The emails started arriving last week.

“I’ve been waiting to hear about the fires in the Amazon,” wrote Molly Krause, a listener in Aurora, Colo. “It’s a huge problem that is not getting adequate attention. Can you please do an episode to shed light on what is going on?”

What began as a handful of requests became a kind of collective plea.

“I’ve been preoccupied with the fires ravaging the Amazon, and I can’t help but sense they have gone underreported in the American media,” wrote Mike Rusie from Wilmington, Del. “My father, for example, scoffed at the matter and implied that they weren’t a big deal.”

We, too, wanted to better understand the fires in the Amazon. Social media had portrayed them, in flashing red lights, as a singular global crisis. Times reporting had put them in deeper historical perspective. After assessing the gap between those two portrayals, we realized there was a chance to make an episode that would answer a simple question: What was really going on down there?

Producers Clare Toeniskoetter and Michael Simon Johnson began digging into the story with Ernesto Londoño, the Brazil bureau chief. What they found was that the modern history of the Amazon was one of constant tension — between conservation and development; between international pressure to protect the rainforest and Brazilians who believe it’s their resource to use as they please.