Wounaan Indigenous people have opposed illegal rosewood logging and centuries of exploitation with wisdom and beauty

The Wounaan people of Panama and Colombia have long carved cocobolo rosewood into ceremonial staffs and art, but soaring Chinese demand during the real estate boom drove prices past thirteen thousand dollars per cubic meter by 2012, triggering an illegal logging invasion of their forests starting in 2011. According to The Conversation, a three-month standoff turned deadly when a logger killed an elected Wounaan authority, and the logger was killed in return. By 2014, Panama had become China's sixteenth-largest rosewood supplier, and cocobolo's conservation status soon fell to critically endangered. A new book, co-produced with the Wounaan National Congress under a data-sovereignty agreement, now tells that story through Wounaan ancestral wisdom alongside the loss.

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