April 13, 2022 • 24 mins
Paul Rosolie is an Amazon Rainforest conservationist, author, and filmmaker. He is the co-founder of Tamandua Expeditions and Junglekeepers.
Here are links to those organizations he mentions in this episode:
Save the Sunlight, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens
Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Zha, booking by Lisa Dunn, editorial support for Keishel Williams. The Managing Producer is Sachar Mathias and the Executive Producer is Mia Lobel.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Solvable listeners, I want to let you know
that this is going to be the last episode of
Solvable for the foreseeable future. Thank you for joining us
each week as we've mined the brightest brains around for
solutions to problems like climate change, imperialism in the arts,
(00:35):
size discrimination, exclusivity and gaming, the nation's mental health crisis,
and of course the pandemic. Now. Although the world has
many more problems, this is the last will aim to
solve for now. And with that, let's start the show.
This is Solvable. I'm Ronald doing Junior to just listen.
(00:59):
You're flying over a field abroccoli and there is nothing else.
That massive field is the Amazon rainforest, stretching from Brazil
to Bolivia, Peru, Eador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, French, Guyana and Surinam,
sometimes called the lungs of the Earth, or its ability
to absorb massive amounts of CO two and produce oxygen.
(01:21):
The Amazon now suffers from man made fires and deforestation.
If somebody came to your backyard and started you or
your block and started cutting down all the trees and
bulldozing the sidewalk, I mean you'd have the cops out
there in a second. We'd never allowed that. The jungle
is changing as people increasingly view the Amazon as a
resource for things like wood and gold, and so bit
(01:42):
by bit, day by day, they've just been shipping away
at it. People are cutting timber from rainforest, people are
gold mining from rainforest. Paul Rosalie is a conservationist and author.
In August twenty nineteen, he posted a video showing the
results of the wildfires destroying the Amazon rainforest. At that time,
it was viewed over one point four million times and
(02:02):
received a lot of media attention. Just by people posting
and resharing his video, Paul and his team got the
word out about what was being lost in those fires.
Give me a reason to be working in the Amazon
at a purpose I was helping with something, which is
something I really wanted, was to not just be you know,
being like, yeah, it's a lot of fun and to
take pictures. It was like, no, I'm actually helping these
(02:23):
people to protect their land. Through his eco tourism company
and his team of forest rangers, Rosalie is trying to
get people to see why the rainforest exists, why it's
important to our daily lives, and what can be done
to preserve the thousands of animal and plant species that
make the rainforest their home. A single tree can be
(02:44):
covered in reptiles, and birds and frogs will be living
on the mosses, lichens, vines, all this stuff. It's just
like a skyscraper of life. The Amazon's existence is also
crucial to our own existence, helping to stabilize the climate.
Rosalie remains optimistic that his efforts to save the rainforest
will not be in vain. Saving the Amazon rainforest is
(03:05):
a solvable problem. Do you remember the earliest time that
you fell in love with wildlife or with nature? And
you tell me about how that came to be for you.
So I was born in Brooklyn, and my parents wanted
(03:26):
to get away from the city, so so they moved
to like northern New Jersey, and so we had I
had access to a lot of forests. People don't realize,
like doing New York and New Jersey, there's actually a
lot of forests there. And so my parents used to
taking me on hikes. I loved like stormy summer days
when the foliage is really thick. I wanted to pretend
it was the jungle, and I used to love going
(03:47):
out and looking for snakes and turtles. And then as
I got older, took me to the Bronx Zoo. It's
like it's like legendary. You see these animals that you
know from all over the world that are so incredible.
It just stuck in my head that that's something that
you can do, that a person can do. And then
when I was a teenager, it was like going out
into the woods with like a knife and one match
(04:09):
and my dog and I'd have to like survive for
the whole weekend. So yeah, one match, add your dog
doesn't seem like enough to survive for the weekend. So
you dropped out of high school with your parents encouragement,
Tell me tell me that story. Yeah it always people
always scratch their head and I tell them that. But
I was the worst student you have ever heard of. Well, no,
(04:30):
second worst. There's always that kid that takes it to
another level. Always there's always that guy. But no, I was.
I think I got detention or suspended how many times
through middle school and then in high school it was
like I was old enough to be like getting in
fights with people and just failing all my classes and
miserable and depressed, I mean, you know, it sounds like, oh,
(04:50):
it was school, but it's like when you're a kid,
you're in a room and they tell you you're gonna
be in this room for a long time. It's January
and you got months ahead of you, and next year
is gonna be the same thing. And when you grow up,
you're gonna sit in an office and it's gonna be
the same thing again. And it's just assignments and it's boring.
And so I'd be like, all right, well, at least
I'm going to read, and then like no, Paul gave
(05:11):
me the book. And then I'd be like, you're not
taking the book. Give us the book now, or else
you're onto the principal office. We're going to call this
a kid. It was My mom came to me and
she was like, look, if you want drop out, and
I was like what. She's like, yeah, you're not going
to be a couch kid. She's like, you're not gonna
go work at you know, the gas station. She's like,
you got to go to college. She's like, but you
can get your geed right now, which is two years
of high school. And I tell this to kids like
(05:32):
it's it's a get out of Jail free card. If
you're ready to go do something, if you want to
learn a trade, if you want to go exploring, whatever
does you want to do. You don't need to sit
for the second two years of high school. It's not
made for everybody. And if you're one of those people,
it's not made for you. Take this test. And I
went straight to community college and then I applied to
state school and I just you know, I did my
(05:53):
undergrad and that gave me the time to start focusing
on what I really wanted. And at that very very
young age, at like seventeen, I was already going, Okay,
well what about what am I doing here? You ended
up in Peru somehow, so take me on that trip.
It was actually, I think in school a teacher had
made a joke about like, oh, you know this wood
(06:14):
that they're cutting down the Amazon rainforest for and I
sort of said, wait a second, this is that's a
real place that theoretically I could go to. And so
I like got in my head and I started doing
searches on the internet, and like, you know, the first
thing you look up, like go to the rainforest, you
found like tours and stuff, and I was like, I
don't want to do that, you know, I want to go.
I want to go and do something. I want to
(06:34):
go be part of something, something authentic. And I found
this local indigenous guy who was working with mccause, you know,
the color for the big colorful parrots. And I sent
out an email and I asked it that like one
hundred and thirty other emails too. But I waited like
a month and a half, heard nothing, and then one
day I got an email back and it was like, hey,
(06:56):
you know, if you're if you're good in the outdoors
and you feel this and that, you can come. It was.
It was very surreal and I had to fight that one.
I had to fight with my parents with because they
were like, you are too young to be getting on
a plane by yourself, going to the middle of the
jungle down a road completely out of contact for days
and days and days and weeks and with anacondas and
bushmasters and jaguars and poachers and all this stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
(07:18):
So that one was tough. That was a tough one
to sell. And I basically had to play the you know,
if I'm turning eighteen, I can do it without your things.
So I'd rather do it with you, so I had to.
We got into it on that one. But yeah, getting
there the first time was that was an adventure. Describe
(07:41):
how big the Amazon is and I don't know if
you have any comparative terms. I can't really imagine the
scope in the size the Amazon basin itself is larger
than the continental US, and we Yeah, it's huge. And
when you're in this forest, when you fly over it,
I was lucky enough to be in like a small
(08:02):
cess and of flying over we were monitoring for shorterier
dogs and you we reach parts where you can't see
anything but forest. It just looks like you're flying over
a field a broccoli and there's nothing else. Yeah, as
far as the eye can see. And it's just it's
such a massive forest. And it's not just jungle. It's
a lot of people don't realize there's in the Amazon.
(08:22):
There's grasslands, and there's wetlands, there's the pentanale, there's there's
all this different other types of ecosystems there's been but
bamboo forests. It floods and it recedes is it's so
so much more complex than we think. That. My big
thing there that that really blew my mind. Was that
you show up and you see a bunch of green
and these giant trees, and you're like, okay, cool. But
(08:42):
then it takes you a few years of learning to
learn how much you don't know. Because once you learn all,
you know, let's say, out of out of fifteen hundred
tree species, I learned, you know, thirty trees, you know,
and and fifty birds and a few snakes and the Okay,
so I learned those things, But I say, well, wait,
the size of this jungle is so beyond our comparison
(09:05):
that it's other than comparing it to the to the
United States. I don't I can't even I can't even begin.
It's just massive. Do you remember the first time you
stepped in there? I imagine that's different from the New
York forests. So what what was it like? You ever
see the beginning of Jurassic Park? Would you see the
broad of sources? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, he like grabs her
(09:26):
face and she she stands up and like everyone gets
chills when you see that. And it was like the
first time I stepped off the boat and saw a giant,
you know, thousand year old capoc tree and trails of
leaf cutter ends and you hear two cans and there's
spider monkeys. It was literally just like, this is where
I am supposed to be. It felt like it felt
like it felt like waking up from the matrix for
(09:47):
the first time. I was like, oh, this is what
it's supposed to be. Like, this is great. The one
thing that my teacher didn't know was he was scared
of snakes, and I had. I had grown up like
rescuing snakes. Like one time on a trail in like
New York, in New Jersey, this some old guy was
trying to kill a copper head and I just, you know,
stepped in and like picked it up and moved it.
(10:09):
Which by that point I'd caught hundreds of non venomous
snakes and so I knew how to do it. No,
thank you, Paul. This is yeah with your guy, no
trying to stay away from them. I mean, I support
you on that. Everybody should stay away from them. But
the funny thing is a snake will never, in any
circumstances um attack a person. You know, anybody that's messing
(10:29):
with a snake. You know, you hear about people like
killing rattlesnakes and stuff. It's like, well you could do
that or you could just keep walking like you just
you just not you know what a radical copdown. It's
it's amazing and there's a lot of that in conservation um.
But yeah, going to going to the jungle for the
first time absolutely was a major life changing moment. That
(10:51):
moment of seeing the jungle for the first time, that's it.
That was like really the start of my actual life.
As you got there and you know, you see this,
(11:12):
you have this Jurassic Park moment. Were there? Did you
have another Jurassic Park moment when you know the juggle
kind of turned, don't you? Or you saw less less
glamorous parts of the jungle that weren't so weren't so great,
the grittier parts you know about visiting and living in
the Amazon. Well, the thing is I love everything about
(11:34):
the jungle. I mean the you know, people say, what
about the piranhas, what about this? What about that? It's like, dude,
piranhas are delicious, Fried piranhas are delicious. I mean anaconda's
black Cayman. I've had close en concounters with jaguars. The
only thing that that after I had started learning and
gone on adventures and and sort of got in my
(11:56):
jungle feet, which is something you literally had to do
because the native guys they're like, look, you're too loud
with boots on, take them off. So they want you
to walk barefoot with the scorpions and the snakes and
the spikes and the jung yads. No, thank you, this
is all Ronald repellent. You're describing a place that Ronald
Will Will we'll see from Afar on a tour. Wait,
but your team just told me they got your plane tickets.
(12:17):
You're coming with me next week. Yeah. My My goal
to preserve the Amazon is by staying out of it.
So that's you're not a lot of people that really
help us protect the Amazon. I've said the same thing.
They're like, look in in theory, I want to protect
the rainforest. I don't want to set foot there. I'm
glad that it exists, and hey, you know, I respect
(12:39):
I really respect that. At least for me, there's a
huge benefit of that. I enjoy it. You wanted to
go yourself. How do you get other people excited about
about the Amazon, about preserving it? How do you get
somebody that you know that maybe apathetic or indifferent about
the Amazon. How do you get them excited about your
work and what it is that you're doing. The rainforests
(13:01):
are huge global forces in the stabilization of our climate
that keep tons of carbon in the ground. That's where
all of our bio diversity is, huge amounts of land
for indigenous people. I mean, there's there's just the crown
jewel of planet Earth, and some people still don't care. Yeah,
you know, But the thing is, if that's where you
(13:21):
get to the level of like, yeah, but a bad environment,
if you can't breathe the air and drink the water,
it ain't good for business either. I I was on
a Fox News show at some point and the guy,
he was actually nice off camera. He goes, luck, he goes,
I'm about to come after you. And I went, Okay,
he goes, but this is a financial show. And and
then they started and he goes and I got a
tree hugger on here. Now, why would we want to
(13:42):
protect the Amazon? And I was like, you got millions
of starving people because there's no rainforest, and everybody up
here starts choking and the weather goes all out of whack.
I was like, that is not good for your third
quarter or whatever it is you're worried about. And that's
the truth. You know, we need a function ecosystem. You
(14:06):
started the eco tourism company, Tamandua Expeditions, telling a little
bit about how that came about. The local guy I
first met. His name is Juan Julio, and he just
told everybody to call him JJ because he thought that
was easier for the green goes. But it stucks now
we all call him JJ. Originally he was doing that.
He was saying, look, you know, I'll bring people onto
my land because I'm trying. He was trying to protect
(14:26):
his land, and he said, look, we'll take you out
for animals, and he worked with scientists and so like,
go out in the morning and take that on my cause,
and then at night I'd be free to run out
and look for snakes or do whatever else I wanted
to do, climb trees and stuff. Originally that was the
first thing I was told, was like, do that, you know,
bring people that'll help. And it also gave me a
reason to be working in the Amazon. Had a purpose.
I was helping with something. Our deal is that we
(14:49):
want to take people on authentic wildlife experiences. And so
that's whether that's tracking tigers in India or coming to
the Amazon and taking part in conservation, it's it's always
like the real deal. And then also like now that
we have a ranger team and that we have all
these projects running, I mean, things have grown so much
that now the so much for people to see when
(15:10):
they come. How do you think eco tourism drives conservation.
I've heard people criticize ecotourism for conservation, and I think
in some places there's you know, like anything. I mean
in some places, I mean, water is great, you know,
until it's a flood. But in the Amazon, in my region,
it is incredibly beneficial. If you're a guy with some forest,
(15:31):
or if you're an indigenous community with some forests, you
might not have a way of interacting with the global economy.
Even if you're an indigenous community that mostly survives off
of piranha and monkeys and a few crops. At some
point you're going to need gasoline for your boat motor
and it's like, well you got to buy that. And
then when the loggers come and try to cut down
your land, it's like, well, now I need a lawyer.
(15:52):
So you do have to interact with the global economy,
and so if you want to do that, you have
to earn a little cash. And it's like, well, ecotourism
is a great way to do that, Paul. Can you
talk me through some of the ways that people are
pillaging I guess we're, lack of a better word, the rainforest. Yes,
if somebody came to your backyard and started, you know,
or your block and started cutting down all the trees
(16:14):
and bulldozing the sidewalk, I mean you'd have the cops
out there in a second. We'd never allow that. Yeah,
But when it's the middle of the Amazon, a lot
of times no one's here to see it, and so
bit by bit, day by day, they've just been chipping
away at it. People are cutting timber from rainforests, People
are gold mining from rainforests. And so in my experience,
I've seen the logging industry going after giant ironwood trees.
(16:36):
These are five hundred, six hundred, sometimes maybe thousand year
old trees that are habitat for thousands of other species,
and that at first even I was like, wait, thousands,
but yes, it's a single tree can be covered in
you know, reptiles and birds and all this other stuff.
Frogs will be living on the mosses, lichens, vines, all
(16:57):
this stuff is just like a skyscraper of life. And
so when you cut that down, this is all this
habitat that's gone. You started a second organization called jungle Keepers. Yes,
tell me about what that does and how that fights
some of the extraction that you're talking about right now.
What we have is a team of eight local rangers,
(17:17):
a fleet of boats, We have a ranger station, and
we are currently protecting fifty five thousand acres along this river,
so a lot of a lot of the area right
around where we were starting to see that deforestation. We're
sort of trying to arrest the cutting, protecting old growth
forest specifically. You know, it's like we can all do something.
(17:39):
It doesn't have to be you know, running with a
sword on fire towards a bulldozer trying to save the
rainforest and one heroic you know, last hand. So I
imagine you guys aren't running at bulldozs with flaming swords.
What are some of the things that you guys do
in order to stop them, Like we're not talking about
like a citizen's arrest here, but if you guys are patrolling.
I imagine there's some sort of execution factor where you
(18:01):
guys are actually stopping folks from doing the things that
they're doing to extract from the rainforest. We gave them
a better job. One of our most esteemed colleagues is
and he drives boat for us, and he does maintenance
for us. He does all this stuff. Name is Victor.
He was a logger. Wow, I mean with logging. He
(18:22):
was like, yeah, man, it's dangerous. The trees fall over
and there's snakes and all the stuff, and you gotta
be out there cutting and it's weeks on end away
from your family. And I was like, what if you
came to us because you're like an expert on the
river now right, And he's like, yeah, I know, this
river like came back of my hand. I was like, okay,
so what if you drive travelers up and down and
help us out with what we do? And he was like, well,
(18:43):
what else? And I was like, well that's really it.
And he's like, so I get good food, a clean bed,
I get to hang out with people that I've never
met before. And he was like, and you're gonna pay
me more? And I was like yeah. I was like,
what is logging pain? And he's like fifty souls to day.
I was like, bro, let's make it a hundred. I mean,
but really no, it's so cheap. It's so cheap. They're
working for a wage that is keeping them poor and starving.
(19:05):
And it's like when we started tim and do it,
one of the things we said was, if we're going
to bring people that have the resources to travel, yeah,
make sure that the local team is paid in such
a way that they're not just getting paid like a
like a day wage, that they're professionals at what they do.
And well, like, are you guys just the jobs creating
organization or do you guys ever find yourself in situations
(19:26):
where you have to do maybe like documentation and prosecuting
And you know, what does patrolling look like for you?
Because I imagine you guys don't have you know, a
big backing like organization. You're not necessarily the FBI of
the rainforest. So how do you get you know, the
type of you know, the type of executive branch stopping
power to actually get in there and um and and
(19:48):
and and stop you know, stop the extractions. And you're right,
I'm excited about this one thing about how we've been
able to convert so many people. But you can't do
that for everybody. We can't just make you know, five
thousand jobs. You can't do that. So yeah, on a
normal day, our rangers are patrolling and monitoring wildlife, so
they're they're checking, you know, where the spider monkeys are,
(20:10):
do you see jaguar tracks. Enforcement is something we do
periodically where it's like, when we need enforcement, we collaborate
with the police. And then because it's keru, a lot
of times we have to actually pay the police to
come out and do their job out there. But in
order to get the police out there, they don't have
them too, they don't have the resources to do what
they're doing. Then when we say, hey, can you guys
(20:33):
take a three day trip out with us into the bush,
They're like yes, but it's got to be like, you know, gasoline,
you got to handle our bedding, food, There's a whole
bunch of things to basically we have to plan like
a wilderness expedition for them. And it's funny. I went
with friends the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens not that long ago,
and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens are currently fighting a developer
(20:55):
that wants to put up a building that will shield
the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens from all their sunlight. Yeah, to
reinforest where it's like, we gotta get everybody to know
about it. First, we got to start up, we gotta
have you know, fundraising and storytelling campaign, and we got
to get people upset about this and not knowing about this,
and then we have to hire lawyers. And we found
after COVID that there were like I think it was
(21:17):
seventeen football fields cut right in one of the core
areas that we're protecting, and it was like, who are
these people? If we had to do some drone flights
over then we had to take that information back to
the city, show the law enforcement try and get them
out there. But then the people had heard us coming
and they ran away, so there's no one to arrest.
And it's like it's absolutely brutal work, but that is
(21:40):
day to day, that is what we're doing. We are
just putting out little fires, trying to trying to protect
this one river because that is right now. That's what
we can do. Tell me what listeners can do if
they want to help with conservation or learn more about
(22:00):
your work. Thousands of people donate small amounts, even like
five dollars, two dollars, I mean, there's also people that
do a thousand dollars. But whatever it is, it helps
to go straight to paying our rangers, getting gasoline for
our boats, scientific equipment, camera traps. It's the most direct
way to protect the Amazon. And then of course there's
all the other things like you know, being a responsible consumer,
(22:23):
not eating fast food beef. I mean, beef is one
of the largest contributors to deforestation in the Amazon because
they go and they cut down huge areas for cattle
farming and it just destroying the Amazon. So there's there's
also just at this point like getting sharing stuff like
on social media, the fact that people share, the fact
that when the fires came out that people shared that video,
(22:45):
got it to the news, got it to people that
now are big time plunders and actually put some serious
fuel behind this work and make us able to do
this work. So it really is like it is a
solvable thing. It is, you know, in conservation. At the
end of the day, what we're trying to do is
not cut down a tree. You know, giraffes aren't going
to go extinct on their own. It's only if we
(23:06):
kill them. So like, this is a very solvable problem.
We just need humans to focus for a second. So
really keeping it as part of the dialogue, helping good
conservation organizations all over the world traveling the eco tourism
thing still works. Support you know, whether it's Costa Rica
or Africa or Peru. Come see the work we're doing.
Get out there. Thanks for being on the show. I
(23:29):
really appreciate you. This has been great and I really
appreciate you. Avenue. You've really brought the rain for us
to life for me. I appreciate it man. And just this,
you know, sharing the news and people being able to
hear this, that's important. That's how we do this, that's
how we get it done. So thank you for helping
us protect the forest. Really appreciate it. Good talking with
you man. Absolutely keep the snakes away from me. Paul
(23:53):
Rosley is a conservationist, author and award winning filmmaker. He's
the co founder of Tom and Dua Expeditions and Jungle Keepers.
You can find links to those organizations and the information
about the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in our show notes. Solvable
is produced by Jocelyn Frank, Research by David Jah, Booking
(24:14):
by Lisa Dunn, Editing help from Kishell Williams. Our managing
producer is Sashimathias, and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle.
From all of us on the Solvable team and the
Pushkin family, we hope you learned ideas and strategies that
you'll use to make your community and the world better places.
(24:34):
I'm Ronald Young, Junior. Thanks for listening.
Pushkin. Hey, Solvable listeners, I want to let you know
that this is going to be the last episode of
Solvable for the foreseeable future. Thank you for joining us
each week as we've mined the brightest brains around for
solutions to problems like climate change, imperialism in the arts,
(00:35):
size discrimination, exclusivity and gaming, the nation's mental health crisis,
and of course the pandemic. Now. Although the world has
many more problems, this is the last will aim to
solve for now. And with that, let's start the show.
This is Solvable. I'm Ronald doing Junior to just listen.
(00:59):
You're flying over a field abroccoli and there is nothing else.
That massive field is the Amazon rainforest, stretching from Brazil
to Bolivia, Peru, Eador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, French, Guyana and Surinam,
sometimes called the lungs of the Earth, or its ability
to absorb massive amounts of CO two and produce oxygen.
(01:21):
The Amazon now suffers from man made fires and deforestation.
If somebody came to your backyard and started you or
your block and started cutting down all the trees and
bulldozing the sidewalk, I mean you'd have the cops out
there in a second. We'd never allowed that. The jungle
is changing as people increasingly view the Amazon as a
resource for things like wood and gold, and so bit
(01:42):
by bit, day by day, they've just been shipping away
at it. People are cutting timber from rainforest, people are
gold mining from rainforest. Paul Rosalie is a conservationist and author.
In August twenty nineteen, he posted a video showing the
results of the wildfires destroying the Amazon rainforest. At that time,
it was viewed over one point four million times and
(02:02):
received a lot of media attention. Just by people posting
and resharing his video, Paul and his team got the
word out about what was being lost in those fires.
Give me a reason to be working in the Amazon
at a purpose I was helping with something, which is
something I really wanted, was to not just be you know,
being like, yeah, it's a lot of fun and to
take pictures. It was like, no, I'm actually helping these
(02:23):
people to protect their land. Through his eco tourism company
and his team of forest rangers, Rosalie is trying to
get people to see why the rainforest exists, why it's
important to our daily lives, and what can be done
to preserve the thousands of animal and plant species that
make the rainforest their home. A single tree can be
(02:44):
covered in reptiles, and birds and frogs will be living
on the mosses, lichens, vines, all this stuff. It's just
like a skyscraper of life. The Amazon's existence is also
crucial to our own existence, helping to stabilize the climate.
Rosalie remains optimistic that his efforts to save the rainforest
will not be in vain. Saving the Amazon rainforest is
(03:05):
a solvable problem. Do you remember the earliest time that
you fell in love with wildlife or with nature? And
you tell me about how that came to be for you.
So I was born in Brooklyn, and my parents wanted
(03:26):
to get away from the city, so so they moved
to like northern New Jersey, and so we had I
had access to a lot of forests. People don't realize,
like doing New York and New Jersey, there's actually a
lot of forests there. And so my parents used to
taking me on hikes. I loved like stormy summer days
when the foliage is really thick. I wanted to pretend
it was the jungle, and I used to love going
(03:47):
out and looking for snakes and turtles. And then as
I got older, took me to the Bronx Zoo. It's
like it's like legendary. You see these animals that you
know from all over the world that are so incredible.
It just stuck in my head that that's something that
you can do, that a person can do. And then
when I was a teenager, it was like going out
into the woods with like a knife and one match
(04:09):
and my dog and I'd have to like survive for
the whole weekend. So yeah, one match, add your dog
doesn't seem like enough to survive for the weekend. So
you dropped out of high school with your parents encouragement,
Tell me tell me that story. Yeah it always people
always scratch their head and I tell them that. But
I was the worst student you have ever heard of. Well, no,
(04:30):
second worst. There's always that kid that takes it to
another level. Always there's always that guy. But no, I was.
I think I got detention or suspended how many times
through middle school and then in high school it was
like I was old enough to be like getting in
fights with people and just failing all my classes and
miserable and depressed, I mean, you know, it sounds like, oh,
(04:50):
it was school, but it's like when you're a kid,
you're in a room and they tell you you're gonna
be in this room for a long time. It's January
and you got months ahead of you, and next year
is gonna be the same thing. And when you grow up,
you're gonna sit in an office and it's gonna be
the same thing again. And it's just assignments and it's boring.
And so I'd be like, all right, well, at least
I'm going to read, and then like no, Paul gave
(05:11):
me the book. And then I'd be like, you're not
taking the book. Give us the book now, or else
you're onto the principal office. We're going to call this
a kid. It was My mom came to me and
she was like, look, if you want drop out, and
I was like what. She's like, yeah, you're not going
to be a couch kid. She's like, you're not gonna
go work at you know, the gas station. She's like,
you got to go to college. She's like, but you
can get your geed right now, which is two years
of high school. And I tell this to kids like
(05:32):
it's it's a get out of Jail free card. If
you're ready to go do something, if you want to
learn a trade, if you want to go exploring, whatever
does you want to do. You don't need to sit
for the second two years of high school. It's not
made for everybody. And if you're one of those people,
it's not made for you. Take this test. And I
went straight to community college and then I applied to
state school and I just you know, I did my
(05:53):
undergrad and that gave me the time to start focusing
on what I really wanted. And at that very very
young age, at like seventeen, I was already going, Okay,
well what about what am I doing here? You ended
up in Peru somehow, so take me on that trip.
It was actually, I think in school a teacher had
made a joke about like, oh, you know this wood
(06:14):
that they're cutting down the Amazon rainforest for and I
sort of said, wait a second, this is that's a
real place that theoretically I could go to. And so
I like got in my head and I started doing
searches on the internet, and like, you know, the first
thing you look up, like go to the rainforest, you
found like tours and stuff, and I was like, I
don't want to do that, you know, I want to go.
I want to go and do something. I want to
(06:34):
go be part of something, something authentic. And I found
this local indigenous guy who was working with mccause, you know,
the color for the big colorful parrots. And I sent
out an email and I asked it that like one
hundred and thirty other emails too. But I waited like
a month and a half, heard nothing, and then one
day I got an email back and it was like, hey,
(06:56):
you know, if you're if you're good in the outdoors
and you feel this and that, you can come. It was.
It was very surreal and I had to fight that one.
I had to fight with my parents with because they
were like, you are too young to be getting on
a plane by yourself, going to the middle of the
jungle down a road completely out of contact for days
and days and days and weeks and with anacondas and
bushmasters and jaguars and poachers and all this stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
(07:18):
So that one was tough. That was a tough one
to sell. And I basically had to play the you know,
if I'm turning eighteen, I can do it without your things.
So I'd rather do it with you, so I had to.
We got into it on that one. But yeah, getting
there the first time was that was an adventure. Describe
(07:41):
how big the Amazon is and I don't know if
you have any comparative terms. I can't really imagine the
scope in the size the Amazon basin itself is larger
than the continental US, and we Yeah, it's huge. And
when you're in this forest, when you fly over it,
I was lucky enough to be in like a small
(08:02):
cess and of flying over we were monitoring for shorterier
dogs and you we reach parts where you can't see
anything but forest. It just looks like you're flying over
a field a broccoli and there's nothing else. Yeah, as
far as the eye can see. And it's just it's
such a massive forest. And it's not just jungle. It's
a lot of people don't realize there's in the Amazon.
(08:22):
There's grasslands, and there's wetlands, there's the pentanale, there's there's
all this different other types of ecosystems there's been but
bamboo forests. It floods and it recedes is it's so
so much more complex than we think. That. My big
thing there that that really blew my mind. Was that
you show up and you see a bunch of green
and these giant trees, and you're like, okay, cool. But
(08:42):
then it takes you a few years of learning to
learn how much you don't know. Because once you learn all,
you know, let's say, out of out of fifteen hundred
tree species, I learned, you know, thirty trees, you know,
and and fifty birds and a few snakes and the Okay,
so I learned those things, But I say, well, wait,
the size of this jungle is so beyond our comparison
(09:05):
that it's other than comparing it to the to the
United States. I don't I can't even I can't even begin.
It's just massive. Do you remember the first time you
stepped in there? I imagine that's different from the New
York forests. So what what was it like? You ever
see the beginning of Jurassic Park? Would you see the
broad of sources? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, he like grabs her
(09:26):
face and she she stands up and like everyone gets
chills when you see that. And it was like the
first time I stepped off the boat and saw a giant,
you know, thousand year old capoc tree and trails of
leaf cutter ends and you hear two cans and there's
spider monkeys. It was literally just like, this is where
I am supposed to be. It felt like it felt
like it felt like waking up from the matrix for
(09:47):
the first time. I was like, oh, this is what
it's supposed to be. Like, this is great. The one
thing that my teacher didn't know was he was scared
of snakes, and I had. I had grown up like
rescuing snakes. Like one time on a trail in like
New York, in New Jersey, this some old guy was
trying to kill a copper head and I just, you know,
stepped in and like picked it up and moved it.
(10:09):
Which by that point I'd caught hundreds of non venomous
snakes and so I knew how to do it. No,
thank you, Paul. This is yeah with your guy, no
trying to stay away from them. I mean, I support
you on that. Everybody should stay away from them. But
the funny thing is a snake will never, in any
circumstances um attack a person. You know, anybody that's messing
(10:29):
with a snake. You know, you hear about people like
killing rattlesnakes and stuff. It's like, well you could do
that or you could just keep walking like you just
you just not you know what a radical copdown. It's
it's amazing and there's a lot of that in conservation um.
But yeah, going to going to the jungle for the
first time absolutely was a major life changing moment. That
(10:51):
moment of seeing the jungle for the first time, that's it.
That was like really the start of my actual life.
As you got there and you know, you see this,
(11:12):
you have this Jurassic Park moment. Were there? Did you
have another Jurassic Park moment when you know the juggle
kind of turned, don't you? Or you saw less less
glamorous parts of the jungle that weren't so weren't so great,
the grittier parts you know about visiting and living in
the Amazon. Well, the thing is I love everything about
(11:34):
the jungle. I mean the you know, people say, what
about the piranhas, what about this? What about that? It's like, dude,
piranhas are delicious, Fried piranhas are delicious. I mean anaconda's
black Cayman. I've had close en concounters with jaguars. The
only thing that that after I had started learning and
gone on adventures and and sort of got in my
(11:56):
jungle feet, which is something you literally had to do
because the native guys they're like, look, you're too loud
with boots on, take them off. So they want you
to walk barefoot with the scorpions and the snakes and
the spikes and the jung yads. No, thank you, this
is all Ronald repellent. You're describing a place that Ronald
Will Will we'll see from Afar on a tour. Wait,
but your team just told me they got your plane tickets.
(12:17):
You're coming with me next week. Yeah. My My goal
to preserve the Amazon is by staying out of it.
So that's you're not a lot of people that really
help us protect the Amazon. I've said the same thing.
They're like, look in in theory, I want to protect
the rainforest. I don't want to set foot there. I'm
glad that it exists, and hey, you know, I respect
(12:39):
I really respect that. At least for me, there's a
huge benefit of that. I enjoy it. You wanted to
go yourself. How do you get other people excited about
about the Amazon, about preserving it? How do you get
somebody that you know that maybe apathetic or indifferent about
the Amazon. How do you get them excited about your
work and what it is that you're doing. The rainforests
(13:01):
are huge global forces in the stabilization of our climate
that keep tons of carbon in the ground. That's where
all of our bio diversity is, huge amounts of land
for indigenous people. I mean, there's there's just the crown
jewel of planet Earth, and some people still don't care. Yeah,
you know, But the thing is, if that's where you
(13:21):
get to the level of like, yeah, but a bad environment,
if you can't breathe the air and drink the water,
it ain't good for business either. I I was on
a Fox News show at some point and the guy,
he was actually nice off camera. He goes, luck, he goes,
I'm about to come after you. And I went, Okay,
he goes, but this is a financial show. And and
then they started and he goes and I got a
tree hugger on here. Now, why would we want to
(13:42):
protect the Amazon? And I was like, you got millions
of starving people because there's no rainforest, and everybody up
here starts choking and the weather goes all out of whack.
I was like, that is not good for your third
quarter or whatever it is you're worried about. And that's
the truth. You know, we need a function ecosystem. You
(14:06):
started the eco tourism company, Tamandua Expeditions, telling a little
bit about how that came about. The local guy I
first met. His name is Juan Julio, and he just
told everybody to call him JJ because he thought that
was easier for the green goes. But it stucks now
we all call him JJ. Originally he was doing that.
He was saying, look, you know, I'll bring people onto
my land because I'm trying. He was trying to protect
(14:26):
his land, and he said, look, we'll take you out
for animals, and he worked with scientists and so like,
go out in the morning and take that on my cause,
and then at night I'd be free to run out
and look for snakes or do whatever else I wanted
to do, climb trees and stuff. Originally that was the
first thing I was told, was like, do that, you know,
bring people that'll help. And it also gave me a
reason to be working in the Amazon. Had a purpose.
I was helping with something. Our deal is that we
(14:49):
want to take people on authentic wildlife experiences. And so
that's whether that's tracking tigers in India or coming to
the Amazon and taking part in conservation, it's it's always
like the real deal. And then also like now that
we have a ranger team and that we have all
these projects running, I mean, things have grown so much
that now the so much for people to see when
(15:10):
they come. How do you think eco tourism drives conservation.
I've heard people criticize ecotourism for conservation, and I think
in some places there's you know, like anything. I mean
in some places, I mean, water is great, you know,
until it's a flood. But in the Amazon, in my region,
it is incredibly beneficial. If you're a guy with some forest,
(15:31):
or if you're an indigenous community with some forests, you
might not have a way of interacting with the global economy.
Even if you're an indigenous community that mostly survives off
of piranha and monkeys and a few crops. At some
point you're going to need gasoline for your boat motor
and it's like, well you got to buy that. And
then when the loggers come and try to cut down
your land, it's like, well, now I need a lawyer.
(15:52):
So you do have to interact with the global economy,
and so if you want to do that, you have
to earn a little cash. And it's like, well, ecotourism
is a great way to do that, Paul. Can you
talk me through some of the ways that people are
pillaging I guess we're, lack of a better word, the rainforest. Yes,
if somebody came to your backyard and started, you know,
or your block and started cutting down all the trees
(16:14):
and bulldozing the sidewalk, I mean you'd have the cops
out there in a second. We'd never allow that. Yeah,
But when it's the middle of the Amazon, a lot
of times no one's here to see it, and so
bit by bit, day by day, they've just been chipping
away at it. People are cutting timber from rainforests, People
are gold mining from rainforests. And so in my experience,
I've seen the logging industry going after giant ironwood trees.
(16:36):
These are five hundred, six hundred, sometimes maybe thousand year
old trees that are habitat for thousands of other species,
and that at first even I was like, wait, thousands,
but yes, it's a single tree can be covered in
you know, reptiles and birds and all this other stuff.
Frogs will be living on the mosses, lichens, vines, all
(16:57):
this stuff is just like a skyscraper of life. And
so when you cut that down, this is all this
habitat that's gone. You started a second organization called jungle Keepers. Yes,
tell me about what that does and how that fights
some of the extraction that you're talking about right now.
What we have is a team of eight local rangers,
(17:17):
a fleet of boats, We have a ranger station, and
we are currently protecting fifty five thousand acres along this river,
so a lot of a lot of the area right
around where we were starting to see that deforestation. We're
sort of trying to arrest the cutting, protecting old growth
forest specifically. You know, it's like we can all do something.
(17:39):
It doesn't have to be you know, running with a
sword on fire towards a bulldozer trying to save the
rainforest and one heroic you know, last hand. So I
imagine you guys aren't running at bulldozs with flaming swords.
What are some of the things that you guys do
in order to stop them, Like we're not talking about
like a citizen's arrest here, but if you guys are patrolling.
I imagine there's some sort of execution factor where you
(18:01):
guys are actually stopping folks from doing the things that
they're doing to extract from the rainforest. We gave them
a better job. One of our most esteemed colleagues is
and he drives boat for us, and he does maintenance
for us. He does all this stuff. Name is Victor.
He was a logger. Wow, I mean with logging. He
(18:22):
was like, yeah, man, it's dangerous. The trees fall over
and there's snakes and all the stuff, and you gotta
be out there cutting and it's weeks on end away
from your family. And I was like, what if you
came to us because you're like an expert on the
river now right, And he's like, yeah, I know, this
river like came back of my hand. I was like, okay,
so what if you drive travelers up and down and
help us out with what we do? And he was like, well,
(18:43):
what else? And I was like, well that's really it.
And he's like, so I get good food, a clean bed,
I get to hang out with people that I've never
met before. And he was like, and you're gonna pay
me more? And I was like yeah. I was like,
what is logging pain? And he's like fifty souls to day.
I was like, bro, let's make it a hundred. I mean,
but really no, it's so cheap. It's so cheap. They're
working for a wage that is keeping them poor and starving.
(19:05):
And it's like when we started tim and do it,
one of the things we said was, if we're going
to bring people that have the resources to travel, yeah,
make sure that the local team is paid in such
a way that they're not just getting paid like a
like a day wage, that they're professionals at what they do.
And well, like, are you guys just the jobs creating
organization or do you guys ever find yourself in situations
(19:26):
where you have to do maybe like documentation and prosecuting
And you know, what does patrolling look like for you?
Because I imagine you guys don't have you know, a
big backing like organization. You're not necessarily the FBI of
the rainforest. So how do you get you know, the
type of you know, the type of executive branch stopping
power to actually get in there and um and and
(19:48):
and and stop you know, stop the extractions. And you're right,
I'm excited about this one thing about how we've been
able to convert so many people. But you can't do
that for everybody. We can't just make you know, five
thousand jobs. You can't do that. So yeah, on a
normal day, our rangers are patrolling and monitoring wildlife, so
they're they're checking, you know, where the spider monkeys are,
(20:10):
do you see jaguar tracks. Enforcement is something we do
periodically where it's like, when we need enforcement, we collaborate
with the police. And then because it's keru, a lot
of times we have to actually pay the police to
come out and do their job out there. But in
order to get the police out there, they don't have
them too, they don't have the resources to do what
they're doing. Then when we say, hey, can you guys
(20:33):
take a three day trip out with us into the bush,
They're like yes, but it's got to be like, you know, gasoline,
you got to handle our bedding, food, There's a whole
bunch of things to basically we have to plan like
a wilderness expedition for them. And it's funny. I went
with friends the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens not that long ago,
and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens are currently fighting a developer
(20:55):
that wants to put up a building that will shield
the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens from all their sunlight. Yeah, to
reinforest where it's like, we gotta get everybody to know
about it. First, we got to start up, we gotta
have you know, fundraising and storytelling campaign, and we got
to get people upset about this and not knowing about this,
and then we have to hire lawyers. And we found
after COVID that there were like I think it was
(21:17):
seventeen football fields cut right in one of the core
areas that we're protecting, and it was like, who are
these people? If we had to do some drone flights
over then we had to take that information back to
the city, show the law enforcement try and get them
out there. But then the people had heard us coming
and they ran away, so there's no one to arrest.
And it's like it's absolutely brutal work, but that is
(21:40):
day to day, that is what we're doing. We are
just putting out little fires, trying to trying to protect
this one river because that is right now. That's what
we can do. Tell me what listeners can do if
they want to help with conservation or learn more about
(22:00):
your work. Thousands of people donate small amounts, even like
five dollars, two dollars, I mean, there's also people that
do a thousand dollars. But whatever it is, it helps
to go straight to paying our rangers, getting gasoline for
our boats, scientific equipment, camera traps. It's the most direct
way to protect the Amazon. And then of course there's
all the other things like you know, being a responsible consumer,
(22:23):
not eating fast food beef. I mean, beef is one
of the largest contributors to deforestation in the Amazon because
they go and they cut down huge areas for cattle
farming and it just destroying the Amazon. So there's there's
also just at this point like getting sharing stuff like
on social media, the fact that people share, the fact
that when the fires came out that people shared that video,
(22:45):
got it to the news, got it to people that
now are big time plunders and actually put some serious
fuel behind this work and make us able to do
this work. So it really is like it is a
solvable thing. It is, you know, in conservation. At the
end of the day, what we're trying to do is
not cut down a tree. You know, giraffes aren't going
to go extinct on their own. It's only if we
(23:06):
kill them. So like, this is a very solvable problem.
We just need humans to focus for a second. So
really keeping it as part of the dialogue, helping good
conservation organizations all over the world traveling the eco tourism
thing still works. Support you know, whether it's Costa Rica
or Africa or Peru. Come see the work we're doing.
Get out there. Thanks for being on the show. I
(23:29):
really appreciate you. This has been great and I really
appreciate you. Avenue. You've really brought the rain for us
to life for me. I appreciate it man. And just this,
you know, sharing the news and people being able to
hear this, that's important. That's how we do this, that's
how we get it done. So thank you for helping
us protect the forest. Really appreciate it. Good talking with
you man. Absolutely keep the snakes away from me. Paul
(23:53):
Rosley is a conservationist, author and award winning filmmaker. He's
the co founder of Tom and Dua Expeditions and Jungle Keepers.
You can find links to those organizations and the information
about the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in our show notes. Solvable
is produced by Jocelyn Frank, Research by David Jah, Booking
(24:14):
by Lisa Dunn, Editing help from Kishell Williams. Our managing
producer is Sashimathias, and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle.
From all of us on the Solvable team and the
Pushkin family, we hope you learned ideas and strategies that
you'll use to make your community and the world better places.
(24:34):
I'm Ronald Young, Junior. Thanks for listening.
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