This forest looks so formidable but signs of fragility are everywhere.
Planes fly overhead taking miners and owners to dig gold upriver.
Chainsaws cut away the hardwood that has taken millenia to flourish. Our dugout canoe is tethered to the aerial root of a fig tree along the edge of a mangrove swamp. We are watching a local fisherman try to catch a single once-abundant fish for his family's supper. In the meantime, we are trying to capture what may be the last gasp of this ancient forest voice before the biophony dies, a result of the effects of arsenic and mercury leaching from the mines and the silt from uncontrolled runoffs left by clear cutting. This work is our gentle living and we, like the fisherman, know nothing else that nourishes us more than this passive act.