When telling stories about nature, Alexandre de Santi’s interest stems from the climate. “Climate collapse is the greatest challenge of my generation,” he says. Before joining Mongabay, Santi began his career as a reporter in 1999. His trajectory included founding the editorial studio Fronteira, contributing as a founding associate of Porto Alegre-based news nonprofit Matinal, and serving as deputy editor at The Intercept Brazil, where he played a key role in major investigations, including the Vaza Jato scandal that led to political turmoil in Brazil. Santi joined Mongabay in 2022 and became managing editor for Brazil in 2025. He has always lived in the country’s urban landscapes where the Atlantic Forest once stood. Today, less than 24% of it remains. “It always struck me how the forest is always trying to regain its space in the urban concrete,” he says. For Santi, Brazil’s urban expansion stands in stark contrast to the nature and communities that predate it. He says Indigenous peoples have long understood how to coexist with the natural world rather than oppose it. While fully adopting traditional lifestyles is unrealistic today, drawing inspiration from “many of those concepts” could guide Brazil and other rapidly growing countries toward an alternative development model, he says. Santi sees reasons to hope for the future. “There’s too much potential and an opportunity to make things better.” One of his proudest achievements at Mongabay was editing an investigation into Brazil’s carbon credit market that exposed a timber laundering scam. “We revealed something truly…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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