Lost "Reality": Beyond Conservation Against Deforestation

Abstract

Lost Reality examines the accelerating deforestation in the southern Amazon, driven by extensive road networks, extractive logging, and ineffective conservation policies. Centered on the construction of the BR-319 highway, a destructive corridor cutting through the forest, the city of ‘Reality’ has emerged as a focal point for new deforestation activities. In response to the failure of conservation policies, the work draws upon communal ways of living within the forest reimagining conservation through strategic design interventions. It proposes a socio-environmental approach that recognizes the Amazon as an inhabited landscape of humans and non-humans. This new occupation framework transforms road axes into a conservation network that reframes logging and ecological stewardship as a living system. Lost Reality envisions systems integrating diverse inhabitation practices, evolving with the forest’s temporal cycles to imagine a more resistant reality for the Amazon forest.