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"The very name "Mato Grosso," or "Thick Forest" as it means in Portuguese, epitomizes the unknown and the unexplored. In the present century this obscure Brazilian wilderness, situated almost in the geographical center of the South American continent, gained worldwide interest with the disappearance of Colonel Fawcett and his party in 1926. Even today, though it may be reached by plane from Rio de Janeiro in less than a day, Mato Grosso is only just beginning to become known to the civilized world. The Upper Xingú River, which is the area of Mato Grosso with which this album is mainly concerned, was first explored by Karl von den Steinen as recently as 1884, and the Chavante Indians were only just peacefully contacted by white men in 1946..."

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The Crucial Crusade of an Amazon Cowboy
By Kathryn Hopper

TCU MAGAZINE
FALL 2009

Century-old live oaks shelter the white clapboard Welder family ranch house and the fragrance of magnolias hangs in a breeze-less June morning. It’s barely 10 a.m. and already in the low 90s as a herd of Hereford-Brahman mix cattle idles in a nearby grove.

At first glance, life on the 131-year-old ranch in Refugio County seems little changed from earlier eras, but on this day the ranch is the site of an international exchange between ranchers and rancheiros — Brazilian cattle ranchers — who were invited to Texas by their Brazilian neighbor John Cain Carter ’93 RM and TCU’s Institute of Ranch Management for a week of on-campus lectures and tours of South Texas alumni ranching operations.
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Music From Mato Grosso
Smithsonian
1999

Edward M. Weyer - Photographer (Cover)
Recording Era: 1950‘s

Three days before Christmas, Francisco (Chico) Mendes was shot dead in the small Amazonian frontier town of Xapuri in Brazil. He was killed by hired assassins because of a land dispute. But he died for a cause that may be one of the last, best hopes for preserving the Amazon rain forest and with it the livelihoods of a million and a half rubber tappers and "extractivists."

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Murder in the Rainforest
Nov 2013

Vanity Fair by Alex Shoumatoff

One evening Chico Mendes stepped out his back door and was blasted by a twenty-gauge shotgun. It could have been just another killing in Brazil’s badlands, but Mendes was a central figure in the worldwide movement to save the rain forest, a sort of Amazonian Gandhi, and he immediately became an environmental cause célèbre. Alex Shoumatoff journeys to a remote corner of western Brazil to investigate and chronicle a death foretold Darci Alves, the twenty-one-year-old son of a local rancher, confessed to Chico’s murder. He is thought to be the tool of a vicious right-wing organization of landowners."

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From Indigenous Peoples in Brazil

Photo: Miltom Guran, 1978

“The Kamaiurá are an important reference in the culture area of the Upper Xingu, in which peoples who speak different languages share very similar worldviews and ways of life. They are even connected by a system of specialized trade and intergroup rituals, which have different names for each ethnic group, but which have become known (both by people within and outside the Xinguan universe) precisely by the terms used in the Kamaiurá language, such as the Kwarup and the Jawari.”

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TEDx Alcatraz

Since Microsoft was founded, an area of the Amazon rainforest nearly the size of Texas has been destroyed in Brazil. The vast majority of that rainforest -- up to 80% in recent years -- was turned into cattle pasture. But today it is ranchers who may ultimately save the Amazon. John Carter, a rancher originally from Texas who moved to one of Earth's wildest frontiers in the mid-1990's, placed himself amongst ongoing battles among Indians, loggers, developers, squatters and police. Through his non-profit conservation organization, Aliança da Terra, John is working on an idea that could turn ranchers from the biggest drivers of deforestation to the saviors of the world's largest rainforest.

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The Texas Chainsaw Stopper
Outside Magazine

By Stephanie Pearson
Nov 3, 2008

Expat conservationist John Cain Carter, a former elite Army soldier who did a tour in Iraq, is anything but typical. Same goes for his plan, which calls on ranchers to preserve Brazil's wild west. Can he have it both ways and still save—and survive—the Amazon?

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The Amazon’s Texas Saviour
Economist

May 26, 2005

AT THE helm of a second-hand Cessna aircraft, John Cain Carter is as preoccupied with the Earth below
as he is with the clouds ahead. An expanse of pasture the size of a small principality “used to be all forest,” he points out, banking right. And the flood plain between the Rio Araguaia and the Rio das Mortes was once “stirrup-high in water. Today you can drive a jeep out there in the rainy season,” he concludes, ruefully. Mr Carter attributes the unnatural dryness to landowners who cut down trees to make way for pasture, shutting o" the supply of moisture from tree to cloud. Watching it happen “is a nightmare.”

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Concerns over deforestation may drive new approach to cattle ranching in the Amazon

Mongabay by Rhett Butler
September 8, 2009

AT THE helm of a second-hand Cessna aircraft, John Cain Carter is as preoccupied with the Earth below
John Cain Carter, a Texas rancher who moved to the heart of the Amazon 11 years ago and founded what is perhaps the most innovative organization working in the Amazon, Alianca da Terra, believes the only way to save the Amazon is through the market. Carter says that by giving producers incentives to reduce their impact on the forest, the market can succeed where conservation efforts have failed.

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Mato Grosso - The Last Virgin Land
By Anthony Smith and Michael Joseph

Royal Geographical Society, 1971

ISBN-10:

0718107349

Mato Grosso: last virgin land: An account of the Mato Grosso, based on the Royal Society and Royal Geographical Society expedition to central Brazil, 1967-9.