This book is fruit of an approximately fifteen years of life work along the Ouro Preto River's Rubber Tappers, in the Western Amazon, on their trajectory of Forest Defense and for their right to life and dignity.It is a book fruit of many struggles, losses and some few victories, granting that the Amazon Forest is not devastated and taken by fire, cattle and soy farms on the intensity intended by wood dealers, farmers and other actors.In exchange for the lives of millions of rubber tappers, who anonymously succumb for diseases, bullets, anguish, political polices committed to agribusiness and pitiful law statements, earned for their descendents, and to us, their readers, the certainty that a dignified life is worth.Through this 15 years living, I earned the trust of many and at the same time as felling the growing impotence for seen the devastation and the destruction growing far, the sadness for seeing the forest burning, appeared more and more in the conversations, the recordings and in the felling they feed about the future.Through this time, it was necessary to develop the capacity to listen keenly beyond the utilitarian-scientifically speech which changes any life report in a mere theoretical appendix. Making rise reports of 30, 50, 60 years of life full of myths, uncertainties, values, temporalities, and plenty of life.This way, the myths related by the rubber tappers mix to their own lives, showing in the dark nights and following them throw the whole life.It is inebriating to see each rubber tapper's life trajectory, frequently lonely, living in the middle of the deep forest, moist, and very hot, with the poronga on the head, an old holster on the shoulders, a rubber tree knife, refer us to the greatest epic or tragic works of literature.It were these years of living and work, that granted the trust of each one of them and allowed the elaboration of reports completely distinct, as diverse as the ways into the Forest.The Oral History challenge learned from so many researchers turned into a important methodology for this book's elaboration, offering a safe and interpretative way, from one side bringing narratives from the wonderful lives and by the other consolidating a field research methodology that makes the human comes and not simply a research object.
