Atop the forest canopy, she drank from her Magnífica and listened to the rainforest buzz. Dusk always saw the Amazon come awake, she thought, after the steamy malaise of midday. The sound of a howler monkey echoed from somewhere off to the north — though it was hard to tell with how sound carried out here.

“Outra cerveja, senhorita?” a waiter asked, gesturing to the table.

“Não, obrigado. I’m just fine.” Silvana smiled, as the waiter left, giving her time to reflect on the day’s investigation. She was just starting to draft an email, back to her boss at SkyCon, but her mind drifted restlessly back to the conversation earlier in the day, where she had been shown the Tiputini Sector Monitoring Station.

She remembered the Station Lead’s introduction. “We know that SkyConnect has an interest in the security and reliability of our monitoring, and I’m proud to report that we are state of the art here. Active LiDAR is updated hourly, and our integrated stomatal monitoring provides real-time estimates of transpiration that are constrained by our aerial sensor net.”

She had asked a leading question here, prompting the Station Lead to keep talking. Of course, she knew as much about stomatal monitoring as the Station Lead, if not more. But she had a job to do, and part of that job was to get the team talking. The Station Lead had jumped at the chance to share how much they knew. “Yes, of course. Stomatal monitoring requires biosynthetic integration with the trees themselves. This is a challenge, given that each tree poses unique threats to our monitors, ranging from toxicological to physical removal. The ecological niches in the Amazon are so complex that its “symbiotes all the way down”, as we joke here.” The Station Lead had laughed at this.

“Where are we at with microclimate management?” Silvana had asked. Again, she had known the answer, and that the Station Lead would be uncomfortable, but that was the job.

“Well”, the Station Lead had said. “We have had setbacks, as you know. Now that microclimate management is out of the box, so to say, everyone is trying it. But we’re not coordinating with the other T sectors. That means that when we tinker with our microclimate to optimize local transpiration, the other sectors react accordingly. Even with the AI independently optimizing the microclimate drone fleet, conditions are quite erratic. I have submitted a report on this, if you have not yet read it.” Silvana had nodded as if to say, yes, yes. I’ll have a look.

The meeting with the rest of the Station staff had been perfunctory, as expected. 

The fact was, transpiration was a commodity now. Just like any other. Well marginal transpiration was a commodity. Since the Manaus Protocol was signed in 2048, there were strict rules about what parts of the Amazon could be deforested and which could not. Also, given that national and international law had granted extraordinary sovereignty to the traditional indigenous peoples globally, the interior of the Amazon had been legally held by local and indigenous communities since 2039. 

Silvana closed her eyes, returning the present. She took a deep breath of the forest air, and looked down, 50 meters below to the forest floor. A light flickered up through the branches, probably a group of tourists out from the hotel on a Night Tour. The sight stirred a memory in Silvana, taking her back 20 years to when she led her own night tours of the forest. She had grown up near here, in the Waorani zone of control. She would run through the forest barefoot, confident in her step, and knowing that the worst fate she might suffer was a bite from a conga ant. Her parents and grandparents had grown up in a despoiled Amazon, with breakneck deforestation. Hurtling the whole basin toward catastrophe. But she grew up in a different forest. Her forest had been a protected place, managed by her community. A place of hope.

But the only constant is change, Silvana thought. 

The year she entered high school was the same year that the Environmental Modification Convention was expanded to include weather manipulation for peaceful purposes. This meant that all the cloud seeding efforts globally, many of which sought to improve agricultural production, were stopped — or at least supposed to stop. At the same time, decades of science documenting the importance of forest transpiration for rainfall suddenly became profitable. In other words, since cloud seeding could no longer coax reticent precipitation from the sky, upwind transpiration became a commodity overnight. 

Nothing stood in the way of global finance moving into the Amazon to speculate and manage the forest to maximize transpiration.

Silvana’s high school years were spent like every other adolescent — mostly focused on her social life, growing up, and figuring out what it meant to be an adult — not on the broader transformations her Amazon was undergoing. But by the time she had left for college, the Indigenous communities had already begun to form corporate partnerships with global finance houses that were eager to bankroll environmentally responsible development, with the guarantee of technologically-advanced transpiration management. 

A husky, grating call carried up to the hotel patio, which brought Silvana back to herself. She smiled, remembering life in the forest, and how much she had hated being woken up by a hoatzin during a midday nap. But it sounded like home, now. 

Silvana found her hands typing the phrase “...yes I accept the” and stopped herself. When did this happen? When did she become a corporate tool?

She thought back to her top grades in ensino médio. That got her a scholarship to attend the University of São Paulo, where she was summa cum laude earning a double BS in Amazon microphysics and Ecological Finance. She was immediately headhunted by Defenda a Amazônia. At the NGO they were tireless proponents of additional ecological protections for the entire Amazon basin. With the tailwind of the Manaus Protocol, decades of mismanagement were being re-written. But the advent of T-trading saw Defenda being subsumed by an EcoFinance startup, SkyConnect LLC. Her job flipped inside out from advancing ecologically-based financial safeguards for her home, to working as a cog to maximize transpiration flows. At first it was exciting — but, well. It wasn’t really exciting anymore, she thought. 

The marginal trade had driven the Amazon mad with the idea of profit, driven by Transpiration Futures Trading. And she had become a part of that. 

The email she had opened earlier that evening had been a surprise promotion. SkyCon was opening a division in Central Africa. The Congo basin was the frontier of transpiration futures, and she had been tapped to lead the development of the CTI, the Congo Transpiration Index that would help structure T trade in the Congo for at least the next decade.

She had been automatically writing her acceptance. But something kept tugging her fingers away from her screen.

Again — unbidden — more memories floated up, this time an earnest conversation that her seven-year-old self had been having with an aging Waorani elder. When Silvana had pledged to do whatever the Waorani elder said, they had smiled. Then they told Silvana, “The most important thing, Silvana, is to be a good ancestor.” 

The night chorus of the Amazon swelled below her in the canopy, and Silvana finally smiled. She understood what the elder had said, and knew what she had to do.