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Seated on the front bench of the voadeira, a motorized canoe taking us deeper into the Amazon rainforest along the Iriri River, Maxiel Ferreira, who is twenty, alternated his gaze between a Canon EOS 5D camera and the water, reflecting infinite shades of green. At times, he would suddenly stand at the bow, balancing himself, and, using a long wooden stick that reached the bottom of the river, conduct the vessel through channels, avoiding rocks and other underwater obstacles that only he could see, maneuvering through rapids or around a banzeiro, a fearsome whirlpool that beiradeiros (inhabitants of Amazonian riverine communities) such as Ferreira don’t dare to trespass without asking the river for permission.

Ferreira had joined me, photographer Rafael Vilela, and cartoonist-reporter Pablito Aguiar on a two-week reporting trip deep into Terra do Meio—The Land in the Middle, a vast stretch of Brazilian Amazon between the Xingu and Tapajós Rivers, permeated by their many tributaries and home to a mosaic of ancient Indigenous lands and traditional forest communities. We were following Eduardo Neves, a prominent forest archaeologist and director of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at the University of São Paulo, as he and his team searched for newly discovered archaeological sites containing long-buried remnants of lost societies that once thrived in the Amazon.

It was Ferreira’s first assignment as a photographer. His introduction to journalism came when the elders of his community, Boa Esperança (Good Hope), nominated him to participate in the first session of the Mycelium-Sumaúma Forest journalist co-training program, started in 2023 by Sumaúma, an independent trilingual news platform. Sumaúma gets its name from the Amazon’s majestic tree. Mycelium is the rootlike vegetative body of a fungus that forms a vast underground network connecting forest plants; this network also functions as a communication system, allowing plants to exchange information and resources, which supports the overall health of the forest. It seemed the perfect metaphor for the type of journalism ecosystem that Sumaúma set out to create.

The program aims to form young people from Indigenous and other traditional Amazon communities into reporters. Over the course of a year, they participate in seminars and workshops with leading journalists, including about twenty-five of Sumaúma’s reporters and editors. As the name suggests, the “co-training” goes both ways: media professionals, or sementoras (seeders, as they are called), impart knowledge, and Amazonian locals, or myceliants (twenty-three, so far), share their own. The group is now working with a second cohort, preparing to cover the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP30, which for the first time will be hosted in the Amazon region.

As part of the program, the journalism trainees receive a monthly stipend of fifteen hundred Brazilian reais, plus books and other reading materials, multimedia training and equipment, and travel funding. They attend five immersive meetings, each lasting a week to ten days. The rest of their time is spent reporting, which takes them through the entire process, from the idea to publication: interviewing, writing or producing news in audio or video, fact-checking, editing, and translating into English and Spanish. Ferreira’s first piece was a podcast about his grandmother Francisca Ferreira, an Amazonian woman and community leader. He has since become a contributor to Rede Xingu+, a collective of twenty-six young communicators, as they’re known, from Indigenous territories and forest communities across the Xingu River basin.

The co-training program was the vision of Eliane Brum, a renowned Brazilian journalist, writer, and filmmaker, and the British correspondent Jonathan Watts, the global environment editor for The Guardian. Back in 2020, as the world grappled with COVID, the two began imagining the future post-pandemic, asking themselves how journalism could respond to a planet on the brink. “From the beginning, Jon and I conceived this co-training program in which we, the white journalists with over thirty years of experience, would teach the journalism we know how to do with precision, ethics, and respect for sources and facts, and the young forest people would teach us how they tell stories and report news, something that the Indigenous peoples in the Amazon have been doing for over ten thousand years,” Brum told me. “From this exchange, from this conversation between worlds, would emerge journalism capable of responding to climate collapse.”

Wajã Xipai, a forest journalist from the Xipaya Indigenous Territory who participated in the first Mycelium, was born and raised in the Médio Xingu along the Iriri River. Last summer, when he set out to investigate why its waters had turned green, he saw no other way to begin the story than to “interview” the river. “I jumped into the Iriri River in an attempt to drown myself,” he wrote in the resulting piece. “My body sank like a stone into its bed. I say drown and sink figuratively, to speak of my desire to understand the river so deeply that the Iriri itself would speak. I remain lying at the bottom of the river, and I am still in the depths as I write this article.”

He goes on to describe “fungi, plants, bacteria, and the phytoplankton peoples”—conveying a conception of nature inherent to the Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. The dichotomy between humans and nature, let alone anthropocentrism, doesn’t make sense to them. Rather, there is an understanding that everything that exists is composed of the same material substance, only in different forms, and that anything can transmute into something else, just as bodies decompose after death. “And since he is also the river, Wajã began the reporting inside the river, mixed with the river,” Brum said. “So these are the types of experiences we have.”

Insights brought by reporters-in-training are discussed extensively, and from collective reflections, a new language emerges. Sumaúma began capitalizing nonhuman beings like “Castanheira” (Brazil nut tree) and “River” as names when referring to a particular tree or river, and it has incorporated the concept of “other humans,” also called “more than humans,” when referring to nonhuman beings. Language is inclusive in terms of gender. Articles never refer to a given Indigenous group as being “from” Brazil, but rather “in” Brazil, acknowledging their existence prior to the formation of the country. Bylines first mention a reporter’s biome, and only then the city—even for reporters from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, or Brasília. “My journalism is connected to who I am as an Indigenous person, as a body of the forest,” Xipai told me. “Sumaúma has given me complete freedom to practice it the way I’ve always wanted to.”

“There are lots of discussions, a lot of studying, a lot of reading about language and how we position ourselves even politically through language,” Viviane Zandonadi, editorial flow coordinator and language editor of Sumaúma, told me. She and Brum are working on an editorial handbook—or, as they call it, a language igarapé (language creek). “This co-training program constantly makes us look at ourselves, the so-called experienced journalists,” she said. “Experienced in what? Why do we think we know more? We are constantly talking to these people who have other experiences and other ways of being. So we often ask ourselves who we are.”

Sumaúma positions itself, per its founding statement, as doing “journalism from the center of the world.” As Brum put it, “We defend that there needs to be a shift in the concepts of the world’s centers and peripheries, where the centers are the enclaves of nature that still resist, like the Amazon, the Pantanal, the Cerrado, the oceans, all biomes, and not Washington, Beijing, Frankfurt, where decisions that destroy nature are made.”

Sumaúma is, in this way, a power transfer project. The hope is that, in ten years, most of the newsroom will be composed of forest journalists, including in leadership positions. The participants in Mycelium’s first session, none of whom came with a formal journalism background, now work mostly in communications for collectives and independent initiatives, such as Rede Xingu+. Three have become Sumaúma staff writers, including Xipai, whose latest piece is an exclusive interview with António Guterres, the UN secretary-general—his only scheduled interview before COP30 and the first ever to an Indigenous forest journalist.

The nine forest journalists in the second cohort, by contrast, all came with some familiarity with reporting. “Our challenge this time is to ‘unformat’ them, to authorize them to experiment,” Brum said. Marcos Miranda, a participant from Rio Madeira, Porto Velho, in the state of Rondônia, defined the program as a “collective experience of learning”; Lorena de Paula, from Belém, in Pará, as “an overflowing experience.” Some are refugees, as Brum told me: forest people pushed to the marginalized peripheries of Amazonian cities by the same forces destroying the forest. “I was born and raised in the city. But there is no such thing as a city and a forest. The city is on top of the forest soil,” Miranda said. For her first Sumaúma story, de Paula wrote about shade inequality, using data to reveal a gap in the distribution of trees and a difference of up to eight degrees Celsius between rich and poor neighborhoods in Belém, which is hosting COP30.

This month’s event marks three decades since the Conference of the Parties first met in Berlin, following the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit (known as ECO-92); twenty years since the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, establishing legally binding emission reduction targets for developed countries; and a decade of the Paris Agreement, which brought all nations together with the common goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. (That is, until President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement, and the United States joined Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only countries not party to it.)

During our trip to Terra do Meio, we learned from Neves, the archaeologist, that some eight million to ten million people lived across the Amazon basin when the first Europeans arrived. The finding challenged the colonial narrative of the rainforest as a wild emptiness, which predominated until technological advancements proved it wrong. Pre-Columbian Amazonian civilizations date back twelve thousand years. They were enslaved or killed, when they didn’t die of diseases like smallpox brought by the colonizers. Entire Indigenous communities were lost; ethnic groups vanished. The few survivors and their descendants have passed on the knowledge of the forest peoples for generations. The myceliants are their heirs.

Sumaúma will travel to Belém by boat, carrying the reforesting and forest journalists, beiradeiros, Indigenous female leaders, and scientists on board to COP30. “Before Sumaúma, I would go to these places and do the journalism I believed in, subverting some things, but it was me. Now it’s an entire team doing it in another way, and this is very, very beautiful for me,” Brum said. “I don’t know how much we’re going to be able to do, but it’s a team doing what it believes in, and that has prepared a lot for this. Our COP coverage will be at home, from inside, from the forest.”

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**Adriana Carranca is a Brazilian journalist and a reporting fellow with the Global Migration Project at Columbia University. Follow her on Twitter @AdrianaCarranca. **