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A car-free town in the Amazon serves lessons for pedaling to net-zero emissions

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A car-free town in the Amazon serves lessons for pedaling to net-zero emissions

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AFUÁ, Brazil - Brazilian politicians stumping for reelection know the power of public largesse. So it was in 2010 when the incumbent governor of Pará state lavished city halls in this sprawling Amazonian province twice the size of France with tractors and motor graders to make roads.

In a remote tropical region, where tarmac is a totem of progress, no self-respecting mayor would snub such a bequest. No one except Odimar Wanderley Salomão, mayor of Afuá, who politely declined and had a good laugh - then astutely swapped his tractor chit for a riverboat.

Since 2002, this city on the Amazon River has been famously off-limits to motor vehicles. It wasn't a matter of environmental scruples. Cars and motorways had no place in this town of 38,000, much of which is built on stilts and sits above the chronically submersed floodplains of Marajó Island, near where the world's largest river empties into the Atlantic.

Locals call their hometown the Venice of the Amazon, because of its filigree of waterways and the fleet of boats that ply them. A visitor would be forgiven for thinking they'd landed in an outsize velodrome, such is the dizzying flow of cyclists zipping along the narrow streets. If Mayor Salomão - known to all as "Mazinho" - has his way, Afuá might yet be remembered as the city that pedaled its way to net-zero emissions.

He's got a good head start. Although there is no independent measure of municipal carbon emissions, this riverine community with one bicycle per capita and "the fittest legs in the Amazon," as Salomão boasts, stands out in a region still in thrall to fossil fuel-driven urban sprawl.

After all, this city of boardwalks, boats and bicycle-taxis is refreshingly free of the gridlock, tailpipe fumes and claxons that plague most fast-growing Amazon cities. The taboo on cars became law in 2022.

"Afuá is an example for the Amazon and Brazil, and maybe for the world," Mazinho told me in a recent interview. "We want people to come see for themselves," he added, in a nod to the scores of diplomats and heads of state set to gather next year in Belém, the storied Amazon port and host city for COP30, the headline United Nations climate summit.

The problem is getting there. Afuá sits on the upper lip of a fluvial island in Brazil's forgotten far north. There are no overland connections to the rest of the country. The local landing strip is often underwater. Travelers must either shell out for a flight to Macapá, a remote regional capital, then take a two to four-hour riverboat ride, or board a ship in Belém for a 27-hour cruise.

Generations of ambitious national leaders always took such isolation as an affront. They preached road building as a civilizational mission, no matter the devastation it wrought. Research in Brazil and Colombia shows that nearly all Amazon deforestation occurs within a few kilometers of roadways. Road by road, Amazon cities grew with their "backs to the river," as locals put it, often in reckless haste.

Traffic fatalities claimed 339,000 Brazilian lives from 2010 to 2019 and saw lethal road accidents jump 43% in the Amazon region, more than three times the national rate.

Rain and floods driven by increasingly rogue weather are an existential threat in southern Brazil, as the lethal deluges in Rio Grande do Sul state this month have made devastatingly clear. In Afuá, the seasonal high waters, known as lançantes, are the cue for a celebration. "When the floods come, we raise the furniture and fridge, put on flip flops and slosh into the streets to have fun until the waters recede," says Adiel de Souza Santos, 32, who sells açaí, a popular rainforest fruit.

Not everything in Afuá is a party. Fewer than 3 in 10 municipal residents live in homes with access to running water, sewage mains or garbage collection. Poverty and income inequality are among the worst in Brazil.

Like most Amazonian cities, the town depends on federal tax transfers just to pay its bills. For all the enthusiasm over the emerging green economy, city hall is the biggest employer. Afuá ranks 655thamong 772 municipalities on the Amazon region's Social Progress Index, an aggregate of metrics for overall well-being.

Carbon neutrality, too, is a work in progress. One of the enduring paradoxes of the Amazon basin is that the same bounteous waterways that power the world's ninth economy and make Brazil a renewable energy standout often leave nearby towns in the dark. Afuá has yet to be plugged into the national grid fueled by hydroelectric dams. (A long overdue plan to do so is still in the works.) Hence, the constant growl and acrid whiff of diesel-burning thermoelectric plants and generators running night and day to keep the lights on.

What Afuá suggests is that pragmatic leadership and community consensus can make a difference even in one of the most chaotically urbanizing regions of the Americas. By turning off the combustion engine, resisting the tarmac temptation and abiding by centuries-old ways of the river, the town is a real time experiment in how to navigate an increasingly uncertain world where unruly climate change is overturning the rules of sustainable urban habitability. All this without a traffic light or tractor in sight.
Mac Margolis is a longtime reporter, columnist and scriptwriter covering Latin America, and author of The Last New World: the Conquest of the Amazon Frontier. This story was produced with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

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A car-free town in the Amazon serves lessons for pedaling to net-zero emissions

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Afuá, a remote town in the Brazilian Amazon, banned motor vehicles over 20 years ago. Writer Mac Margolis and photographer Stefan Kolumban paid the town a visit to see what life is like.

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My patients think Ozempic is a wonder drug. But it can't fix fat phobia

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My patients think Ozempic is a wonder drug. But it can't fix fat phobia

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The other day in my primary care practice, one of my patients asked me to prescribe Ozempic. She had recently given birth, and her body had changed.

"I want my body back," she told me.

Did her body really go away? I wondered, privately. I've had a lot of conversations like this recently, spurred by the onslaught of media coverage of Ozempic and Oprah's ecstatic endorsement of its benefits during a special TV segment she did this week.

My patient's blood pressure was normal, her labs looked perfect. The only issue was that she had gained maybe 25 pounds over the last two years, most of which she had spent gestating and breastfeeding a new human life. It's an amazing feat, and it's unsurprising that it required a little extra adipose tissue.

She had a long history of losing and regaining weight, and years of family members pressuring her to be skinnier.

"I'm not sure Ozempic will bring you peace with your body," I suggested, gently. Medically, I told her, I didn't think she needed to lose weight.

She was undeterred. "My clothes don't fit," she complained.

Was that a reason to start a weight-loss medication? Increasingly, my patients think so.

My practice in New Jersey is filled with people desperate to lose weight, patients who believe their true selves are smaller than the bodies they actually inhabit.

I've written publicly about my size-inclusive approach to medicine - I don't direct my patients towards weight loss, and I have a loyal following of patients who come to me specifically because I don't harass them about their body size.

But for every patient who seeks out my weight-neutral approach, I have ten who have been sold the lie that losing weight will fix every problem in their life. That myth is nothing new, but it's been newly medicalized in the era of Ozempic and Wegovy, a class of medications known as GLP-1 agonists. And patients are showing up at my door, eager for the promised panacea.

Even Oprah, whose body size has been the subject of national interest for decades, seems to buy the hype.

She publicly announced she was using a GLP-1 medication in 2023. And she told viewers in her prime-time special that she's "releasing the stigma and the shame and the judgment" that come with living in a bigger body - something she can presumably do now because she's thin.

She doesn't stop to ask if maybe fat phobia is the problem, not fat people.

I've had patients cry tears of frustration when I point out that they are a "healthy" weight and their labs show no evidence of diabetes. Instead of being thrilled they've received a clean bill of health, they're upset their insurance won't pay for GLP-1 agonists.

I've had patients confess they believe Ozempic will give them higher self-esteem, happier marriages, more energy, less back pain. People seem convinced this medication can do it all.

It's really no surprise that my patients overestimate the healing powers of this once-a-week injection. Our society is obsessed with thinness. We have a diet industry worth many billions of dollars a year, thriving on - and perpetuating - a pervasive sense that our bodies are never good enough. When life gets tough or the news gets unbearable, we're told to work on ourselves, squeeze in a little self-care: a little Peloton here, a little intermittent fasting there.

Ozempic fits in perfectly, a medical solution to all the problems that are assumed to come with being fat. Rather than fixing discrimination against people with bigger bodies, we tell patients to fix themselves.

The new weight-loss drugs have a veneer of respectability - doctors prescribe them, after all - that makes them seem different from HerbaLIfe or Weight Watchers. But, like all the weight-loss promises that came before them, they're being drastically oversold.

Ozempic and Wegovy sales are estimated at $13 billion a year, a true windfall for Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company that developed the blockbuster drugs. They have a marketing budget to match: the company spent $491 million on advertising in the first half of 2023. With budgets like that, it's no wonder my patients seem to think Ozempic is a miracle drug.

Doctors are perhaps the most guilty of perpetuating the myth that weight loss solves everything. My field's obsession with body mass index means that many of my colleagues zone in on weight loss as a cure for every ailment.

"Have you thought about losing weight?" doctors ask, when patients complain of anything from insomnia to hot flashes to foot pain. Meanwhile, my patients share stories of missed diagnoses from doctors who focus on their weight and forget that fat patients might have other diseases. Fat phobia has become so ingrained in the culture of medicine that it's hard to see, unless you look closely.

The weight-loss industry tells us that if we just lose a few pounds, we'll finally be happy. But this industry has created a problem only more dieting - or more drugs - can fix. It tells us that the body is something to be tamed for the entirety of our lives. If we don't stay vigilant, the pounds might come back. So we keep buying supplements, keep paying the monthly fee for weight-loss apps. And we doctors go on prescribing Ozempic.

When I decided, at age 22, to become a physician, I imagined long-term relationships with my patients, earning their trust. I didn't think I'd be complicit in fat-phobic culture, peddling diet drugs and all of their false promises.

Yet the industry is so powerful, it feels hard to escape. When I suggest to patients that Ozempic might not be medically necessary, they shrug. They say, "Fine, I'll just get it online," at any number of telehealth services where patients can self-report whatever weight will get them the prescription.

To be clear: I'm not anti-Ozempic. GLP-1 medications can solve certain problems. I happily prescribe them for many of my patients with diabetes or heart disease, and I'm grateful to the researchers who developed them. And I even prescribe them for people who simply want to lose weight, since supporting their body autonomy is my duty as their doctor.

But I want them to know there's a lot these medications don't do.

They don't undo the harms of diet culture, distorted body image and pervasive weight stigma. They don't change the way we've turned eating into a morality contest, the way the pleasure and ritual of sharing food with our loved ones has been weaponized against us. These medications don't help us feel grateful for our bodies - bodies that climb mountains, birth babies, hug grandparents. They don't fix the casual self-hatred that's been normalized in our fatphobic world.

Watching Oprah's weight loss special, I mostly felt sadness. She shared wrenching testimonials from people who felt ashamed to leave the house because of their body size, including one Chicago-area mom who said people started treating her children better once she lost weight.

Certainly, GLP-1 medications helped some of Oprah's guests with their diabetes and changed the way the world treated them, but the real problem behind their suffering isn't entirely medical. The problem is fat phobia.

This stigma is challenging to deal with, but recognizing it - and understanding that Ozempic is a woefully inadequate tool to address it - is a good first step. What if instead of trying to shrink ourselves, we tried to change our biases? What if we built a world where diverse bodies are appreciated, not medicated to take up less space?

For my patient who asked for Ozempic the other day, I told her that it's normal for bodies to change shape and size over time. She met my eye, through tears, and confessed that she felt like her authentic self - her thin self - was just waiting to emerge.

"What would it feel like to love your body the way it is?" I asked. My patient didn't have an answer.

Mara Gordon is a family physician in Camden, N.J., and a contributor to NPR. She's on Twitter as @MaraGordonMD.

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My patients think Ozempic is a wonder drug. But it can't fix fat phobia

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Yes, as Oprah enthused, the drugs help people shrink their bodies. But the psychological damage of weight stigma can't be so easily cured, a doctor writes.

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Stop Doomscrolling and Comparing: Why Social Media Influencers Are Not Role Models

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Stop Doomscrolling and Comparing: Why Social Media Influencers Are Not Role Models

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Stop Doomscrolling and Comparing: Why Social Media Influencers Are Not Role Models

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In today’s society, our daily lives have become more and more dependent on social media platforms, which are widely used by teens.

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The Ballerina Farm Controversy: Is the Tradwife Lifestyle Toxic for Women?

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The Ballerina Farm Controversy: Is the Tradwife Lifestyle Toxic for Women?

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The Ballerina Farm Controversy: Is the Tradwife Lifestyle Toxic for Women?

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When the Times profile was released, everyone on social media, from TikTok to Instagram, wanted Hannah Neeleman, commonly known on social media as Ballerina Farm, to be free from her lifestyle and husband. Hannah Neeleman was born in Utah on June 25, 1990 (age 34). She was the eighth of nine children that her parents, who ran a flower shop, had. Growing up, she loved to dance, and at the age of 17, she was admitted to the Juilliard School, a prestigious arts university, and moved to New York to follow her passion. To pay school-related expenses, she started competing in beauty pageants.

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Living in the Best of Times, Thinking in the Worst of Times

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Living in the Best of Times, Thinking in the Worst of Times

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Living in the Best of Times, Thinking in the Worst of Times

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In 2024, we live in a world that would have been dismissed as science fiction only a few decades earlier: the emergence of diseases like polio; the whole world connected by the internet, bringing more information to the fingertips of the average person in one minute than our ancestors could learn in a lifetime. Life expectancy is up, poverty rates are down, and technological innovation has made our lives easier and more comfortable than at any time in history. But amidst all that improvement, it often seems like we’re collectively convinced that society is in shambles.