Eliane Brum dials into our video call from the rainforest. Behind her is a wall of green. Over the whirr of my laptop in a windowless basement in central London, I can hear some faint sounds of insects, or perhaps birds. The forest, life itself, is a participant in this conversation.
Brum is a Brazilian journalist and documentary filmmaker—and Prospect’s Top Thinker for 2025, chosen by our readers from a shortlist of 25 experts on climate, economics, freedom, geo-politics and technology. She is a worthy winner, her work rich in radical ideas about climate, nature, inequality and oppression, and her life a practised effort to transform how we see ourselves and our place on this Earth.
The Amazon, Brum says, is the centre of the world. Forget London, New York and Beijing—the centre is defined not by markets, but by life. And where is life more bountiful, where is it under greater attack, than in the Amazon? Where is the heart of life’s resistance if not in a place where indigenous peoples have for centuries fought against colonisation and capitalism just to survive? “This is not rhetoric,” she tells me. “We depend on the Amazon forest to have a future in our planet home. And well, we have forests because we have… the indigenous people that protect the forest.”
Many of us would distinguish between humanity and nature, but not everybody does. Among the Amazon’s indigenous peoples, it is common to see oneself as being a part of nature, rather than apart from it. In Brum’s most recent book, Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Centre of the World, she reminds us that the European colonisers who first violated the forest saw those indigenous people that way too—as savages—and wrought the same destruction on them as they did on the trees and earth.
Her reporting focuses on documenting the continuation of that harm—in its many varieties, from pollution to deforestation to the abuse of women and children—and on reporting the stories of the indigenous people who resist it. They “are in the spotlight defending the forest with their bodies, and they are dying, they are being killed for this. As [are] the other non-human species that are living here. We need to support the people that are dying for all of us.”
Brum has worked as a journalist for 36 years, for many of them covering human rights abuses from a base in São Paulo, the most populous city in the Americas, and the fourth-biggest in the world. In 2016, while working on a project in the municipality of Altamira, Pará state—a region at the heart of deforestation—she realised that she needed to live there, at “an epicentre of everything we need to change”.
It was from there in 2017 that she co-founded Sumaúma, a journalism platform covering climate breakdown in Spanish, Portuguese and English “because we want to debate with the world”. The aim is to report on the Amazon from the inside, and to train as journalists “young people from the forest, like indigenous and other traditional communities, and also urban young people from the cities of the Amazon, the peripheries, the slums”. The founders will be out of Sumaúma within 10 years. They are intentionally “losing power”—handing it over to those historically denied it, “to create a new language and new journalism”. “This is the only way to have a real change,” Brum says.
In November, Brazil will host the next UN climate summit, Cop30, in the city of Belém, within the Amazon itself. Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), global emissions have increased by around 60 per cent. “We have no more time,” Brum says. She expects civil society to turn out in large numbers to demonstrate. “But this is not enough,” she adds. “It’s necessary to -participate in the decisions.”
The political climate, though, is not ripe for the kind of radical change that Brum hopes to see. “We have a bad environment for this Cop, in large part because we have Trump in power in the United States,” she says. His “alliance” with Elon Musk suggests to her that America has elected “a government for billionaires, with an idea of a bunker country”, cut off from the world and focused most on self-preservation at a time when the biggest historic emitter needs to be a role model for change.
In Brazil, too, climate politics is under pressure. In 2022, the centre-left Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ousted Jair Bolsonaro, under whose presidency deforestation increased by 60 per cent, while greenhouse gas emissions reached a 19-year high, illegal mining boomed and indigenous peoples and lands came under attack. And yet Brazil’s Congress remains firmly to the right, and “business has great influence”, Brum says. It is very possible that Brazil will elect a far-right leader again, she thinks.
It’s a minority that destroyed the Amazon and produced global warming. A minority formed by the big corporations, super-rich people, the billionaires
The left, Brum thinks, is too backwards-looking, and “not connected with the big challenge of climate collapse”. During his first two terms as president, from 2003 to 2010, Lula was globally lauded for transforming the living conditions of millions of Brazilians. A new middle class was created. But this was at nature’s cost, Brum says, paid for by the extraction of commodities, and their export to China in particular. “The left still thinks that it’s possible to do this. We have Lula making big speeches outside, but inside we have Lula supporting… new oil exploration in the Amazon basin, and doing big construction, like a railway in the Amazon and a big road.”
Despite her criticisms of Brazil’s leaders, Brum wants to make one thing clear: “It’s very important to understand that it’s not the ‘barbarians’ in Brazil that are destroying the Amazon. [A] big part of the Amazon is being eaten on the plate of Europe,” whether it’s the soybeans that feed European and Chinese cattle and pigs, or gold, or wood. “I think it’s a minority that destroyed the Amazon and produced global warming. A minority formed by the big corporations, super-rich people, the billionaires that are the main arsonists.”
I ask Brum how left-wing governments in Brazil and Europe should act if faced with a choice between protecting the environment and improving the lot of the poorest in society. “A government that is really worried about diminishing poverty and especially diminishing inequality… [must] face climate breakdown,” she says. “The most affected are the poorest people, the women, the indigenous people, the children.”
Dishonesty is fodder for the far right, she says. They succeed in part because they “lie, sell a past that never existed. A past where everybody accepted the inequality of rights and others. The black people accepted a subaltern place, women accepted the subaltern place. Everyone’s place was very defined, and this was ‘peaceful’. We never had ‘peaceful’. This supposedly peaceful world was produced with extermination.”
An honest politician “needs to say that [standards of living] will be worse, and people that have privileges should lose their privileges. Nobody wants to vote for this, unfortunately”.
In 2024 global temperatures were more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels—the limit set by the 2015 Paris agreement. I ask Brum what hope she has for the future. “I think it’s not about hope,” she says. “It’s not about optimism. Hope is very beautiful, and optimism is also interesting. But… it’s about wanting to live.”
She recalls Greta Thunberg’s metaphor: that our house is burning and we aren’t extinguishing the flames. “In this situation, if we wait for hope to fight, maybe it won’t be possible,” she says. “I live in the forest and I see all the creatures… any simple organism, if they feel threatened, they immediately react, because in the forest everybody wants to live.”
“We are in an extreme, serious situation. We are very threatened. And we should be fighting for life. There is just our generation, the generations that are alive at this moment, to fight for this.”
