. They had traveled, mostly on foot, more than two thousand miles, and literally everything they had started the expedition with—200 horses, 2,000 to 3,000 swine, 2,000 dogs, and more than 4,000 native bearers—was gone, dead and gone, along with the 120 of their companions who had perished en route.

Book Descriptions: Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami Boy, Volume 1 The magic of the Amazon rainforest enchanted artist Barbara Crane Navarro as she spent the winter months with the Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil over a period of twelve years and inspired her to write her children's book series. The vividly illustrated stories in this series evoke daily life in the rainforest and the magical quality of the Yanomami's relation to the plants and animals around them. The first book, "Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami Boy", recounts the journey of Namowë, a thirteen year old Yanomami boy living in the rainforest, as he seeks a cure for his baby sister. Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Meromi, a Yanomami Girl, Volume 2 The second volume recounts the surprising voyage of Meromi, a 9 year old Yanomami girl who is swept into an unexpected adventure in the rivers and jungles of the Amazon. With the help of improvised allies, she seeks a way to discourage intruders and make them leave the forest. Aspects of traditional Yanomami life in the Rainforest are woven into the fanciful story. The author’s enchanting illustrations transform readers into fellow travelers on Meromi’s magical quest.

inspirational adult romance author under the pen name of Liz Isaacson, her work includes the young adult dystopian romance series Possession, published by Simon Pulse (Simon & Schuster), Elevated, the Elemental series, the Redwood Bay romance series, and the Amazon bestselling Three Rivers Ranch

The prevailing note in the Amazon is one of monotony,” thought Kenneth Grubb, “the same green lines the river-bank, the same gloom fills the forest. . . . Each successive bend in the river is rounded in expectancy, only to reveal another identical stretch ahead.

You know you said you used to wake up every morning in the lagoon when your father was alive and think, ‘Here I am, where I want to be.’ Well, that’s how I feel when I wake up on the Arabella.” Maia did not care whether they found the Xanti or not. It was not about arriving for her, it was about the journey. Even the sadness about Minty deserting her had gone. For Finn, who had almost kidnapped her, there were moments of anxiety. He should have told someone that Maia was safe, instead of taking her away without a word, but gradually he stopped worrying and gave himself up to the journey. And if Maia knew deep down that she would not be allowed to sail away forever up the rivers of the Amazon, she managed to forget it. She sang as she worked and when Finn whistled “Blow the Wind Southerly,” she smiled, because she had been wrong to be cross with the wind. The wind had brought him back, and she was content. And when Finn complained at the end of a day that they had not come very far, she said, “What does it matter? We’ve got all the time in the world.” Which is not always a clever thing to say.

Right,” she said. “Come down off that chair. I think we are ready for the next step.” “What do you mean?” “I am going to see Mrs. Carter tomorrow. I shall tell her that you are not able to keep up with the twins in lessons.” “But--” Miss Minton held up her hand. “Don’t interrupt, please. I shall tell her that I will set you to work separately because you are holding the twins back. That means I am trusting you to work on your own. I shall, of course, help you whenever I can, but you must keep up the deception.” She gave one of her tight smiles. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t have an interesting time. I have a book about the history of Brazil, and one by Bates, the explorer who first described this part of the Amazon. And another by Humboldt--a very great scientist. The twins may live as though they are still in Littleford-on-Sea, but there is no need for us to do so.” Maia jumped from the chair. “Oh, Minty,” she said, and threw her arms around her governess. “Thank you. I’m sorry…I thought--” “Well don’t,” said Miss Minton briskly. And then: “Come along, it’s time we opened my trunk.” Miss Minton had been poor all her life. She had no trinkets, no personal possessions; her employers underpaid her when they paid her at all--but her trunk was an Aladdin’s cave. There were travel books and fairy tales, novels and dictionaries and collections of poetry… “How did you get them all?” Maia asked wonderingly. “How did you manage?” Miss Minton shrugged. “If you want something enough you usually get it. But you have to take what goes with it”--and she pointed to her shabby blouse and mended skirt. “Now, let’s see---what shall we start with? Ah yes, here is Bates. He must have sailed down this very river not sixty years ago. Look at that drawing of a sloth…

Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, would

The origin myth of the Tukano speaks of the time, eons ago, when humans first settled the great rivers of the Amazon basin. It seems that 'supernatural beings' accompanied them on this journey and gifted them the fundamentals upon which to build a civilized life. From the 'Daughter of the Sun' they received the gift of fire and the knowledge of horticulture, pottery-making, and many other crafts. 'The serpent-shaped canoe of the first settlers' was steered by a superhuman 'Helmsman.' Meanwhile other supernaturals 'travelled by canoe over all the rivers and ... explored the remote hill ranges; they pointed out propitious sites for houses or fields, or for hunting and fishing, and they left their lasting imprint on many spots so that future generations would have ineffaceable proof of their earthly days and would forever remember them and their teachings.

Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post (conveniently, the biggest media company in D.C.), and he’s building Amazon’s second headquarters (HQ2) across the river from—shocker!—the capital city.

The Amazon forest exhales a Lake Tahoe every five days. Many mornings you can see mist columns twisting up from the canopy as if from fairy campfires. This vapor coalesces into “flying rivers” that ride equatorial winds to the west, while at ground level the rivers flow down an extremely subtle slope eastward toward the Atlantic.

It rains in the Amazon because the trees want it to. There is plenty of moisture in the oceans that surround the continent, but there is also hidden reservoir on the land, feeding an invisible river that flow upward to the sky. The water held in the soil is lifted up the bodies of trees and lost to the atmosphere through the surface of the leaves. The local sky plumps with moisture, primed for the arrival of the seasonal rains driven by the annual back-and-forth march of the sun’s rays. As climate scientist Alex Hall put it, the trees are co-conspiring with the sky to attract an earlier monsoon. A HANDFUL OF DUST by Kate Marvel

The good news is that you don’t need a Jeff to make this type of decision. You only need to ruthlessly stick to the simple-to-understand (but sometimes hard-to-follow) principles and process that insist on customer obsession, encourage thinking long term, value innovation, and stay connected to the details. None of us, including Jeff, knew exactly what we would end up building; it’s more like we stuck with the process and surrendered to where it was taking us. Prime was a perfect example of the multicausal, nonlinear way in which business initiatives both major and minor got decided on and executed at Amazon. Correspondingly, we can’t tell a linear story of how we came up with Prime because there isn’t one. Instead, this chapter will reflect that there were a lot of little tributaries that emptied into the river of Prime.

Inland rain requires trees. Rain clouds on their own cannot travel more than 400km from the sea, so rain in the centre of a continent – the very rain that creates the central forest of the Amazon for example – requires continuous forest to the coast. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon comes from its trees. As every school geography student knows, water evaporates from the sea, then falls as rain on coastal forest. Those trees ‘breathe out’ water vapour, which creates new clouds that travel further inland in so-called ‘flying rivers’. Crucially, this is how water reaches the soy and corn plantations in central and western Brazil. Once you destroy the forest you get less rain. A 2019 study showed that the rainy season in the state of Mato Grosso had become a month shorter in a decade,41, 42 and many of the major soy farms in Brazil are now suffering from the very drought that they have caused. Diverting rivers is not going to be possible, because the river water comes from rain.43 Hotter temperatures and droughts mean the southeastern Amazon has become a source of carbon dioxide rather than a carbon sink, and by some estimates the Amazon now produces more carbon than it stores.44, 45 So, the single greatest threat to Brazilian agribusiness is ... Brazilian agribusiness.

Watching as the water moves along I am once again reminded of the endless passing of time, the cruelty of it, how curial and amazing is it that no moment can last forever, and thus we have to learn to live with our mortality,

On the other side of the shore the lighthouse starts up again, illuminating the night and the river delta, casting its deep yellow light over the immediate surroundings. I once agin shiver despite the tropical heat. Another Peruvian night has dawned and with it another shot at hope is gone.

This was a creature that, except for the brief days in safety as a kitten, swatting at her mother’s tail and taking in a new world, had spent every waking moment fighting for life. Like one endless solo expedition, her life was a solitary battle for survival. Each morsel of food won required skill, stealth, and often the risk of injury or death. Stalking the beaches and brush of the long river beneath black thunderheads of the Amazon sky, she had managed to survive through all adversity in one of the most competitive and unforgiving ecosystems on earth.

the longest one percent of these fifteen thousand tributaries, alone, wind through more than sixty thousand miles of jungle. All in all, the Amazon River system contains more than twenty percent of the Earth’s fresh water, and the jungle generates more than twenty percent of the world’s oxygen. The Amazon River itself is many miles wide in some places, and over a hundred miles wide where it meets the ocean, gushing fifty-five million gallons of water into the Atlantic each second.

Over the course of my life, I’ve

Sometimes I'll pick up the "heart of the jungle" fossil on my bookshelf, or pull out my old field notebooks from my desk drawer, warped by Amazonian rains and the river's steam, the scent of the jungle still on their pages. I do this to remind myself that fiction does not have a monopoly on the unbelievable.

In Brazil there is a thrilling sight. The River Solimoes and River Negro are two tributaries of the Amazon. These two giant rivers join at Manaus to make the Amazon River. The water in the two is different in color and they flow side by side for nearly six kilometers before they mix. I have seen this for myself on one of my teaching trips to Brazil. Mindfulness and concentration work that way in the fourth jhana. They blend together to form one mighty river.

acid broke down the compound, making their waste devastating. They said that once it was absorbed, it ruined the cellular walls of plant cells, causing them to be weak, to die. I don’t know the science behind it, but it spread like a plague through plant life. All across the Midwest, crops withered, trees rotted, and forests turned brown. They said that the soil was completely useless due to highly acidic toxins which destroyed all the minerals and nutrients plants needed to thrive. Everything started dying. We watched on television as the Amazon and lush forests in India began to wither and blacken. The governments took action, quickly quarantining any infected areas, halting foot traffic, and trying their hardest to stop the spread. To be honest, it could have worked had we realized sooner. Everything along the Missouri, the Platte, the Canadian, the Pecos, Red, and Mississippi rivers all began to die. The runoff and seepage killed everything, turning the heart of America into a

Dan explains the trip’s itinerary, which includes trekking through the jungle, boating down the Amazon River, and to my surprise, three Ayahuasca ceremonies.

For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. II Timothy 1:7

a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses

went by back roads, past pines, swamps, shacks, the small towns of Lorman and Fayette, a school flying a Confederate flag, and down one road on which for some miles there were large lettered signs with intimidating Bible quotations nailed to roadside trees: “Prepare to Meet Thy God—Amos 4:12” and “He who endures to the end shall be saved—Mark 13:13” and “REPENT”—Mark 6:12.” Finally I arrived at the lovely town of Natchez. Natchez is dramatically sited on the bluffs above the wide brown Mississippi, facing the cotton fields in flatter Louisiana and the transpontine town of Vidalia. It was my first glimpse of the river on this trip. Though the Mississippi is not the busy thoroughfare it once was, it is impossible for an American to see this great, muddy, slow-moving stream and not be moved, as an Indian is by the Ganges, a Chinese by the Yangtze, an Egyptian by the Nile, an African by the Zambezi, a New Guinean by the Sepik, a Brazilian by the Amazon, an English person by the Thames, a Quebecois by the St. Lawrence, or any citizen by a stream flowing past his feet. I mention these rivers because I’ve seen them myself, and written about them, but as an alien, a romantic voyeur. A river is history made visible, the lifeblood of a nation.

The activities of La Condamine, Humboldt, Wallace, Bates, and other such explorers touched on only the tiniest fraction of the vastness of a world so expansive as to be impervious to harm. But today, the Amazon River Basin, occupying more than 2.7 million square miles is at our fingertips and is considered one of the most ecologically threatened regions of the world.

Rainforest destruction was invariably justified by those who profited as a necessary evil, an engine of wealth that would lift all boats. But what most people got instead was a host of other consequences—exploding vampire bat populations, poisoned rivers, the spread of rabies and malaria, and a deepening drought that was blistering the trees, frying the jungle. Wildfires never before seen had come to the Amazon. *

Casement, the diplomat who had earlier exposed the horrors of Leopold’s Congo, to investigate. Finding himself at a loss to describe the reign of terror he encountered on the Putumayo River, Casement coined a new term to do so: “a crime against humanity.” *

Personally, I like them like this—violent,” Possuelo said. In the low light, his hazel eyes seemed to pop from their sockets. “This river is one of the most preserved and intact in all of Brazil. Why? Because the Korubo are here, and they’re fierce.

the separation process, in which mercury and cyanide were used to extract the gold from the ore. It would be dumped straight into rivers and streams, poisoning fish and drinking water. Where rivers ran past Indian settlements downstream from gold strikes, ulcers and suppurating sores were the order of the day. So were birth defects. The grieving nurse in Gorotire had delivered two stillborn babies in her first three months on the job. The fetuses’ brains were growing outside their skulls.

The Kayapó of Gorotire had made a deal with the devil; they got a cut of the action from the Maria Bonita gold mine upstream, but in return, their once-crystalline river was ruined forever. The

Which smells more—one piece of shit or two? Take deforestation. You cut down the forests, and you destroy the flora, the fauna, the rivers. Gold extraction is concentrated along the rivers. It pollutes the water, kills off the fish. It’s all the same shit. It all stinks equally.” Tomorrow

He explained the dynamic that leads an uprooted tribe to extinction: “The women stop having children. Under these conditions, why have children? The older men lose their ability to run, climb mountains, cross rivers. The younger ones are strongest, but they’re in a state of total demoralization. It’s contradictory. On the one hand they don’t want to live; on the other, they don’t want to surrender.” 44

innumerable tribes wiped out, enslaved, or set to fighting each other. Rivers poisoned, forests razed. Possuelo had seen the consequences with his own eyes among the Yanomami—the death and disease, the complete and utter bewilderment of a people overwhelmed by the stampede for gold.

floating rigs that laid waste to huge stretches of shoreline and spewed toxic effluents straight into the rivers. So destructive were the dredges that a permit was nearly impossible to obtain. But that didn’t keep hundreds—if not thousands—of the machines from operating extralegally along the region’s most remote and ungovernable waterways. Rarely did anyone try to stop them. Technically,

They could make contact any time they wanted, Possuelo said. All they had to do was head down any river and they’d find their way to civilization. The fact that the Arrow People and like tribes had not done so provided a sufficiently clear message: they wanted to be left alone. *

Alejandro de Humboldt National Park Outside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people. One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct. The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles. “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.

Juan Ponce de León On April 2, 1513, according to legend while searching for the Fountain of Youth, Ponce de León discovered Florida. In actual fact, it was more likely that he was out seeking the gold that the Indians were always talking about. The Indians encouraged this sort of talk, in the high hopes of keeping the conquistadors away from them as far as possible. Returning to Spain in 1514, Ponce de León was recognized for his service to the crown and was knighted. Given his own coat of arms, he became the first conquistador to be honored in this way. Although Ponce de León did bring back a substantial amount of gold, much of it had been stolen from the Indians that he had enslaved. In 1521 Ponce de León set out from Puerto Rico to colonize Florida. He commanded a flotilla of two ships containing about 200 men. In this case his exploratory party was peaceful and included farmers, priests and craftsmen. However he was attacked by Calusa braves, a tribe of Indians who lived on the coast and along the rivers and inner waterways of Florida’s southwestern coast. In the skirmish, Ponce de León was wounded when an arrow, believed to have been dipped into the sap of the “Manchineel Tree,” also called Poison Guava, pierced his thigh. After fending off this attack, he and the colonists retreated to Havana, where in July of 1521, he succumbed to his wound and died. In 1559 his body was moved from Cuba and taken to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he was interred in the crypt of San José Church. In 1836, his remains were exhumed and transferred to the larger, more impressive Cathedral of San Juan Bautista in San Juan. They have remained at this urban, hillside church until this day. This information is from Captain Hank Bracker’s award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” available from Amazon.com and other fine book vendors. Follow, like and share Captain Hank Bracker’s daily blogs & commentaries.

In places the Amazon sprawls a remarkable fifty miles wide; it can vary in depth with floodwaters or tides by as much as fifty feet; and, near its terminus at the Atlantic, it contains an island the size of Switzerland.

Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajó, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka’apor-managed forests, according to Balée’s plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balée cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was “anthropogenic”—directly or indirectly created by humans. Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. “I basically think it’s all human created,” Clement told me. So does Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he said. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, “lots” of researchers believe that “what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.” The phrase “built environment,” Erickson argued, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.

When I became Governor, the champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and I got him to come round three or four afternoons a week….While President I used to box with some of the aides. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT, the only U.S. president who swam naked in the Potomac in winter, went blind in one eye from boxing in the White House, gave a speech immediately after taking a bullet in the chest, and nearly died mapping an uncharted river in the Amazon

Our words are similar to wells, and those wells can accommodate the most diverse waters: cataracts, drizzles of other times, oceans that were and will be of ashes, whirlpools of rivers, of human being, and of tears as well. Our words are like people, and sometimes much more, not simple carriers of only one meaning. They are not like those bored pots holding always the same water until their beings, their tongues, forget them, and then crack or get tired, and lean to one side, almost dead. No. You can put entire rivers in our pots, and if perchance they break, if the envelope of the words cracks, the water remain: vivid, intact, running, and renovating itself unceasingly. They are live beings who wander on their own, our words: animals that never repeat themselves and are never resigned to a single skin, to an unchanging temperature, to the same steps.

For the first part of the journey Maia kept her eyes on the side of the road. Now that she was really leaving her friends it was hard to hold back her tears. She had reached the gulping stage when she heard a loud snapping noise and turned her head. Miss Minton had opened the metal clasp of her large black handbag and was handing her a clean handkerchief, embroidered with the initial A. “Myself,” said the governess in her deep gruff voice, “I would think how lucky I was. How fortunate.” “To go to the Amazon, you mean?” “To have so many friends who were sad to see me go.” “Didn’t you have friends who minded you leaving?” Miss Minton’s thin lips twitched for a moment. “My sister’s canary, perhaps. If he had understood what was happening. Which is extremely doubtful.

But in the evening, when at last she had a moment alone, she slipped into the library and leaned her head against the mahogany steps she had climbed the day she knew she was going to the Amazon. The dream she had dreamed there had been a true one. She had found a land whose riches she had never before imagined, and she had found Finn. Well, now it was over. In ten minutes the bell would ring for them to go to their dormitories, then another bell for them to kneel and pray. And why not? How else was one supposed to run a school? “Oh Finn,” said Maia. “How am I going to bear it, day after day after day?

But in the evening, when at last she had a moment alone, she slipped into the library and leaned her head against the mahogany steps she had climbed the day she knew she was going to the Amazon. The dream she had dreamed there had been a true one. She had found a land whose riches she had never before imagined, and she had found Finn.

Miss Minton, what on earth made you let a young girl travel up the Amazon and spend weeks living with savages? What made you do it? The British consul thinks that you must all have been drugged.” “Perhaps. Yes, perhaps we were drugged. Not by the things the Xanti smoked--none of us touched them--but by…peace…by happiness. By a different sense of time.” “I don’t think you have explained why you let Maia--” Miss Minton interrupted him. “I will explain. At least I will try to. You see, I have looked after some truly dreadful children in my time, and it was easy not to get fond of them. After all, a governess is not a mother. But Maia…well, I’m afraid I grew to love her. And that meant I began to think what I would do if she were my child.” “And you would let her--” began Mr. Murray. But Miss Minton stopped him. “I would let her…have adventures. I would let her…choose her path. It would be hard…it was hard…but I would do it. Oh, not completely, of course. Some things have to go on. Cleaning one’s teeth, arithmetic. But Maia fell in love with the Amazon. It happens. The place was for her--and the people. Of course there was some danger, but there is danger everywhere. Two years ago, in this school, there was an outbreak of typhus, and three girls died. Children are knocked down and killed by horses every week, here in these streets--” She broke off, gathering her thoughts. “When she was traveling and exploring…and finding her songs, Maia wasn’t just happy, she was…herself. I think something broke in Maia when her parents died, and out there it was healed. Perhaps I’m mad--and the professor, too--but I think children must lead big lives…if it is in them to do so. And it is in Maia.” The old lawyer was silent, rolling his silver pencil over and over between his fingers. “You would take her back to Brazil?” “Yes.” “To live among savages?” “No. To explore and discover and look for giant sloths and new melodies and flowers that only blossom once every twenty years. Not to find them necessarily, but to look--” She broke off, remembering what they had planned, the four of them, as they sailed up the Agarapi. To build a proper House of Rest near the Carters’ old bungalow and live there in the rainy season, studying hard so that if Maia wanted to go to music college later, or Finn to train as a doctor, they would be prepared. And in the dry weather, to set off and explore. Mr. Murray had risen to his feet. He walked over to the window and stood with his back to her, looking out at the square. “It’s impossible. It’s madness.” There was a long pause. “Or is it?” the old man said.

By 1906 there were few blank spaces left on the world map. Central Africa, the Amazon River basin, the high Himalayas, and Antarctica still had some uncharted areas.

You could go [along the river] where you wanted and homestead—the forest gives you all kinds of fruit and animals, the river gives you fish and plants. That was very important to societies like Marajó. They had to be much less coercive, much more hang-loose, much more socially fluid, or people wouldn’t stay there.” Compared with much of the rest of the world at that time, people in the Amazon “were freer, they were healthier, they were living in a really wonderful civilization.

Adrenaline fizzed through his veins. Jumping down,

I would drain my tropics to the last precious drop. I myself was seeing what I had thought others lucky to have seen. It was like being born into the world as an understanding adult.

Fall River, an old mill town fifty miles south of Boston. Median household income in that city is $33,000, among the lowest in the state; unemployment is among the highest, 15 percent in March 2014, nearly five years after the recession ended. Twenty-three percent of Fall River’s inhabitants live in poverty. The city lost its many fabric-making concerns years ago and with them it lost its reason for being. People have been deserting the place for decades.14 Many of the empty factories in which their ancestors worked are still standing, however. Solid nineteenth-century structures of granite or brick, these huge boxes dominate the city visually—there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, contrasting painfully with whatever colorful plastic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door. Most of these old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading, simply, “Cancer & Blood.” The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politicians have withdrawn their blessing. Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failure you see on every corner in Fall River. This is a place where affluence never returns—not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country’s leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives, and professionals. Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities—an Amazon warehouse that is in the planning stages—will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.15

Pinzón explored the easternmost shores of Brazil and ventured into the mouth of the Amazon River,

Cuando se ha vivido en completo aislamiento, ¿cómo se puede entender lo que significa perder una cultura? No es sino hasta que ha desaparecido casi por completo y la gente se educa y se dan cuenta de lo que están perdiendo. Para entonces, los atractivos de las nuevas formas de vida son tan irresistibles, que los únicos que quieren volver a las antiguas costumbres son los que nunca vivieron bajo ellas".

The heart of the issue is the modern principle, that does not hold much water, death of us, sever from the bosom thine breast and dispersed, surmounted morals by sadist of uncivil. Mammoth falling gradually dying without remorse, history hidden on the hills and caves, decipher not, roots abandoned for modern indulgence, eyes see not, civilization dying in the orb of beauty when wine blinds us. Rivers moving upstream, oceans feeding rivers, deserts with dense pine trees, oasis with mackerels, the amazons’ sands with camel foot prints, the Savanah snow rain paint beauty of pandas. Mother is blinded by mammon, father drunk with savory of rum while it digs, it destroys the spirit while it penetrates the cudgel spell.

Bolivians recently elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales, and gave constitutional rights to the earth. Rivers, fish, air, trees—these things have rights there and are regarded as part of the collective public interest, of the inheritance that everyone is entitled to.

Yes , you're going to see the greatest river on earth...the greatest unexplored jungle on earth...greatest storehouse of natural resources on earth. Some day the Amazon will feed the world.

However, not all dolphins belong to the Delphinidae. There are five species of river dolphins—remarkable, prehistoric-looking animals like the Amazon boto, the Ganges River dolphin, and the now-extinct baiji, formerly found in China’s Yangtze River.

Then came an invention to target fish with better accuracy. Some years after my visit to the Luangwa River I was in the Solomon Islands, in the South Pacific. One of my tasks here was to shoot a mullet with a bow and arrow, up one of the mangrove-fringed creeks. I already had some experience with a bow, having shot a couple of peacock bass in the Amazon.

The Mississippi River, beginning in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and ending in the Gulf of Mexico, is 2,340 miles long. It runs as deep as 217 feet, and at the foot of Canal Street is 2,200 feet wide. It is the third largest river in the world after the Amazon and the Congo. It drains forty percent of the forty-eight continental states and has a basin covering 1.25 million square miles, including parts of thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces

this is not only the largest river in the world, it's many times larger than the next biggest river. it blows all other rivers away.

My first real trip out of the country was flying alone out of Winnipeg, landing in the Twin Cities to switch planes, and finally arriving in Miami. Going from negative 30 degree winter weather to the heat and humidity of South Florida was a shock to my Canadian senses, but I was ready for an adventure. One week later, I climbed out of a small Cessna 206 in the middle of the Amazon jungle that’s called the green hell! A month of living the missionary life on the Orinoco River in Venezuela convinced me that my future lay in this lifestyle.

Orellana’s achievement would later be called one of the world’s greatest explorations, “something more than a journey, and more like a miraculous event.

Few people know that trees in the Amazon put more water into the sky, in the form of steam, than the Amazon River transports to sea. We really need to take care of forests: they are an incredible value to all of us!

Few people know that trees in the Amazon put more water into the sky in the form of steam, than the Amazon River transports to sea,

the first Amazonians did avoid the Dilemma of Rainfall Physics. Speaking broadly, their solution was not to clear the forest but to replace it with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the bluffs that mark the edge of high water—close enough to the river to fish, far enough to avoid the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops, they focused on the Amazon’s wildly diverse assortment of trees. In his view, the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots with their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other annual crops in their gardens until the forest took them over, they planted selected tree crops along with the manioc and managed the transition. Of the 138 known domesticated plant species in the Amazon, more than half are trees.