In the Amazon, every cloud has a golden lining…

Here’s a collection of pretty landscape photos – mostly nice sunsets and sunrises. They were all taken on a recent trip down to the lowland Amazon region of Madre de Dios in southeast Peru.

The physical explanation for why these sunsets are so eye-catching is fairly straightforward. When the sky is hazy, light with shorter wavelengths – blues, greens and violets – is intercepted by particulates in the atmosphere and scattered in all directions. Only the most direct light, with the longest wavelengths, makes it through to our eyes – the reds, oranges and yellows.

But this explanation is only a fraction of the story. The more important question is, why is it so hazy?

And that, is because the Amazon is on fire.

I arrived in the lowlands by boat, spending a day travelling down the mighty Madre de Dios river, and the increase in gold mining since I’d done the same trip last year was unfathomable.

We floated past hundreds of artisanal mines, each pumping toxic mercury into the surrounding ecosystem, while huge patches of rainforest burned in the background, to clear space for yet more gold mines. If it’s not mining, it’s beef – pristine jungles incinerated to give cows somewhere to graze. And no matter the reason, the bottom line is always the same: the natural world destroyed in the pursuit of human progress.

The current situation is being exacerbated by an ongoing drought – the result of the combined effects of El Niño and global warming – and the story replicates across the broader region.

In Manaus, the Amazon River recently hit its lowest level since records began, and the city had the second-worst air quality in the world due to the swathes of burning rainforest that surround it. Remote Indigenous communities have been isolated as rivers dry out, and there have been mass die-offs of endangered pink river dolphins.

All of this is the direct consequence of human greed and overconsumption, and it’s causing the breakdown of the Amazon’s essential moisture cycle.

As a species, we’re staring at pretty sunsets while the lungs of our planet collapse.

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Amazonian Sunsets/Sunrises, Los Amigos Biological Station, Peru