— Taken over as director of Panguana after her father’s death and expanded it from approximately 460 to nearly 2,470 acres, or around 10 square kilometers.
— Secured Panguana’s legal protection as a formally designated private conservation area in 2011.
— Supported more than 180 scientific publications through the research program she and her parents built.
— Written and published a memoir that won the Corine Literature Prize and became the most authoritative account of her story available in written form.
— Participated in Werner Herzog’s documentary and returned to the crash site for the first time in 27 years.
— Received the Grand Officer of the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services from the Peruvian government in 2019.
This list is a factual inventory, not a moral argument. She did not earn her survival by what she did afterward, and her survival does not obligate any particular accounting. But the list serves a purpose: it makes visible the specific shape of a life that has been consistently described, in popular accounts of her story, primarily through the prism of the eleven days in 1971. The eleven days are extraordinary, and they are why the world knows her name. But fifty years of scientific work and conservation effort are also the story, and they deserve to be part of it.
## The Forest That Made Her and That She Is Making
The Amazon basin contains approximately ten percent of all the species on Earth. Its primary forests are among the most biologically diverse environments that exist, and they are disappearing at rates that represent a genuine crisis for planetary biodiversity. The political and economic forces driving deforestation are powerful and well-funded. The forces working to document and preserve what exists are considerably less powerful and considerably less well-funded.