Allison Keeley

Apr 19, 2024 | abigailwise.substack.com | Allison Keeley |Rebecca Simon |Dan Kois |Abigail Wise

^2020 vs. 2024When my husband and I moved into our main house in the height of the early pandemic, the yard attached to our kitchen and sunroom quickly became “my yard.” It was a small, weirdly shaped triangle of true desert terrain: dust, dirt, tumbleweeds, and goat heads. My mom has always been an avid gardener, so I grew up with flowers and fresh veggies, and I was eager to transform my own little patch of property into a lush, green paradise.

Apr 17, 2024 | newyorker.com | 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.