Last Wildest Place

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project © Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project © Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project View all images ↓
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  • Dates
    2013 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Locations Purús Province, Manú Province, Peru, Ucayali

The Purús/Manu region is one of the last most isolated places in the Amazon, where threatened but still intact ecosystems provide for remote indigenous communities as well as water, oxygen, climate stability, and biological diversity for us all.

LAST WILDEST PLACE is a decade-plus-long, ongoing project based on a simple fact: The Amazon Matters. At over a billion acres, the Amazon Basin is bigger than the next two largest tropical forests combined. It alone accounts for half the planet’s remaining rainforest, 30% of all terrestrial species, 20% of our world’s freshwater, and 20% of the global oxygen. It provides climate stability for the entire planet and the carbon stored in its forests— and released by its deforestation— affects us all.

Within the Amazon, the Purús/Manu region in southeastern Peru is one of the most remote and inaccessible, where still-intact and uniquely biodiverse ecosystems provide sustenance for settled indigenous communities and is home to perhaps the highest concentration of isolated “uncontacted” tribes on Earth. While still largely undeveloped, this last wildest place is increasingly threatened by logging, illegal and unregulated gold mining (Peru is the largest gold producer in South America and in the top ten globally), coca farms and processing (for cocaine), land trafficking, oil and gas development, cattle grazing, agricultural expansion, Christian missionaries, pharmaceutical exploitation, extreme fires and drought, and the legal and illegal road construction projects that open access to previously inaccessible forests with devastating— often irrevocable— impacts on the ecosystems and all who depend on them.

I first visited the Upper Amazon in 2013 and have returned many times spending more than a year in total in the jungle. The pandemic, which limited legitimate expeditions as well as enforcement patrols, left the region especially vulnerable to increased illegal activity. As we have emerged from this restrictive dynamic and now into the reality of an increasingly uncertain and unstable socio-political global environment, the extent of new unregulated and illegal activities in this unique ecosystem makes raising awareness more critical than ever.

We have at least one trip planned in fall/winter 2025. It will be focused Alto Esperanza, an Amahuaca community in the headwaters of the Inuya River that is positioned to be the first Indigenous community in initial contact in Peru’s history to obtain title to their land. And with additional grant funds and/or support in the form of this book award, we would do at least one additional expedition in early 2026 as well, ideally in consultation with the publishers and to finalize a book edit.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Aerial view of an approaching storm over the vast roadless forests of the Alto Purús region in Peru. The Purús/Manu complex in southeastern Peru—including two national parks, multiple Indigenous reserves, and other protected areas—is one of the most remote, inaccessible, and important areas of the Amazon.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Linder Miques Viquia, Sepahua Community Vigilance Committee Member patrolling the upper Sepahua River, Peru. Illegal land trafficking schemes mostly for growing coca are leading to rapid deforestation threatening the Indigenous communities and unparalleled biodiversity of multiple critical protected areas.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Workers loading lumber on a truck at the port in Pucallpa on the Ucayali River in Peru. Pucallpa is well known as one of the centers for trafficking illegal lumber out of the Upper Amazon and a few weeks before this photograph the local paper reported that 4 million board feet of illegal lumber had been confiscated at eight Pucallpa sawmills.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Evening traffic in Puerto Esperanza, Peru. The larger of the remote towns like this are the weak bridge between the more remote indigenous villages and the rest of the world. They have mediocre healthcare, remedial education, infrequently replenished and limited provisions, few economic opportunities, and usually at least several western religious denominations vying for their souls.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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A man searches for his keys dropped in the water and mud at the port on the river in Puerto Breu, Ucayali region, Peru. The 500 people in Puerto Breu connect to their nearest neighbor, the also mostly-unconnected but slightly larger Marechal Thaumaturgo in Brazil, via 9 hours by boat down the Yurúa.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Want ads in La Pampa, Peru for women to work in the service industries. In the unofficial town of La Pampa, crime and illegal activities beyond the illegal gold mining include black market goods, prostitution, slavery, and human trafficking. Ads like these are used to lure in women in search of work to remote locations where they can be coerced or abducted into prostitution.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Miluska with pet black howler monkey (Alouatta nigerrima) in Nueva Victoria II, Yurúa River, Ucayali Province, Peru. Miluska's Chitonahua tribal group lives in initial contact in their own community of Nueva Victoria II. named after the Ashaninka community of Nueva Victoria where they first settled after contact.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Carlitos (name unverified and likely false) and his family are new arrivals from the coca-growing highlands to the west and are moving in on land illegally trafficked and freshly cleared for agriculture on the upper Sepahua River, Peru. These plots, increasing in numbers almost daily, are illegal and mostly for small farms that appear to be fronts for growing coca deeper in the forests.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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A family from the valley of the three rivers Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro (aka, VRAEM or VRAE)—one of the main areas for cultivation of coca in Peru—arriving to establish a new— and illegal— coca farm on the Sepahua River.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Coca (Erythroxylum coca) leaves for sale at the port in Atalaya, Peru. Coca is a familiar traditional medicine chewed to relieve hunger and fatigue and to enhance physical performance, as well as for stimulating stomach function, treating asthma, colds, and other ailments.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Baby caiman caught in a local lake are offered for sale in Puerto Esperanza, the isolated capital of the Purús region in southeastern Peru.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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The Catholic church in Puerto Esperanza has adopted local "native" effigies including a mostly naked altar server and a baptismal font in the shape of a canoe. Fr. Miguel Piovesan, is an outspoken and controversial proponent of road development through the Alto Purús National Park—activities that are often illegal and almost always open pathways to destructive land invasions.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Jovita Rengifo Cobos's from Imaculada on the Inuya River in Peru tells how her parents grew up enslaved in the rubber and agriculture booms of the early 1900s that spread across the Amazon, forced to work growing barbasco—the common name of several plants that contain poisonous chemical compounds used for fishing by indigenous populations and that became important to the pharmaceuticals industry.

© Jason Houston - A morning scene from a window in the small Mastanahua village of Nueva Luz on the upper Purús River, Ucayali, Peru.
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A morning scene from a window in the small Mastanahua village of Nueva Luz on the upper Purús River, Ucayali, Peru.

© Jason Houston - A pet spider monkey (Ateles chamek) on the bank above the Purús River in Zapote, Peru.
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A pet spider monkey (Ateles chamek) on the bank above the Purús River in Zapote, Peru.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Spix’s Guan (Penelope jacuacu). A half-day hunting and gathering trip near Selva Virgen near the border of the Murunahua Reserve on the upper Yurúa River, Peru.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Butchering a tapir (Tapirus terrestris) in a canoe on the Curanja River in Balta, Ucayali region, Peru. Remote indigenous villages in the Alto Purús region in southeastern Peru rely on the wild diversity of the forest for everything from food and traditional medicines to building materials.

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Edgar Monsin Panayfo in San Martin, Atalaya Province, on the Inuya River in Peru with a copy of a photograph made by Cornell Capa of his grandfather, Pedro Collazos Churuyama, many decades ago for the book, "Farewell to Eden".

© Jason Houston - Image from the Last Wildest Place photography project
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Waiting on the plane in Puerto Esperanza, Peru. Located in a remote southeastern corner of Peru against the border with Brazil and surrounded by protected areas, Puerto Esperanza is both isolated as well as a hub for goods and services for the even more remote indigenous communities in the Alto Purús region.

© Jason Houston - A monkey skull found in a mud bank on the Mapuya River, Atalaya Province, Peru.
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A monkey skull found in a mud bank on the Mapuya River, Atalaya Province, Peru.