When John Ethan Householder talks about the palm swamps in Peru’s southeastern Madre de Dios region, it’s with a tinge of existential sadness. Some 15 years ago, as a graduate student, he waded through the swamps of rich peat deposits, mapping them and wondering whether the vanilla plants he found along the way were planted deliberately by some of the region’s earliest Indigenous inhabitants. Now, armed with satellite data, he’s watching as illegal miners tear up the peatlands in their race to cash in on skyrocketing gold prices. “I feel I’m putting the bookends on these peats in one generation,” says Householder, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. “In 2012, we described these peats in Madre de Dios for the first time [in scientific literature], and I’m describing their complete obliteration in a matter of a few decades.” Throughout the Amazon Basin, alluvial gold mining has... [Log in to read more]