I’m deep in the remote corners of the western Amazon rainforest where the saturated air clings to my skin in transparent droplets. As I trudge along the well-worn leaf-covered trail, my guide stops. Jose was born in this forest and has been leading western scientists here for decades. He points at a spot just off the edge of the trail. “Rana,” he whispers.
My Spanish falters, and I struggle to remember the word. “Frog,” my colleague whispers to me. Relieved to have a search image, I peer toward the spot, straining my eyes. I see only layers of flattened leaves. Jose points again. “Aqui.” Here. This time, he points closer to the ground. Still, I see nothing. This goes on for longer than I care to admit. At one point, I lie. “I see it!” Jose knows I don’t, but he’s patient. He points again. I desperately scan the ground for a break in the pattern, something out of place in the decaying leaves.
Finally, there it is. A slightly different mottling of brown forms a familiar outline, and two tiny yellow-trimmed eyes become visible.
Jose didn’t find the frog because his eyesight is better. He found it because he knows what should be there. Years of walking these trails have given him a baseline to which he can compare colors, textures, and shapes. Against that baseline, even small deviations are obvious. For me, an outsider, everything blurs into noise. While I don’t lack vision, I lack a reference.
The same is true of climate change in the Amazon. Its earliest signs are not dramatic. They are subtle shifts in phenology: a tree that fruits a few weeks later, a bird call that becomes less frequent and then absent, and soil that dries enough that footprints and tracks linger longer. The forest transforms in increments that require sustained attention to detect, so to an outsider, the forest remains unchanged. But to those who have deep generational knowledge of the system, these shifts are obvious. Traditional ecological knowledge creates a capacity to perceive early deviations from normal.
The frog hops away seconds later—small, quick, and in its element. I almost missed it.
We most readily recognize climate change in catastrophes, fires and droughts, but it shapes the world in much less dramatic ways. We mistake visibility for urgency, when it’s the least visible changes that are often the most urgent. By the time we are aware, the early harbingers—those that would have enabled action before a disaster—are already gone. The capacity to perceive early warnings resides in the knowledge of those people who are rooted here, even if the capacity to acknowledge them and act lies within the broader global community. We often need to be shown where to look. Without that knowledge, we are left staring at the ground, looking for a pattern that untrained eyes cannot readily observe.
And if we wait too long to see it clearly, the frog is already out of sight.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
