Blooming from the wounds: Lessons from the Amazon’s Macacarecuia
Below are some initial reflections from an extraordinary residency in Lab Verde, where I explored biosemiotics, interspecies communication and foundation models in the Amazon. I'll be sharing much more about these investigations in the coming weeks. My deepest gratitude goes to Lab Verde's Lilian Fraiji and Tammy Calvacante for creating this transformative space and to the brilliant cohort of 20+ artists and thinkers who became co-conspirators. I was privileged to learn from leading researchers, including Prof. Charles Clement, whose work on agricultural domestication reveals the Amazon's ancient human histories; ornithologist Dr Mario Cohn-Haft, who opened my ears to the forest's complex soundscapes; and Dr Jochen Schöngart, whose research illuminates how climate extremes (floods and droughts) and human activities reshape wetland ecosystems. But perhaps my most profound teacher was our guide Samuel Basílio, from the Baré and Baniwwa peoples of the Upper Rio Negro, whose deep knowledge of forest ways taught me more than I can begin to express here. Photos taken by me.
My first encounter with a macacarecuia wasn't in the forest but in a garden in Manaus. Its trunk was bursting with flowers, complex blooms emerging directly from the bark in cascading clusters, while its heavy, spherical fruits lay scattered below like forgotten cannonballs. I didn't know then that this tree would teach me about transformation, resilience, and futures that bloom from unlikely places.
What we call "Amazon" - this supposedly unified body - is itself a kind of wound, a colonial simplification that reduces continental complexity to a single name. A term that flattens a biome, the largest river basin in the world, a transnational territory, an administrative division, nine states, and the myriads of landscapes, identities, cultures and lives into one overwhelming totality, one word (Lilian Fraiji, 2023).
But the macacarecuia knows better. Standing before one near the drowned forests of Balbina Dam, where its kin persist despite the changed landscape, I understand what we lose through such simplification.
But the macacarecuia tree holds secrets that defy the extractive gaze. When wounded, it transforms. From its scars, it grows new roots inside itself, turning trauma into possibility. Scientists call this cauliflory, this ability to grow roots within its own trunk, to feed itself from itself. These adventitious roots - opportunistic growth that can emerge from unusual places on the plant body - create a complete internal root system within its own trunk cavity, as if the tree contains within itself both the wound and the healing, both the problem and the solution.
In the várzea forests where rivers rise and fall like breath, these trees have evolved another remarkable ability: their roots can survive months of flooding, developing special tissues that channel oxygen to submerged parts. During the long inundation season, when waters rise up to 15 meters (!), the tree creates microhabitats for fish and aquatic life in its submerged root system. Where the rhythms of wet and dry seasons (or the flood pulse) grow increasingly erratic, this capacity takes on new significance.
In the Amazon's enveloping humidity, I began to feel a curious kinship with the forest itself—my body sweating to mimic the stomatal function of leaves, releasing water vapour into the thick air as if I were part of the ecosystem's grand evapotranspiration cycle. Meanwhile, with every breath, I inhale an invisible set of fungi spores, bacteria, and Amazonian fragrances, as though the forest were reprogramming my microbiome to better align with its rhythms. For a moment, I fancied myself a microclimatic contributor, a walking, sweating extension of the biosphere — and, admittedly, an open buffet for the forest’s winged diners…
As I’m walking in the forest, I’m reminded of the historic pattern of extraction that has marked the Amazon since colonial times. First came the "drogas do sertão" - forest spices and medicines that powered early colonial economies. Then rubber, the commodity that fueled the industrial revolution which turned Manaus into a city of opera houses built on the backs of enslaved tappers. Gold that poisoned rivers, timber that left scars like the ones I see on trees’ barks, hydroelectric dams that drowned ancient groves, and now soy farms stretching to the horizon.
There's a lesson here that echoes through centuries of Amazonian history. When Henry Wickham smuggled rubber tree seeds to British colonies in 1876 - the first great theft of genetic material from the Amazon - he thought he was securing the empire's future. He didn't understand that the forest's true wealth isn't in any single species or substance but in relationships that can't be transplanted. Each cycle enriches distant cities while leaving local communities - who speak over 300 different languages and hold countless generations of forest knowledge - to deal with the wounds.
I think about this as I watch golden light filter through the canopy. The macacarecuia sister and brother trees rise fifty meters above us, its leaves converting sunlight into sugar, its wood sequestering carbon that might otherwise warm our world past tipping points. A single large tree like this can hold as much carbon as an acre of smaller trees. Multiply this by the billions of trees in the Amazon, and you begin to understand why this forest shapes weather patterns as far away as Tibet, why its breath creates flying rivers of moisture that water crops thousands of miles south.
In the Brazilian Amazon, the protected natural areas are responsible for storing 36.4 billion tonnes of CO2 and account for 34% of the world's total carbon reserves while recycling 20% of the world's freshwater daily and basically powering the water cycle of the Earth. These figures matter, but they emerge from something deeper - what Indigenous peoples have long known and Western science is finally beginning to understand: the Amazon is not a resource to be managed but a web of relationships to be sustained.
The macacarecuia shows us how. When most trees retreat into survival mode under stress, this tree maintains its extraordinary investment in relationships. When drought comes - as it increasingly does in our warming world - the tree doesn't compete more fiercely for water. Instead, it adapts. Its dense wood becomes a reservoir, its efficient leaves conserve moisture, and those extraordinary internal roots allow it to recycle its own resources. But it doesn't do this alone. Below ground, its roots intertwine with vast fungal networks that redistribute water and nutrients through the community. Even in scarcity, it maintains its relationships.
This feels especially poignant now as new extraction forms threaten the forest. The old patterns persist. Cattle farming is the main contributor to the current deforestation figures, but mining and new infrastructures are growing and ever-present dangers. Almost 70% of the protected areas and indigenous territories in the Amazon are threatened by roads, mines, new oil- and gas-drilling ventures, illegal invasions, hydroelectric dams and plantations of trees used for timber. More insidious forces join these. Carbon credits that turn the forest's breath into a commodity. Bioprospecting that reduces ancient knowledge to patents. The same Western gaze that once saw only warfare in extractivismo now sees carbon sinks and genetic resources.
Yet the macacarecuia remembers another way. You cannot transplant its relationships, cannot patent its ability to bloom from its core, cannot reduce its gift economy to metrics of lumber or medicinal compounds. It holds within its rings the memory of when the forest stretched unbroken to the horizon when people lived in a reciprocal relationship with the land. This memory lives not just in trees but in people. Indigenous communities across the Amazon are reviving traditional practices, creating new economies based on standing forests, and fighting for territories that sustain both human and more-than-human life. They teach us that true wealth lies not in what you can extract but in what you can sustain.
Scientists warn that the forest is approaching tipping points. Another few percent of deforestation could trigger a cascade of feedback, turning rainforests into savannas. The implications would be global—disrupted rainfall patterns, accelerated warming, lost medicines, lost languages, lost futures.
Standing under the canopy, I think about time differently. This tree emerged from soil enriched by indigenous peoples whose agricultural practices, like terra preta, we're only beginning to understand. In a world racing toward scarcity, this might be the most important demonstration of all: that another way is possible, that it's already here, flowering from unexpected places in the wounds of the world. Its ability to flower from its trunk evolved through countless generations of adaptation and relationship. Its current blooms might feed insects whose ancestors have danced with this tree's ancestors for millennia. Past, present, and future flow together like the rivers of air above us.
We glimpse another kind of future. Not the extractive vision that has dominated for five centuries, not the techno-fixes offered by the same systems that created our crisis, but something older and newer at once ancestral. As the Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak says in his book Ancestral Future:
The rivers, those beings that have always inhabited different worlds, are the ones that suggest to me that if there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral because it’s already present.
The macacarecuia's gift isn't its sequestration capacity, compounds, or ecological services. Its gift is this memory of relationship, this living proof that we can adapt without losing our essence, that we can transform wounds into doorways, and that we can create abundance by sharing it even in the most challenging places. In a warming world, these may be the seeds we most need to plant.
