In 1990, the state of Rondonia created eight sustainable yield forests on the left bank of the Madeira River. The Rio Madeira A, B, and C forests were three of them, alongside the Rio Vermelho A through D forests and the Rio Abuna Sustainable Yield Forest. The concept was straightforward: designate these areas as managed forests, permit selective logging under strict guidelines, and prove that economic activity and conservation could coexist in the Amazon. Two years later, Rondonia signed a loan agreement with the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to implement Planafloro, the Agricultural and Forestry Plan of Rondonia. The money was real. The implementation was not. Throughout the 1990s, the state government took no effective measures to establish management protocols, hire rangers, or enforce boundaries. The Rondonia executive treated development and conservation as a zero-sum equation, and development won every time -- new roads, new waterways, new settlers occupying land that existed as a conservation unit only on paper.

The year 2000 marked the point of no return. INCRA, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform, transferred 19 federal public lands in state conservation units to the Rondonia state government, including all three Rio Madeira sectors. That same year, Law 233/00 redefined the state's environmental zoning and eliminated approximately 70 percent of its protected areas. Three forests were reduced in size. Three others were simply ignored, as if they had never been created. The Rio Madeira forests shrank from their original 587,207 hectares to 150,461 hectares. What remained was unprotected in any practical sense and subject to invasions by settlers and ranchers. INCRA and the Porto Velho department of agriculture issued land ownership documents within Sector B's boundaries, and Banco da Amazonia released funds for agricultural activities inside the forest perimeter. The agencies nominally responsible for conservation were actively enabling deforestation.

Sector B tells the story in miniature. Originally covering 82,437 hectares, its area was reduced by private land claims, then recreated in 1996 by state decree at a diminished 51,856 hectares. The goal was self-sustaining production of renewable resources with natural regeneration of remaining vegetation -- language that reads like ecological policy but in practice lacked any enforcement mechanism. In December 2010, the federal government transferred the Sector B property to the state. A 2012 satellite analysis showed deforestation advancing well beyond sustainable levels. Then came the legal convulsions: on February 19, 2014, a legislative decree revoked the 1996 decree that had created the forest. Less than two months later, on April 14, 2014, a court suspended the revocation as unconstitutional. That decision was upheld on May 2, 2016. Sector B exists because the judiciary said it must, not because anyone with a chainsaw respects the boundary.

Sector A, created in Porto Velho municipality with an area of about 63,813 hectares, appears to have ceased to exist as a functioning conservation unit after 2000. No public records document its management or protection. Sector C, the smallest at roughly 30,000 hectares, has fared better -- but largely by accident. Ninety percent of its territory overlaps with the central section of the Cunia Ecological Station, a federal conservation unit with stricter protections and actual enforcement capacity. Its vegetation is entirely savanna-rainforest contact habitat, a transitional ecosystem found where closed-canopy forest gives way to open grassland. Sector C sits southeast of the BR-319 highway, north of Porto Velho. The Rio Madeira Sustainable Yield Forest is a case study in the distance between environmental law and environmental reality. The decrees were written, the hectares were designated, and the forests continued to fall.