Hello, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and this is Women Who Travel, a podcast for anyone who's curious about the world.

The Amazon lives in our imaginations, it lives in literature, and throughout swathes of travel writing,

accounts of hiking through thick jungle and trips on waterways from Manaus,

the gateway to the forest.

But today, we're talking to someone who really knows what it's like to live on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest.

Journalist Eliani Brum, who has built a house of recycled wood in a town called Altamira, which lies on the

northern fringes of the Amazon.

It's in the Amazon forest.

It's the center of deforestation in the Amazon, also the center of the criminal fires, and also the centre of the resistance.

The rainforest is known for its incredible jaw-dropping biodiversity.

It's home to innumerable types of animals and plants.

But it's also central to the story of climate change, suffering from severe deforestation.

Altamira in particular is prey to aggressive logging, gold mining, and recently a huge new hydroelectric dam.

The land is being flooded, dug up, cut down, and the local people's livelihood is being threatened.

Thank you. cut down, and the local people's livelihood is being threatened. Eliani has been documenting this for decades, and much of that work appears in her new book,

Banzairo Okoto, or The Amazon is the Center of the World, out on March 7th.

It's why we're also talking to Diane Whitty, who's based in Madison, Wisconsin, and lived in

Brazil before translating Eliani's book. I asked Diane how you'd explain the book to anyone

unfamiliar with Brazil.

If you would like to take a journey into the Amazon, a world that you know hardly anything about, and in the same time, take that trip as a transformational experience of a person who goes from a city dweller to someone

who feels herself intermixed with a forest, you will come out with a new understanding of

our relationship with the world, where we are at this moment of the world, and how the

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