Flying high above the verdant Amazon jungle, TIME correspondent Eugene Linden experienced a kind of epiphany. "I had thoughts oddly similar to those I had when I flew in a small plane across the Arctic -- a sense of reassurance that the world still contained places so immense and so empty of people," recalls Linden, who wrote this week's cover story. "But while the emptiness of the Arctic is austere, the forest canopy that seems to extend into infinity is choked with life."
Linden has explored the complex and sometimes tragic relationships between humans and nature in several books, including Silent...