People carry drinking water along a sandbank of the Madeira river. The water is at its lowest level since 1967. Along the Madeira river basin, in the Amazon, locals blame climate change and human greed for the wildfires “All of that up there is Paradise,” said Maria Moraes de Souza, gesturing to the string of villages among which she lives along one of the Amazon’s most important waterways. But lately life in this supposedly Arcadian community has taken a toxic turn, as the River Madeira’s waters have fallen to their lowest level since the 1960s and the skies overhead have filled with smoke from wildfires that are raging across Brazil . “I’ve never seen it like this,” said Souza, a 44-year-old subsistence farmer as her canoe glided through the murk towards her smog-shrouded hamlet, chaperoned by river dolphins whose aquatic home is growing smaller by the day. To reach Souza’s wooden house in Paraíso Grande (Big Paradise) – a former rubber-tapping community near the port town of Humaitá – visitors must now scale a sun-scorched bluff that has been exposed by the plummeting waters. Vast, desert-like expanses of red-hot sand lie between some river-dwellers and the waters on which they depend for food, transport, education and work. Some of those beaches are hundreds of metres wide. “In the old days we used to understand the river’s rise and fall … But lately man has started to affect nature to such an extent that we no longer know how things work,” complained village leader José Francisco Vieira dos Santos, describing how the Amazon’s annual rainy and dry seasons were being scrambled for reasons locals struggled to comprehend. “Even the animals can feel the change,” added Santos, 42. An Amazon catfish called the “bodó” used to lay its eggs in January. […]