Fábio Zuker is a scholar and writer whose work explores the political dimensions of environmental destruction and the contradictions of the green transition — how deforestation, industrial agriculture, and extractive capitalism remake landscapes, bodies, and forms of life in the Brazilian Amazon, and how authoritarian politics, environmental crime, and public health crises are reshaping futures across the Global South.

 

His books move between registers. The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon (Milkweed Editions, 2022), a work of narrative nonfiction praised by The New York Times, The Economist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, traces the entanglements of Amazonian life and death through a single, improbable event. His academic book manuscript, under contract with the University of California Press, is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon.

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His work is rooted in more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous, riverine, and smallholder communities across the Brazilian Amazon.

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His essays and reporting have appeared in National Geographic, Wired, The Guardian, E-flux Journal, Revista Piauí, Nexo Jornal, and Revista Serrote, among others. He is a four-time Pulitzer Center grantee.

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His academic work has appeared in Science, Environment and Planning E, and Mana, and received the USP Dissertation Award (Prêmio Tese Destaque USP, 2023).

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He is a researcher at the Pensi Institute (José Luiz Setúbal Foundation) and the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo, and is currently a Visiting Researcher at the University of Oxford. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Collège de France, and has taught at the University of São Paulo and Princeton University.