Back in Tarapoto for Christmas. Missing all the various bird, frog and insect sounds of the jungle in Chazuta.

To me, the sound of birdsong in the forest is a sound of life, and hope. And the sound of motorized vehicles - mostly motorcycles in this city - is a sound of death, and despair. The sound of our industrial civilization, our hubris and our technology destroying the birds and practically every other beautiful living thing on earth.

I spent Nochebuena, Christmas eve, with the family that kept me fed with good healthy vegetarian food while I was locked down here during the first 8 months of the pandemic. Also met with my friend Roberto, whom I worked with on my mapping project for the Pan-Amazon Social Forum starting in 2016, and learned about all the ups and downs of his enterprise to produce juvenile fish of native species for sale to small-scale aquaculture producers throughout the country.

Tarapoto has been a turning point, in more ways than one. After eight year as the GIS Coordinator, I had to quit the work at Iracambi due to an unexpected and unacceptable turn of events, and now instead of traveling to Brazil, I've decided to head in the other direction toward Lima. Then with my one flight of the year, I'll return to Mexico to deal with some health concerns and explore some options for my life and work there. At this point, I still plan to work remotely on my projects for the Amazon.

I've been reading "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist" by Paul Kingsnorth, and like he did, I've been reevaluating the integrity and usefulness of environmental NGOs in general. A problem with most is their capture by the sources of their funding, which constrain what they can do or even think about doing.