The article highlights the importance of envisioning multiple futures for human and rainforest coexistence. It emphasizes forest conviviality and knowledge co-creation, drawing insights from the PRODIGY research project, which shows that knowledge systems are essential for socioecological resilience
Imagining multiple futures is not just an intellectual exercise; it is a matter of life itself. Here, the concepts of forest conviviality and knowledge co-creation capture the need for coexistence between human societies and the rainforest. The results of the PRODIGY research project highlight that knowledge in the Southwestern Amazon is not merely a side effect of change but one of its most powerful drivers. In this context, ‘knowledge’ does not refer only to science, but to all forms of knowing: scientific, Indigenous, and forest practices in everyday life. Each of these knowledge systems holds value, offering different ways of relating to land, water, and forest. This epistemic diversity, meaning diversity in ways of knowing and understanding the world, is not simply cultural richness; it is a critical component of socioecological resilience. Forest relations shaped solely by extractive thinking tend toward instability, while those grounded in multiple ways of knowing are better equipped to adapt to crises without collapse.
Forest conviviality and knowledge tipping points
We understand forest conviviality as the relationalities among all species in the rainforest, including humans, guided by practices that maintain a balance between use and care, ensuring the health and continuity of the forest. These relationalities can themselves reach tipping points: moments when shifts in worldview fundamentally alter how societies perceive, value, and engage with the world. In other words, a knowledge or ontological tipping point signifies a profound transformation in the underlying assumptions about what exists and how humans relate to it.
One such moment occurred in the Southwestern Amazon during the late nineteenth-century rubber boom. Before this period, the tri-border region between Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru was home to diverse Indigenous communities whose daily lives were shaped by relational ontologies, connecting humans, forests, animals, and soils. Although their world was not free of violence, with armed conflicts and even abductions occurring between Indigenous groups, relationships with other species were primarily characterized by interaction and mutuality. Animals or plants, while hunted and eaten, were regarded as kin or persons in other-than-human form, and their consumption was mediated by ritual, respect, and cosmological reciprocity rather than by notions of domination or unlimited extraction. Rivers and smaller waterways formed a comprehensive network for transport, mobility, and trade, while Western goods and information had begun to circulate alongside forest products in local exchange systems.
The industrial demand for rubber dramatically altered this reality. Rubber trees were reframed as ‘production machines’ for global markets, and both Indigenous and migrant laborers were bound into coercive debt–patronage systems. This was not only an economic shift – it was a fundamental change in how ‘nature’ was understood, redefined as a stockpile of exploitable resources. ‘Progress’ became synonymous with integration into capitalist economies.
Even after the collapse of the rubber economy, the extractive worldview it introduced persists and leads to new tipping points today. The economy pivoted to new commodities like Brazil nuts, gold, cattle, wildlife, and timber, but the underlying logic of species commodification and land development remained. Today, extractivism is taking more destructive forms: mercury-driven soil and water degradation from gold mining, and large-scale deforestation for cattle ranching. These tipping points are not only ecological, but they are reinforced by knowledge as a driver and governance models that prioritize short-term extraction for development over long-term resilience and conviviality. Yet, many people in the region continue to relate to the forest and care for their co-species. Navigating these thresholds requires policies that realign incentives, integrate Indigenous and local knowledge, and promote sustainable, non-extractive land-use alternatives.
From extractive pathways to navigating thresholds
The challenge today is to foster relational knowledge that can inform governance and practices, pushing toward resilience instead of collapse. Encouragingly, as said before, such knowledge has never ceased to exist in the region. Field research in Madre de Dios (Peru), Acre (Brazil), and Pando (Bolivia) reveals examples where alternative ways of knowing endure or are being revitalized. In Peru, mercury- free gold mining cooperatives fostered by international NGOs like Pure Earth and local activists are reviving pre-Columbian Moche techniques, while ecotourism ventures act as an education hub and buffer against further mining expansion. In Brazil, inspired by the legacy of Chico Mendes, Colectivo Varadouro unites young leaders in reclaiming their relationship with the forest and advocating for an economy with a standing forest, a ‘floresta em pé. In Bolivia, Fair Trade community-led enterprises organized by former rubber tappers and Indigenous groups aim to access global markets under equitable conditions, safeguarding species while sustaining livelihoods. These initiatives challenge dominant extractive narratives and exemplify forest conviviality – a form of coexistence in which human livelihoods and multispecies relationalities mutually reinforce one another, negotiating new forms of knowing and governing land.
The role of knowledge towards multiple Amazonian futures
Transitioning from extractive to regenerative and convivial land practices requires recognizing that relationalities and forest knowledge are not secondary to transformation; they are its driving force. Just as the rubber boom’s ontological tipping point reshaped the region’s trajectory, the co-creation of knowledge across scientific, Indigenous, and local forest expertise today can trigger transformative shifts toward socioecological justice. This would embed the rights and wellbeing of all human and nonhuman beings into decision-making. By ‘multiple Amazonian futures’ we refer to the idea that the Amazon is not heading toward a single, predetermined outcome, but rather a range of possible trajectories shaped by forest conviviality. Supporting these forms of knowledge co-creation enables us to move beyond extractive legacies toward futures that are diverse, adaptive, and just; not only for human communities but for the flourishing of forest relationalities themselves.
References
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