Loggers cut a road into the reserve. We closed it.

A logging crew bulldozed an access road about 2km into a protected block in the Amazon Basin. An illegal road like that is almost never the end in itself. It is the first move, the way you get trucks and chainsaws to timber that was previously too far from anywhere to reach.

Our rangers found it early, within days of it being cut, on a routine patrol with the Associação Raízes cooperative. They logged the coordinates, photographed the fresh vehicle tracks and the cut stumps at the road's end, and put together a file the authorities could act on.

Speed was the whole thing. A road left open for a month becomes a road everyone uses, and once a dozen people are running timber down it, closing it becomes a fight rather than a formality. The rangers handed the file to the environmental agency the same week.

The agency issued a stop order, which we will admit does not always happen as quickly as it did here. Tomás had spent two years building the relationship with that office, and this was one of the times it paid off.

With the order in place we dug deep trenches across the road so no truck can pass, and planted fast-growing pioneer trees along the cut. Pioneers grow quickly and shade out the bare ground, which is what stops a closed road from simply being reopened.

In two years it will be hard to tell a road was ever there. That is the aim. Not just to block it, but to erase it, so the next crew tempted to cut one in finds no head start waiting for them.