The Amazon's guardians finally got their own early-warning system

In the Peruvian Amazon, Indigenous communities long hit with forest fines they couldn't pay are now doing the enforcing themselves. Since 2018, AIDESEP — the interethnic association for the Peruvian rainforest — has built an Early Warning and Action System: community monitoring teams that keep a constant presence across their territories, spot threats, and channel reports to the authorities. As their self-monitoring gains official recognition, conservation is becoming what it always was — the work of the people who live in the forest.