The Amazon transcends easy categorization. Stretching across nine countries, it shelters one in ten of all known species on Earth and locks away an estimated 200 billion tons of carbon in its soil and vegetation. Moisture released by its plants creates “flying rivers” that seed rain and regulate temperatures across continents. Because of its planetary significance, it has become a matter of global concern, debated in international forums, measured by satellites, and managed through carbon markets and conservation agreements.
This global perspective risks flattening an extraordinarily complex biome into a global utility — a reservoir of carbon, water, and biodiversity to be managed for the benefit of humanity. But the Amazon is more than that. It is a living ecosystem, a site of encounter and co-creation among a vast network of actors: plants and animals, rivers and mountains, and more than 50 million people, including hundreds of Indigenous communities whose knowledge has shaped the forest for centuries.
The evening will begin with a short film screening by Claudia Tomateo, a Quechua Chanka architect, designer, planner, and activist whose work explores Indigenous methodologies of data visualization. A panel discussion will follow, led by Tomás Bartoletti, a historian researching the development of global forest governance. In addition to Tomateo, the panel will feature Livio Silva-Mueller, a sociologist researching the intersection of decarbonization, inequality, and democracy in Latin America; and Mauricio Fontes, a scientist studying Amazon soils and their transformation.
Situated within Swissnex’s Planetary Embassy in Boston, the conversation invites audiences to move past familiar images of the Amazon as a distant wilderness or planetary utility, and instead engage with it as a place of deep relations — and to ask what it would mean for the Amazon, in all its diversity, to have a voice on the global stage.
Program
- 6:00pm – Doors open
- 6:30pm – Opening remarks
- 6:35pm – Discussion
- 7:20pm – Q&A
- 7:40pm – Reception
- 8:15pm – End
iCal / Outlook
Event start time
-
Boston
6:00PM
Moderator
& Co-Organizer
-
![]()
Bio
Tomás Bartoletti
Senior Lecturer, ETH Zurich,
Postdoctoral Fellow
Weatherhead Center
for International AffairsTomás Bartoletti is a Senior Lecturer at the Chair for History of the Modern World of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He is currently Principal Investigator for the project “Insect Pests and Economic Entomology in Plantations, c. 1880-1980s: A Multispecies History of Global Capitalism”, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Tomás earned his PhD from the University of Buenos Aires and read Latin American Studies at the University of Buenos Aires and History of Science and Technology at the University of Quilmes (Argentina). He has held research positions as a Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (2025-2026), as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2021-2023), and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ETH Zürich (2019-2021). In Spring 2025, Tomás served as a Visiting Professor at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Brazil) and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His work has been published in Isis: Journal of the History of Science Association, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Global Intellectual History, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
His research led to an exhibition, Naming Natures: Natural History and Colonial Legacy (naming-natures.ch), at the Natural History Museum of Neuchâtel (2024-2025). The art–science exhibition brought together the collection of Swiss naturalist and diplomat J. J. von Tschudi with hundreds of documents and objects drawn from museums and libraries in Switzerland, Austria, and Peru, alongside works by Latin American and Swiss artists that dialogue with his legacy.
Since 2023, Tomás is an associate editor of Environmental Humanities and of the Commodity Frontiers Journal.
In December 2024, he received the ETH Career Seed Award for innovation in research and teaching.
Panelists
-
![]()
Bio
Claudia Tomateo
PhD Candidate
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyClaudia Tomateo is an Indigenous descendant of the Quechua-Chanka people from the mountains of Apurímac, in so-called Peru. Her work explores Indigenous methodologies in relation to data visualization, examining how visual practices can support Indigenous knowledge systems and the design of Indigenous futures. She is an architect, designer, planner, and activist, currently a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an incoming Assistant Professor of Indigenous Knowledges and Methodologies at Parsons School of Design at The New School.
Since 2023, in partnership with the Andean Project for Peasant Technologies (PRATEC), Claudia has facilitated the study and creation of communal calendars with Quechua people in the Amazon. As part of this ongoing project, she developed the exhibition Amazonian Calendars: Indigenous Data Visualizations, presented at the MIT Media Lab (2025), which explored how Indigenous communities visualize ecological, agricultural, and spiritual knowledge through cyclical temporal systems.
Previously, Claudia worked as a Research Fellow at the Urban Systems Lab. She has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She holds the degree of Professional Architect from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
-
![]()
Bio
Livio Silva-Muller
Harvard Academy Scholar
Weatherhead Center
for International AffairsLivio is a Harvard Academy Scholar and sociologist who studies how states, markets, and societies confront the challenges of decarbonization, development, and democracy in comparative perspective. His work focuses on the Global South—especially the Amazon rainforest—and examines how governments build the capacity to reduce deforestation and support regional development. Livio holds a Ph.D. from the Geneva Graduate Institute.
-
![]()
Bio
Mauricio Fontes
Professor of Soil Science
Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Brazil,
Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe InstituteMauricio P. F. Fontes is a professor in the Department of Soils at Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Brazil. He conducts research in various fields of pedology, with emphasis on soil mineralogy and soil chemistry of heavy metals and rare earth elements in soils, waters, and plants in the context of environmental pollution. In the past 15-plus years, Fontes has worked with soils in the Amazon region.
The Amazon biome is the world’s largest remaining tropical forest, hosting around 10 percent of the planet’s biodiversity, and the soil, part of this brittle ecosystem, plays a vital role in its conservation. The critical threshold at which the conversion of tropical rainforest to dry savanna could be irreversible is approaching dangerously. Fontes is generating a methodology for the establishment of sustainable and regenerative agriculture in this region.
Fontes, a member of the Phi Kappa Phi and Gamma Sigma Delta honor societies, holds a degree in agronomy and a master’s in soil fertility from Universidade Federal de Viçosa and completed a PhD in mineralogy/soil chemistry at NC State University. As a Tinker Visiting Professor, he taught Soils and Nutrient Cycling at Stanford University and Soils of Amazon: Genesis and Mineralogy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has held sabbaticals at Stanford University, Technical University of Munich, and UC Berkeley. Fontes has published 154 papers, 19 book chapters, and organized three books. He won the 2022 Medalha de Ouro Peter Henry Rolfs do Mérito em Pesquisa, his home institution’s highest research award.
Planetary Embassy
This event is part of the Planetary Embassy in Boston, a series of activities dedicated to international, interdisciplinary, and interspecies collaboration. The Planetary Embassy explores how we can work with the more-than-human world to address urgent and interconnected planetary crises through conversations, installations, film screenings, and more, with contributions from Switzerland, Boston, and beyond.
