LAST WILDEST PLACE is a decade-long, ongoing project based on a simple fact: The Amazon Matters. Working regularly with several small NGOs, I have been photographing this globally critical landscape in the face of the many and constantly evolving threats to the unique social, cultural, and environmental fabric of this place.

At over a billion acres, the Amazon Basin is bigger than the next two largest tropical forests combined. It alone accounts for half the planet’s remaining rainforest, 30% of all terrestrial species, 20% of our world’s freshwater, and 20% of the global oxygen. It provides climate stability for the entire planet and the carbon stored in its forests—and released by its deforestation—affects us all.

Within the Amazon, the Purús/Manu region in southeastern Peru is one of the most remote and inaccessible, where still-intact and uniquely biodiverse ecosystems provide sustenance for settled indigenous communities and is home to perhaps the highest concentration of isolated “uncontacted” tribes on Earth. While still largely undeveloped, this last wildest place is increasingly threatened by logging, illegal and unregulated gold mining (Peru is the largest gold producer in South America and 6th or 7th in the world), coca farms and processing, land trafficking, oil and gas development, cattle grazing, agricultural expansion, Christian missionaries, pharmaceutical exploitation, extreme drought, and the legal and illegal road construction projects that open access to previously inaccessible forests with devastating—often irrevocable—impacts on the ecosystems and all who depend on them.

I first visited the Upper Amazon in 2013 and have returned over a dozen times spending more than a year in total in the jungle. The pandemic, which limited legitimate expeditions as well as enforcement patrols, left the region especially vulnerable to increased illegal activity. As we emerge from this dynamic and into the face of an uncertain and unstable socio-political environment, we see the extent of the unregulated and illegal activities making raising awareness more critical than ever.