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In 2014, the Brazilian megacity São Paulo experienced nearly running out of water. Only 5% remained in their water reservoirs, enough for a few weeks of consumption.
The world’s rainforests are essential to the global climate. Large parts of South America's population are, for example, directly dependent on the Amazon rainforest’s ability to create weather systems that bring rain, both for use as clean drinking water and for growing crops.
1. edition published May 2025 at the imprint Forlaget Pantanal.
GAIA I - The Sky River
José has spent his entire life on the streets of the ever-bustling megacity São Paulo, where other homeless people, beggars, drug addicts, and muggers make everyday life a constant struggle for survival. As if that weren't enough, the rain fails to come, and the city is on the verge of running out of clean drinking water.
One day, a fruit plantation manager gets stuck in one of the city’s numerous traffic jams, strikes up a conversation with José, and offers him a job. José sees this as his golden opportunity to escape life as a homeless person, and soon after, he and his friend Thiago set off for the Amazon rainforest, where the plantation is located. Meanwhile, the city they’ve left behind grows increasingly parched.
On the plantation, they meet Alice, a Greenpeace activist, who makes them aware that not everything is as it should be, either on the plantation or in the rainforest.
GAIA I – The Sky River is the first stand-alone part of four planned works in the series Victims of Hothouse Earth. GAIA is thereby a sort of series within the series and addresses some of the turning points that risk significantly escalating the climate crisis if the global community fails to act in time.
