By 1937, S. C. Johnson had built a carnauba processing factory in Fortaleza. By 1938, the company added a research farm that was later donated to the University of Ceará's school of agronomy. The Brazilian subsidiary came in 1960. And in 1990 - nine years after Herbert's death - Johnson Wax's Brazilian arm launched an environmental project that led eventually to the creation of the reserve. The seed of the thing was a flight, but the tree it grew into was institutional patience: an American family business agreeing, across three generations, that caring about the raw material also meant caring about the forest that produced it. The reserve was formally established on September 8, 2000, with 4,749.58 hectares in the municipality of Crateús, Ceará - nearly half of which had already been stripped of its original caatinga vegetation by the time it came under protection.

Caatinga is, to outsiders, the hardest Brazilian biome to love. It is dry, thorny, and gray for most of the year, its squat trees shedding leaves to survive the long northeastern drought. The plants look beaten - twisted trunks, knife-edge thorns, xerophytic leaves. Then the brief wet season arrives and the whole landscape greens overnight, briefly spectacular before retreating into gray again. For decades the caatinga was treated by Brazilian policy as degraded land awaiting development, and most of it was cleared for goats, charcoal, or subsistence agriculture. It is now recognized as the largest continuous stretch of seasonally dry tropical forest in the Americas, with high levels of endemism, and one of the most threatened biomes in Brazil. Serra das Almas's commitment to preserving a piece of it whole is one of the more significant private conservation acts in the country.

The reserve's boundaries have moved outward over the years. In November 2015 the purchase of the neighboring Fazenda Gameleira added 292 hectares of preserved caatinga, bringing the total area to 6,137 hectares and extending the reserve across the state line into Buriti dos Montes in Piauí. The expansion was financed with support from the International Union for Conservation of Nature - the IUCN - along with a list of partners that reads like an institutional map of Brazilian conservation: The Nature Conservancy, Petrobras, Fundação O Boticário, the Fundo Nacional do Meio Ambiente, and FUNBIO. The reserve itself is owned and run by the Associação Caatinga, a Brazilian nonprofit built around this ecosystem. The Samuel Johnson Fund for Conservation of the Caatinga, named for another generation of the family, continues the underwriting.

The central threat at Serra das Almas is illegal hunting. The reserve shelters a fauna that other parts of the caatinga have largely lost - deer, peccaries, armadillos, agoutis, rock cavies - and all of them remain targets for subsistence and sport hunters operating in the surrounding landscape. The bird side of the problem is different: the saffron finch, a small yellow tanager beloved of singing-bird competitions, is trapped in large numbers for the live bird trade. The blue-fronted Amazon parrot and several species of guan are similarly threatened. Reserve staff respond with monitoring and surveillance patrols, environmental education in nearby communities, and a growing ecotourism program that gives local people an economic stake in keeping the forest and its animals intact. None of that is a complete answer. It is the best answer currently available in a biome where saying no to hunting has to compete with saying no to hunger.