The Fishbone Roads

Rondônia — The Fishbone Roads.

9 moments in this segment.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 2018-01-01 — The logging roads. Illegal logging roads push ever deeper, opening the forest to settlers and ranchers behind them.
4. 2019-01-01 — The fishbone from the air. Drone and aerial footage reveals the herringbone 'fishbone' pattern of roads eating into the forest.
5. 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.
6. The Fishbone Pattern. The signature "fishbone": settlers clear narrow plots perpendicular to a central road, leaving a herringbone scar visible from orbit.
7. Forest and Fields. Planet Labs high-resolution frame: the hard boundary between standing forest and the cleared fields that replace it.
8. 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.
9. 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.