Rondônia

The state of Rondônia in western Brazil — once home to 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres), an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas — has become one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s forests have been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by 1988; and 53,300 by 1998. By 2003, an estimated 67,764 square kilometers of rainforest—an area larger than the state of West Virginia—had been cleared.

A chronological documentary of 60 moments on Loreline.

last updated 2026-07-21

1. 1910 — Clearing for the Madeira-Mamoré Railway. c.1910. Forest felled to open the route for the Madeira-Mamoré railway — the first great clearing of Rondônia, decades before the highways.
2. 1910 — Camp in Opened Forest. A railway-era camp inside a freshly opened stretch of Amazon forest — the leading edge of settlement at the turn of the century.
3. 1910 — Village Along the Railway Line. A settlement and its cleared land beside the Madeira-Mamoré line — the pattern of road-then-clearing that would define Rondônia.
4. 1912-01-01 — The Devil's Railway. The Madeira-Mamoré railway, built through the jungle at the cost of thousands of lives, first opened this corner of the Amazon.
5. 1984-01-01 — Paving BR-364. The World-Bank-funded paving of the BR-364 highway in the 1980s triggered a wave of settlement and clearing.
6. 1985-01-01 — The colonization program. Government schemes settled hundreds of thousands of migrants along the new roads, each clearing their plot from the forest.
7. 1988 — Chico Mendes, 1988. Chico Mendes the year of his death. His killing made the human cost of Amazon deforestation an international cause.
8. 1988 — Chico Mendes at the Rubber Tree. Rubber-tapper and union leader Chico Mendes, 1988. He organized Amazon forest peoples against clearing and was murdered that December.
9. 1988-12-22 — The murder of Chico Mendes. Rubber-tapper and union leader Chico Mendes, who fought to save the forest, was murdered by ranchers in December 1988.
10. 2000-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2000. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2000, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
11. 2001-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2001. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2001, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
12. 2002 — Smoke and Fires — MODIS, 2002. NASA Terra/MODIS view of Rondônia, 2002 — smoke from hundreds of clearing fires drifts over the fishbone of cleared land.
13. 2002-11-17 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2002. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2002, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
14. 2003-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2003. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2003, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
15. 2004-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2004. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2004, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
16. 2005-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2005. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2005, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
17. 2006-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2006. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2006, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
18. 2007-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2007. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2007, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
19. 2007 — Fires on the Amazon Frontier, 2007. August 12, 2007. Red dots mark active fires along the frontier where forest is being converted to farmland in Rondônia.
20. 2008-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2008. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2008, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
21. 2009 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2009. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2009, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
22. 2010 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2010. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2010, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
23. 2011-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2011. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2011, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
24. 2012-01-01 — Rondônia from Orbit — 2012. NASA satellite view of Rondônia in 2012, part of the Earth Observatory time series tracking the advance of clearing across the state.
25. 2014 — Rondônia Deforestation — 18 June 2014. Landsat view, June 18 2014. Intact forest (dark green) is steadily replaced by the pale geometric grid of pasture and crops.
26. 2015 — Rondônia Deforestation — 21 June 2015. Landsat view, June 21 2015 — a year on from the 2014 frame, the cleared corridors widening along the access roads.
27. 2016 — Rondônia Deforestation — 25 July 2016. Landsat view, July 25 2016. By now the original solid forest survives mainly as islands inside a sea of cleared land.
28. 2018-01-01 — The logging roads. Illegal logging roads push ever deeper, opening the forest to settlers and ranchers behind them.
29. 2019-01-01 — Illegal logging. Loggers strip the most valuable hardwoods first, in operations that are largely illegal.
30. 2019-01-01 — Land conflict and violence. The frontier is violent: land-grabbers, gunmen and the killing of activists and small farmers.
31. 2019-01-01 — The jaguar's shrinking world. The jaguar, the Amazon's apex predator, loses habitat and prey as the forest is cleared and burned.
32. 2019-01-01 — Cattle on the cleared land. Most cleared Amazon land becomes cattle pasture — Brazil's beef frontier drives the deforestation.
33. 2019-01-01 — The fishbone from the air. Drone and aerial footage reveals the herringbone 'fishbone' pattern of roads eating into the forest.
34. 2019 — The 2019 Amazon Fires. 2019’s fire season drew global attention as clearing fires across Rondônia and the wider Amazon sent smoke as far as São Paulo.
35. 2019 — Cleared Land at Espigão do Oeste. Aerial view over Espigão do Oeste, 2019 — pasture and smallholdings carved out of what was continuous forest a generation earlier.
36. 2019 — Cattle and the Clearing Front. Footage from the Rondônia clearing front — logging, burning and the cattle ranches that replace the forest.
37. 2019 — Burning Beside the Highway. A fire set to clear land along an Amazon highway, 2019 — the same slash-and-burn method that drove Rondônia’s clearing for decades.
38. 2019-08-01 — The Bolsonaro years. Under President Bolsonaro (2019-2022), enforcement was gutted and deforestation surged to a 15-year high.
39. 2019-08-01 — The clearing front. On the ground at the frontier: chainsaws, bulldozers and the burning of freshly-felled forest.
40. 2019-08-23 — The 2019 fires. In August 2019 fires set to clear land raged across Rondônia and the Amazon, darkening the sky over São Paulo.
41. 2019-09-01 — Animals in the fire. The 2019 fires killed and injured countless animals; rescuers pulled survivors from the ash.
42. 2019-11-01 — The forest guardians. Indigenous 'forest guardians' risk their lives confronting illegal loggers — several have been killed.
43. 2020-01-01 — The Uru-eu-wau-wau's fight. The Uru-eu-wau-wau people patrol their territory against invaders who burn and clear their forest.
44. 2020-01-01 — Uprooted communities. Traditional rubber-tappers, riverine communities and Indigenous peoples are pushed off the land they depend on.
45. 2020-01-01 — Forty years from orbit. Time-lapse satellite imagery shows Rondônia's forest dissolving into farmland over four decades.
46. 2020-01-01 — The vanishing primates. Woolly monkeys, spider monkeys and titis lose the canopy they need to survive.
47. 2020-01-01 — Soy and the frontier. Beyond the cattle, soybean plantations push the agricultural frontier deeper into the forest.
48. 2021-01-01 — Wildcat gold mining. Illegal 'garimpo' gold mining poisons the rivers of the Amazon with mercury.
49. 2021-01-01 — INPE and the deforestation alarm. Brazil's INPE space agency measures the forest loss that spiked to record highs around 2020-2021.
50. 2021-01-01 — A world of species, lost. The Amazon holds a tenth of the world's known species — deforestation drives many toward extinction.
51. 2022-08-01 — The scar seen from space. NASA and ESA satellites track the advancing deforestation front across the Brazilian Amazon.
52. The Fishbone Pattern. The signature "fishbone": settlers clear narrow plots perpendicular to a central road, leaving a herringbone scar visible from orbit.
53. Forest and Fields. Planet Labs high-resolution frame: the hard boundary between standing forest and the cleared fields that replace it.
54. BR-364 — The Road In. The BR-364 highway. Paved through Rondônia in the 1980s, it opened the state to mass settlement — every fishbone branches off a road like this.
55. BR-364 at Ji-Paraná. BR-364 running through Ji-Paraná, one of the boom towns that grew along the highway as colonists poured into Rondônia.
56. What the Clearing Leaves. Degraded, fragmented forest — the thinned remnant left behind after selective logging and repeated burning.
57. Uru-eu-wau-wau Territory. The Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Land in Rondônia — protected forest that invaders repeatedly clear and burn, often violently.
58. Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve. The extractive reserve named for Chico Mendes — a model of protected forest where traditional communities harvest without clearing.
59. Jaguar. The jaguar (Panthera onca) — apex predator of the Amazon, its range fragmented and shrunk by every road and pasture cut into the forest.
60. Brown Woolly Monkey. The brown woolly monkey, a canopy-dwelling Amazon primate that cannot survive where the forest is cleared.

Full text archive: /loreline-text/rondonia.md