The New Yorker:

In Puerto Lucerna, a group of conservationists, carpenters, arborists, builders, and rangers have constructed a tree house on two intertwined trees—a white quinilla and a strangler fig, together measuring a hundred and thirty feet tall. The Alta Sanctuary comes with views above the rain forest canopy and the distant sounds of howler monkeys, and its aim is to engender an appreciation for endangered places: “The tree house is a tool for conservation because it’s in the middle of something that we’re losing, but still have the power to save.”

By Allison Keeley

Every day, empty logging trucks rumble into Puerto Lucerna, a small outpost on Peru’s Las Piedras River, which snakes through the lush Amazon rain forest. There, workers load them up with pyramids of freshly cut logs—cedar, quinilla, and, most important, ironwoods, which are prized for their hardness and rich color. Hundreds of thousands of ironwood trees flowed out of the Peruvian Amazon between 2000 and 2020, many of them illegally logged and extracted from this region, Madre de Dios. A few miles from the port, a narrow line of trees towers over a deforested landscape—a grim portent of what could happen to the rest of the forest.

One morning in May, 2023, a lone truck, piled high with wooden beams, did something curious: it carried its cargo into Puerto Lucerna, against the usual flow of timber. The beams were headed for a remote pair of intertwined trees that measured a hundred and thirty feet tall. There, a group of conservationists from Tamandua Expeditions planned to erect the highest tree house in the Amazon.

On the banks of the river, laborers loaded the wood onto small motorized canoes called peque peques. One boat sank before it even pushed off, but workers managed to recover the wood, and they successfully ferried it forty minutes upriver. Rollin Yvana, an accountant by training who had struggled to find well-paid work in Puerto Maldonado, the regional capital, helped to load it onto a cart. “The path was disastrous,” he recalled. Pushing it through the mud made him want to quit and go back to the city. But he also wanted to see the great tree house finished.

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