“Intervalo-escola” project for art and education, Amazonas, Brazil (2017) | Claudio Bueno and Tainá Azeredo
Dionéia Ferreira is a scholar, environmental activist, and community leader in southern Amazonas, Brazil, where she plays a key role in weaving together RETA, the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network. RETA connects local communities, women leaders, researchers, and legal actors across the territory surrounding the BR-319 highway—a controversial infrastructure project at the heart of intensifying ecological and political struggles in the Amazon.
Since 2024, Ferreira has been a visiting researcher at the Parsons Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab at The New School, supported by the New University in Exile Consortium. She is also pursuing a PhD in the Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas Modos de Vida e Culturas Amazônicas, based in the Department of Geography at the Federal University of Rondônia. Her time in New York is part of Life in the Faultline, a translocal platform co-created by The New School and the University of California Santa Cruz. The platform supports practices of resistance and repair in sites of systemic rupture, from the Amazon to New York to California.
This conversation took place in New York on March 25, 2025, and was initially conducted in Portuguese by Renata Zapronio and Eduardo Staszowski for Public Seminar, and later translated into English. It features Ferreira reflecting on the origins and values of RETA, the violent impacts of BR-319, the power of transdisciplinary alliances, and what it means to defend lifeworlds from the ground up.
Public Seminar: The BR-319 highway has been at the center of controversy regarding deforestation and development. From your perspective, what are the main social, environmental, and political threats tied to its reactivation? And what does this case reveal about the current model of development in Brazil?
Dionéia Ferreira: I think the first thing that needs to be said is that BR-319 is a construct—or rather, an artifact—that collapsed onto our heads. It fell on us in the 1970s and split our worlds apart.
We need to name that. For example, the place where I lived, my place of life, was completely destroyed because of the opening of BR-319. It fueled the illegal land market, and the area where my family and I lived was sold off by someone claiming to be the landowner. We were expelled from our land in the early 1980s. BR-319 is a tool that serves those in power, those who command. Brazil has two dominant economic agendas: agribusiness and mining.
BR-319, like the Trans-Amazonian Highway, was built during the same period in the early 1970s, under Brazil’s military dictatorship. They are sister highways, part of a broader state project to integrate the Amazon into the national economy through infrastructure expansion. My city sits right at the intersection of the two. These highways were opened to serve economic interests, to facilitate the entry of agribusiness and mining into the region. They were tools of colonization, used to expand land grabs and territorial occupation for agribusiness. That is what BR-319 is.
PS: And now with the push to pave the highway again, what do you see as the most immediate threats?
Ferreira: Honestly, I don’t even talk about paving BR-319 anymore, because the so-called “maintenance works” have already happened. Back in 2010 to 2012, the highway was practically closed. It hadn’t been maintained for 40 years, and the forest had taken it back.
Then in 2013, DENIT, Brazil’s national transportation department, got a license to carry out what they referred to as “maintenance,” essentially clearing the roadway and reconstructing its foundation. In 2014, I saw more than 130, maybe 150, eroded sections being converted into culverts and bridges. They built entire drainage systems along the route.
So BR-319 underwent major reconstruction starting in 2014. That’s when it became passable again. Barely, since it’s still an unpaved road, but vehicles started making the journey. For us, that’s when the impacts began.
If you look at a historical timeline of deforestation in that region, starting from 2014, when traffic resumed, up to now, it’s been ten years. And what we’ve seen is that land invasions are advancing along the highway corridor at a pace of about 100 kilometers every two or three years, moving toward the capital.
For us, paving is just the last step. The real damage has already happened. What’s surprising is that no one seems to talk about that.
PS: RETA works with a transdisciplinary approach, bringing together researchers, activists, and local communities. How has this weaving of different forms of knowledge strengthened resistance to environmental and social destruction in the region?
Ferreira: RETA’s strength is that it’s organic and relational. Everyone who moves within RETA, all the actors, brings complementarity. We operate through cooperation and complementarity. That’s what makes it possible for us to keep walking together.
And that’s what makes RETA powerful. I do see RETA as a powerful structure, a grassroots model of governance. That’s what we are. And what makes us strong, what makes us important in this struggle is precisely our diversity: of people, of areas of work, of worldviews.
Our way of doing transdisciplinary work is grounded in everyday collaboration, in how we walk together. It’s about working side by side, day by day. Even if we don’t have formal structures, legal status, or official procedures. RETA isn’t an organization in the conventional sense, it’s held together by relationships, trust, and the work we do together every day.
PS: Do you have any concrete examples of initiatives that express this kind of political and territorial action that RETA seeks to strengthen? What do these examples teach us about collective and relational action in contexts of violence, silencing, and inequality?
Ferreira: Yes. For example, we’ve been very active in supporting women’s empowerment. It’s pretty well known that women are often leading the way when it comes to protecting the environment and defending their land.
RETA has built a powerful arrangement to support and strengthen women’s leadership. We’ve been organizing and pushing for the creation of Municipal Women’s Councils in every municipality along the BR-319 corridor. There are nine municipalities we’re directly connected with. Our goal is to establish these councils in each municipality and to push politically for the creation of Municipal Secretariats for Women.
Some places have already achieved this. Humaitá has one, and Careiro has one. These are direct results of our political advocacy. Manaus, for example, still doesn’t have one. So this is an initiative where women from civil society are working together with women from the municipal legal offices, public defenders’ offices, and professors from state and federal universities in Amazonas and Rondônia.
That’s just one example. Another is the process we helped build that led to the legal recognition of real-use rights for nearly 400,000 hectares of land. This was the result of an alliance between civil society, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, and RETA.
We’ve been deeply engaged in confronting modern-day slavery connected to deforestation. It’s a serious issue. We’ve built an alliance that includes universities, the Pastoral Land Commission, the Freedom Fund, the Ministry of Labor, the National Council of Justice, and of course, the communities themselves—the ones resisting the enticements and traps of these industries. These are just a few of the arrangements that RETA helps hold together.
PS: Given all these actors involved, often with conflicting interests, how does RETA navigate the tensions and the possibilities that emerge from the relationships between communities, universities, and the state? What are the limits of institutional collaboration in this process?
Ferreira: I think the key thing, the central feature of how RETA operates, is precisely that it works by undoing institutionalism.
RETA is relational. If we’re putting together an alliance that might involve the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the university, local communities, and the municipal government, that articulation doesn’t start on paper. It doesn’t start with protocols. It starts with relationships. It starts with the shared history of people who already walk with RETA.
The institutional part comes second, sometimes third. First, it is relational, built in this big circle of friends, partners, and companions. This fraternity. That is what RETA is.
Before something becomes formal, it has already been shaped by the trust that exists between people. That is what prevents problems from erupting midway through a process. It minimizes conflict because the groundwork has already been done in that field of trust and cooperation.
PS: In a context marked by environmental injustices, historical inequities, and political violence, what strategies have proven effective for strengthening community autonomy, and ensuring that local people are central to the processes of care and territorial defense?
Ferreira: We’ve been fighting for that every day. It’s not easy, because we’re talking about governance. For RETA, governance means that every actor occupies their space of competence, in the territory and in decision-making.
We struggle to safeguard the voice and power of those at the base, the communities, in spaces where decisions are made. In the implementation of projects—whether they are from the government, private sector, or NGOs—the process needs to start from the realities, needs, and desires of the communities themselves. That is our starting point. But it is hard. I want to be clear, this may sound straightforward, but building these alliances is complex. It takes constant care, constant work, and a lot of dedication.
It is a daily battle to make sure communities are heard, that they have space, and that their visions can guide the work. And we are still far from that ideal. On the ground, communities have their own way of acting and organizing, what we call governança orgânica, organic governance. It is embedded in everyday life.
That way of life, that “world of life,” is what makes it possible to withstand the crises we are facing. But unfortunately, there is another way of being that is always trying to override that organic way and impose something else.That is our daily fight.
PS: Where are those battles most intense? Where does the hardest confrontation happen?
Ferreira: It happens in the real. In the everyday. Because these communities still don’t have the access or means to fight in policy spaces or national debates. We haven’t been able to speak with the Ministry of the Environment, and we’ve been trying for years. Same with the Ministry of Social Development, and the state environmental secretariat. We just don’t get in.
So the fight isn’t happening in Brasília or the state capital. It’s happening on the ground, every day, in a reality where everything is pushing us to submit, to accept a way of life—a system—that leads to our destruction. And yet every day, the communities are moving in the opposite direction, toward care, toward protecting the forest, the animals, and the land. That’s where the confrontation happens.
When it comes to formal policy, how it’s formulated, how it’s debated, it’s all done at the top. And I have to say: Most of those policies never reach us. They don’t land. They don’t take root in the territory.
PS: You recently helped organize the Forest Call gatherings in New York and California, as part of the platform Life in the Faultline, which connects practices of existence in contexts of ecological and social crisis. What were these events trying to provoke?
Ferreira: The Forest Call was a kind of summoning, a call to bring different groups together around these questions, around the forest around the Amazon—but not only the Amazon.
It is about what the world is doing to its forests, to biodiversity, to life itself.
The Forest Call exists to awaken a sense of reciprocity. That was the word I kept returning to in my talks: reciprocity. Giving something back. To the forests, to the Amazon—but not just the Amazon.
For example, I spent time in the Redwoods in California. I walked through Central Park in New York. These are also forests. Grandmothers. Ancient beings. And what we needed to do, what we tried to do, was to offer something back to them, for all they have given us, for everything they have sustained throughout human history.
That is what the Forest Call was trying to open up: an ethic of return, of care, of responsibility.
PS: In your view, what forms of international solidarity make a difference in strengthening the Amazonian struggle? How do we avoid external support reinforcing colonial or symbolic extractivist logic?
Ferreira: The key is amplification. What makes a difference is when institutions— international universities, foundations, or networks—amplify our voices, our ways of thinking, our Amazonian perspectives.
That is very different from appropriation, from taking our knowledge and using it for other purposes. There is a fine line between supporting and extracting, between listening and speaking for. What we need is for these structures to create space, to echo our voices, to help give reach to the thoughts, research, and visions that are coming from within the Amazon.
Our research is grounded in a different epistemology. One that connects with bem viver, the good life, with the Amazon as a place of life, not a place of resource extraction.
The Amazon is not a warehouse. Not a supermarket. Not a “resource.” It is our home.
When research does not start from that understanding, it ends up working against the very struggle it claims to support.
