A Not For Sale story

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From the air, the Amazon looks endless.

Fly out of Puerto Maldonado, in Peru’s Madre de Dios region, and you soon find where it ends.

A Not For Sale story

The Forest Line

A flight over Madre de Dios, Peru: from the gold mines to the forest that people are keeping alive, and why both are one story.

About 7 minutes · October 2026

The landscape is illustrated: it folds a real place into one flight. The facts and figures come from Not For Sale’s work in Madre de Dios.

An illustrated flight from above: pasture, then a moonscape of gold-mining pits and blue-tarp camps, then a sharp edge where dense rainforest begins, with a river, giant Brazil nut trees, a village and a tree nursery.
Mining pit
Camp
Dredge and mercury
Brazil nut pod
Harvest boat
Seed bank

Pasture

First, cattle pasture. All of this was forest once.

At the edges, the last trees are burned to make room for more.

The mining zone

Then the ground turns to sand. This is what illegal gold mining leaves: the forest stripped, the soil blasted with water, the gold bound with mercury.

Under the blue tarps: the camps. In camps like these, forced labor, child labor and sexual trafficking go on without oversight.

The mercury does not stay in the pits. It washes into the rivers, the fish and the drinking water.

139,000 hectares

of forest lost to gold mining. 97.5% of it is here, in Madre de Dios.

Source: Not For Sale

Many of the people doing this work did not choose it. Indigenous families trapped in debt are forced into the mines, destroying the forest their own communities depend on.

The forest line.

On one side, gold, for as long as it lasts. On the other, a forest that can keep paying its way.

Standing forest

See the giants standing above the canopy? Brazil nut trees. They only grow in wild, closed-canopy rainforest. No one can plant them in rows.

On the river: harvesters taking nuts to market in a boat they own.

One of ten indigenous communities in AFIMAD, the cooperative Not For Sale helped start. Here, the forest is worth more standing.

Where forest has already gone, it can come back. The Camino Verde project grows more than 400 native species from a living seed bank.

Every harvested nut is a reason not to cut a tree down.

On the ground

Up close, one of those giants. A Brazil nut tree can grow taller than 50 meters, high above the rest of the forest.

Its flowers can only be opened by large, strong bees that live in the forest.

Its pods, hard as wood, fall in the rainy season. Harvesters gather them from the forest floor.

The agouti, a forest rodent, is one of the few animals that can open a pod. It buries the seeds and forgets some. That is how new trees grow.

Why it matters

A Brazil nut tree needs the whole forest around it, so it cannot be grown on a plantation. Every Brazil nut economy is a forest economy.

The loop

Here is how a standing forest pays for itself.

Ten indigenous communities in the AFIMAD cooperative gather the fallen pods under forest management plans. Five hold organic certification, and the cooperative is Fair Trade certified.

They take the nuts to Puerto Maldonado in their own boats, which Not For Sale helped fund, so they no longer depend on predatory middlemen.

There they sell to Candor, the exporter that processes them and ships them to the United States.

The nuts go into REBBL, a drinks company that grew out of the Montara Circle, a workshop Not For Sale co-hosted in 2011.

REBBL returns 2.5% of its net revenue to Not For Sale: more than $2 million so far.

Forest to cooperative. Cooperative to product. Product to revenue. Revenue to protection.

Every year, Not For Sale conserves 753 square miles of rainforest in Madre de Dios.

That is about 1.6 times the size of New York City.

It is not a line drawn on a map. It holds because the forest earns more standing than cut down.

About this story

Ecocide and slavery are one system

In Madre de Dios, the same economy that traffics people destroys the forest, and the same economy that protects the forest protects people. So Not For Sale works on both at once: scholarships and community gardens for children, fish farms free of mercury, a cooperative that earns from a standing forest, and a supply chain that pays for the protection.

The flight in this story is illustrated. It folds a real region into one landscape, so distances and places are not to scale.

139,000 haof forest lost to gold mining, 97.5% in Madre de DiosNot For Sale
753 sq miof rainforest conserved every yearNot For Sale
10indigenous communities in the AFIMAD cooperativeNot For Sale
$2M+returned to Not For Sale by REBBLNot For Sale

No one is for sale.
Help us prove it.

DonateWhat is ecocide?

Sources and notes

  • Mining deforestation, the camps, mercury, AFIMAD, the boats, Candor, REBBL, the 753 square miles and Camino Verde: Not For Sale’s Peru page.
  • Ecocide and its link to forced labor: What is ecocide?
  • Brazil nut biology (canopy, bees, agouti): general botany, to be checked by the Peru team.
  • The landscape, the camps and the community shown are illustrative. New York City is shown at its total area, 472 square miles.

Concept mockup for review. Not published, and not the live site. Illustrations are drawn in code as placeholders for commissioned art.

All story mockups

Mockup for review. Not the live site.