The first time Virgilio Viana saw the Amazon up close, he was a 16-year-old with a backpack, two school friends and very little sense of what he was walking into. They arrived by land, drifting along dirt roads that had more potholes than surface, then continued by riverboat as the forest thickened around them.  Something in that journey stayed with him. It pulled at him long after he returned home, and kept pulling as he studied forestry, completed a doctorate on the region, and eventually left a professorship in São Paulo for the more complicated work of governing the forest itself. That decision—to move not just intellectually but physically into the Amazon—shaped the rest of his life. Viana later became State Secretary for Environment and Sustainable Development in Amazonas, a role tha

See Full Page