Glenn Shepard and Filipe DeAndrade Tell Stories in the Wild

(Recorded July 2021) Glenn Shepard, Ph.D., is an ethnobotanist and medical anthropologist who’s worked with indigenous people in the Amazon for decades. Filipe DeAndrade is the host of Nat Geo Wild’s Untamed. These remarkable storytellers have a way of making you care about people, places, and animals that are often overlooked and misunderstood. The Brazilan-born, Cleveland-raised DeAndrade is a rising star in the world of wildlife filmmaking, and he has a contagious enthusiasm for wild animals and adventure. Glenn Shepard lives in northern Brazil and works as a researcher at the Emilio Goeldi Museum near the mouth of the Amazon river. He’s worked with indigenous people along the Amazon, from the Machiguenga in Peru to the Kayapo in northern Brazil. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. One of the ways people
learn to care about our planet is by seeing the
natural world up close. My guests today have dedicated their
lives to taking their audiences to remote areas and telling
the stories of the people and the animals who lived there.

(00:25):
The animal Kingdom couldn't ask for a better ambassador than
Philippe Deondrade. The award winning filmmaker is the host of
the series Untamed on nat Geo Wilde. His boundless enthusiasm
for all animals and the lengths he's willing to go
to to capture their everyday majesty have made Philippe Deondrode

(00:46):
a rising star in the world of wildlife filmmaking. But first,
I'm talking to Glenn Shephard, an ethnobotanist and medical anthropologist
who spent decades studying indigenous people in the Amazon. He
holds a doctorate in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley,

(01:06):
and his work has been featured in National Geographic and
The New Yorker. Glenn speaks eleven languages, and his ease
at learning them played a big role in deciding his career.
My dad's a doctor, and I was supposed to follow
the family tradition to become a doctor, obviously, and so
I was all trained, you know, premy I was going
to do premed at Princeton, and you know, straight a

(01:29):
student and all that. But almost by accident, I just
discovered that I was really good at languages. I mean
there's nothing in the families. I just sort of I
did French in high school. I spent like a summer
exchange program friends, and like in three weeks I was
speaking French like perfectly, I mean not perfectly, but very well.
And I just sort of had this I wish I
had that knack for like electric guitar or something, but
I just have this inborn talent. I don't know where

(01:51):
it came from. I'm just very good at learning, picking
up and speaking them more more spoken than written. And
so I get to I get to college, and I
just started learning all the languages I could. I took
I took Arabic, I took German. I tried out Chinese
for a bit, but I ended up sticking with Arabic
and German. And I love traveling, and so I was thinking,
how can I, you know, medicine languages, where do they meet?

(02:12):
And I discovered, sort of by accident, the field of ethnobotany,
which is the traditional uses of plants by different peoples
around the world, indigenous people's, ancient people's as well. And
so I remember in an undergraduate class, I took some
archaeology classes and one of the student papers I had
to write was about trepid nation. Trepid nation is this

(02:33):
ancient practice in Peru in other places where they would
do surgery on the skull, they would literally cut open
the skull. They find these skulls in the Peruvian desert,
asked us with holes open in them, and they can
tell by the growth of the bone that the person
survived the treatment, and they weren't. Most of the yeah,
it was. It doesn't seem to have been to treat

(02:55):
like a brain injury. They seem to be healthy people.
And they think that they opened up to open channels
of communication with the spirits. That's one of the theories.
And you know, they used coca leaf as an an aesthetic.
They use these obsidian knives, so they performed brain surgery
in ancient Peru, and that sort of fascinatility, brain surgery,
coca anesthetics, and so I sort of got interested in

(03:16):
this interface between archaeology, anthropology, medicine, languages and discovered this
field of ethnobotany and started reading up on it. Ethnobotany
isn't really taught as a discipline often in anthropology. You
sort of have to find your way, and I actually
wound up. I was taking Arabic, and my Arabic teaching
assistant he was doing his PhD on the poetry of

(03:40):
Jordanian Bedouins, like these these ancient medieval poems that were
recited by heart by these ancient medieval these ancient poems
that are survived today. He was doing his PhD on that,
and I said, well, that sounds really fascinating. Do they
use plants? Oh? Yeah, they use these different medicinal plants.
And so I went around the university and I got
money to spend the summer after my sophomore year summer,
and so I'm gonna go to Jordan's and live with

(04:01):
these better when learn their medicinal plants. And so I
showed up on the border of it's literally the border,
it's called H four Province. So I show up on
the border of Iraq. It's like it's this panhandle of Jordan.
It goes, it goes between Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabian.
There's this little panhandle out there where these Bedouin live.
And you don't think there'd be any medicinal plants in
the desert, but there are it rains and these things grow,

(04:23):
and they had all these interesting plants. They had this
one plant. It's called handle. There's an Arabic expression moral handel.
It means as bitter as this bitter goard. And the
someone who's really nasty, like a nasty person you called mound,
is a bitter person. And it's this little it's like
a watermelon, same family's watermelon, this size, and you cut
it in half. It's very bitter. And to treat diabetes,

(04:44):
you sit in a hot house like sweathouse. You cut
it in half and you put it on your heel
of your foot and you just sit there in the
sweat house until you taste the bitterness on your tongue.
That's how it's absorbed by your feet. And when you
can taste the bitters on tongue, you stop because it's toxic.
And they treat in the Arabic. It's incredible. So I
was fascinated by this. You know, this medicinal plant, this knowledge,

(05:07):
all these medicinal plants in the desert. And so this
friend of mine Yon spent the fall semester of his
senior year in Peru and wrote me these amazing letters.
Were going down the Andes mountains, the cloud force, the
howler monkeys are singing, and there's these Indians who come
every couple of weeks to bring bananas. They're called the
Macha Indians. I was like, m So I looked them up,
went to the library, found a little vocabulary book written

(05:27):
in four read everything that was written about them. And
when they get back, I go to Turborg, John Turborg,
and I say, hey, I just got back from Jordan.
I'm good at languages, I'm interested in the botany. If
I can find the money, will you take me to
Peru to do my seniors? And said sure. Once I
set foot in those pruning villages, it felt like I
was coming home. I mean, I really Jordan was amazing,
but it was very far and very strange. It was

(05:49):
a very strange, exotic experience. And and when I stepped
foot and Prue was like it was like being in Virginia.
We grew up on the chest Peak Bay, hunting, fishing, crabbing, boating.
I feel like I was reliving my child just and
so I just you know, I just felt at home
and I said, this is it, this is what I'm
gonna do. I felt like I was at home in
your lifetime, in the time that you went to Princeton,
and there was no place that necessarily was studying on

(06:10):
the deeper level ethnobotany. Whereas ethnobotany being studied now. Do
they have programs now or it still remains, It still
remains sort of like me, It's sort of doesn't really
fit in any existing container, so it always falls between
the crack. So the you know, the great ethnobotanist of
the Amazon, Richard Schulte, is that the wonderful film Embrace
of the Serpent, the Columbian film that won the Oscar

(06:31):
a couple of years back, was sort of loosely based
on his life. Richard Schults was an ethnobotanist at Harvard
and he was the greatest ethnobotanist of all time. Really,
certainly the twentieth century we spent I think twelve years
living in the Amazon searching the origins of the cure
are poison that they use for surgery muscle, you know,
heart surgery. Ayahuasca this mysterious plant. Back then, it was

(06:52):
a mysterious plant. Looking at the botanical identification of ahuasca.
He helped identify the magic mushroom in Mexico. He was
this peyote. He was involved in all these ethno botanical discoveries.
And yet when he retired, Harvard simply never replaced his
position as ethnobotanist, because it's not it's not real botany.
It's sort of this ethnobotany. It's this thing that's sort
of between it. The anthropologists don't consider it to be anthropology.

(07:15):
Botanists don't consider it to be botany, and it falls
prey to these these sort of rigid disciplinary boundaries and
reneg Yeah, it's renegade botany and renegade anthropology, and it
doesn't fit into the mold. And so so you have
people like me, or you know, people who are interested
in this, who create a program here, create a program there.
University of Georgia had an important ethnobotany program for all

(07:37):
My professor Berlin was there, but then he retired in Athens, Georgia.
He was at Berkeley when I was at Berkeley, and
then he moved to Georgia, and then and then when
he retired, it wasn't really no one really kept it going.
And so it's an unfortunate result of the disciplinary boundaries
that these very fascinating and important fields. I mean, all
of this work on malaria that's been coming out using
these Chinese medicines treat malaria, so ethnobotany still produces results.

(08:00):
My son, my youngest son, Glen Gabriel, when he was
a year and a half old, he was diagnosed with
this extremely rare it's not exactly a cancer. It's an
immune system disease that used to be considered a kind
of limp foam. It's called histocytosis, and it basically causes
the white blood cells to attack the body. And he
had these huge holes in his skull, He lost one
of his vertebra from this immune system just attacks the

(08:21):
bones and and he was treated this wonderful clinic and
we thought he had brain cancer and was gonna be
dead in six months, but it turned out to be
this other very rare disease like one in a million histocytosis.
And among the treatments that he was given is a
drug called in blasting, which is used treating cancer and
it comes from the rosy periwinkle originally from Madagascar, which

(08:42):
was a traditional medicine by African people's in the Caribbean
brought it and it sort of went wild in the Caribbean.
It's used an Afro Caribbean traditional medicine and it turns
out to be very effective against cancer and other kinds
of tumors. So he had his first shot and he
had to slump the size of an olive besides behind
his right ears. Here was it. Now, that's when we
first noticed it. And after one shot that lump just vanished.

(09:05):
And so there is this tremendous potential for ethnobotany to
contribute to human welfare and it could also contribute to
sustainable livelihoods for indigenous peoples. But it just the discipline
doesn't have a home because it's it's interdisciplinary. Everyone talks
about interdisciplinary at universities. When it comes down to like
who we're gonna hire, where's the funding going, It falls

(09:25):
between the cracks for someone on the ground and someone
doing the work you're doing. When people in this country
who are and I don't judge them because it's it's
it's just the state of things in America, and they're
completely ignorant about the condition of the rainforest in South
America and particularly in Brazil, with the preponderance of it
is in Brazil because of the size of Brazil. What's

(09:46):
you live in the United States and all you hear
all the time is like they're losing you know whatever,
whatever it is, five thousand acres an hour or whatever
the eth it is that's coming on down there. What's
going on? Is it really that threatened or is that
is that exaggerated? Well, you know, I've worked in the
Amazon for thirty five years and I've lived in Brazil,
in the Brazilian Amazon for twenty years, and the Amazon
has always been under threat. Indigenous people have always been

(10:08):
under threat. Gold rushes in different times, the Bell of
Manchy Damn that was that was being proposed in the
ninety nineties, which was blocked initially, deforestation, drug trafficking, These
things were always there. Beef cattle, beef cattle, cattle, ranching,
palm oil plantations, industrial agriculture, mine traction, mining, mining, oil drilling,

(10:29):
oil contamination, gas wells. Can we say a gas pipeline
and run in Ecuador, mobile in Peru. So these threats
have always been there, but these past two years in Brazil,
what we've seen under the Mostonato administration, I've seen nothing
like this in my twenty years, where in a sense,
you know, there's Brazil has a constitution, there's there's a

(10:52):
whole article about indigenous people's rights, much better rights than
in the American case, you know, with what they have,
like rights to their traditional lands, height land titling the
ninth because it was under a military dictatorship from nineteen
sixty four, and the nineteen constitution includes all these provisions
for indigenous people's rights. And so people like me and
you know, perhaps others, I guess we were sort of

(11:13):
lulled into complacency. And then suddenly Bosonato gets elected and
all of these you know, constitutionally enshrined rights and protections
just went down the drain. And you know, those forces
were there, the miners were there, the agrab business was there,
the cattle ranchers were there. But there was a pretense,
at least on behalf of the Brazilian government debate these laws,

(11:35):
we have these norms, you know, suddenly Bosonata comes in
and gives people just a blank check, like we don't
have to obey these laws. He's the son his father
was a wildcat miner at happy at Halata. Was this
mine that sebast Salgado, those wonderful photographs of this it
looks like hell, it's just this looks like something out
of Dante, this pit with people carrying pit. Yeah, with

(11:55):
people carrying all these this mud and landslides. And Bostanta's
father was there. So people talk about the Amazon. They're
not interested in the Indians or the fin trees. They
want the minerals. And so he's been very pro mining
and basically said, you guys got a blank check. And
so there was illegal mining before, but nothing like I
mean basically they're like, well, the president's behind us, we're
going in and so how much would you say it's

(12:18):
a taking and people are just going in the government's
just going in and saying get out and we're gonna
take it. Or how much are they going to these
people and exploiting their needs and offering them money? Oh yeah,
the latter for sure. I mean both things but I
mean mostly it's saying, you want some money that, get
the hell out of here. We're gonna we're gonna raise
cattle here. Yeah, And you know, he may even think

(12:38):
of himself. He certainly portrays himself as being a friend
of indigenous people's Like, they're living on all these minerals,
why can't they exploit them, you know, to a certain
category pres inside that makes sense. Well, they you know
this idea, they're very poor, they live on this land
with all this gold. Why can't they exploit it? Why not?
The Brazilian constitution doesn't prohibit mining on indigenous lands. It
says that there needs to be specific laws that regulate

(12:58):
that so that indigenous peoples can benefit from it. And
those laws haven't been passed yet, and and he's desperately
trying to pass them. But the problem is mining creates
this fever that can't be controlled. And you can see
it going on now with the Yo, mommy, with cool,
with the Cayapo. These miners just come in and the
level of devastation mining is just the worst possible kind

(13:19):
of devastation. There was a there's a village that I
worked in, you know, five years ago, and when you
fly over it, you just you fly for like forty
five minutes and you just see this this river that's
just been completely devastated. It's not even in its course anymore,
has been totally turned over, you know, hundreds of square
kilometers of devastation. And because gold mining is completely out

(13:39):
of control, illegal mining, and they just theysical gold, gold
diamonds as well, but mostly gold, but not resources for
these technological things like chips and so forth. There. I mean,
there's this amazing place in Brazil and the upper to
your Negro. It's this meteor that landed on Earth and
it's got the largest reserves of I think niobium, were
these rare metals for cell phones anywhere in South America.

(14:00):
It's in a protected area. It can't be exploited right now,
but you could imagine ways in which these medals could
be exploited sustainably and ways that would benefit local people.
But right now it's just the worst possile. It's like
the Yukon Valley, just the worst possible gold rush. And
but you know, there's all of these misconceptions about Amazonian
indigenous peoples and and the Amazon rainforest. There's this idea

(14:24):
that the Amazon is being destroyed by this clash between
civilization and nature. But it's not really a clash between
civilization nature. It's it's a clash between two different kinds
of civilization. The indigenous peoples of Amazon have a civilization,
and they have lived in the Amazon for thousand years
and before the conquest, before they were wiped out by diseases,
there were these large cities in the Amazon, on the

(14:48):
scale of the city states in ancient Egypt. There were
large cities with that large populations. There were sort of
these garden cities where I wouldn't say people lived in
harmony with nature, but they discovered ways of harnessing natural
processes for producing food without cutting it down and just
planting monocrop you know, planting barley or rice or or

(15:09):
or wheat or or cattle or something like that, like
the Americans. And this is even even scientists, even archaeologists
through the twentieth century assumed that indigenous peoples in the
ancient Amazon were much like the indigenous people that they
were seeing the nineteen fifties, these very small groups, nomadic people,
you know, sort of primitive people's and then you know,
in the two thousands, we started having these major archaeological

(15:30):
discovers like Michael Heckenberger at University of Florida discovered garden
cities in the Shingle with these huge earthworks with dikes
and roads connecting, like there was major indianerit that requires
thousands of people to create these causeways and roads and
fish ponds, and so there were these civilizations in the
Amazon that rather than everywhere else in the world, you

(15:51):
had about eleven thousand years ago, you had people discover
domestication of plants and animals everywhere in the world happened
about the same time. Eleven tho years ago. In Egypt
it was barley, and China was rice. In Anatolia it
was horses and and you know, wheat and so on.
Eleven thou years ago, the people in Egypt were hunting
their hunter gathers, hunting gazelles. They started domesticating barley. Three
four thousand years later you have pyramids and dynasties. It

(16:13):
was the same thing all over the world, and the
archaeologists and culture historians have just assumed this is a
universal process in human history. You you get crops, you
domesticate animals, and five thousands and in the Amazon. It
doesn't fit the mold because people in Amazon domesticated crops
eleven thousand years ago, but they didn't take crop domestication
to agricultural fields and monocultures the way every whelse and

(16:35):
what they planted crops. They continued to hunt and fish,
and they discovered ways of domesticating the forests without having
to cut it all down. And so brazil nuts. I
remember when I was a kid, you'd only get brazil
nuts at Christmas time and your Christmas stocking. You couldn't
get it any other time year. So these wonderful, amazing
brazil nuts, these delicious nuts, they come from this huge tree,

(16:57):
fifty feet tall tree from the Amazon lives five hundred years.
The assumption was who in the world would plant a
tree that takes eight hundred years to grow. It's a
natural tree. But research that I did with some geneticists
in the early two thousands, we discovered that the Brazilian
Amazon and Bolivia are filled with these groves that have
fifteen twenty fifty d Brasilia trees. And then you go

(17:18):
for hundreds of kilometers there's no brasionas and there's another
little grove of Brasilas, and so we were able to
show using genetics that there is very strong genetic evidence
and historical evidence that these are actually there aren't exactly plantations,
but they're often associate with archaeological site. It was a system.
It was a system for producing food using the forest
without having to cut it down. And Brazila is one example.

(17:41):
We have Assai palm, which is a big thing. Now
you have all these palm trees. There's a whole system
of what's called agro forestry. Agra forestry means you you
use the forest like a garden. You don't cut it down,
You introduce things, protect things, you take away weeds and montvines,
and you turn the forest into this productive system. And
so that induce amazons. People's perfected this way of harvesting

(18:03):
the force without having to cut it all down. And
so when Europeans are especially after you know, there was
a huge population in the Amazon before four two and
was wiped out by smallpox, measles, warfare, diseases, and so
there was this idea that all that the indigenous people's
Amazon of today, of the nineteen fifties, or the way
they always have been, No, these are the refugees from

(18:24):
this genocide. If you look at the ancient pottery from
the Amazon, you have in in the Tapajos River in Brazil,
there's a pottery tradition called Sothday. I would say it's
as sophisticated as my empoties. These incredibly elaborate basis, with
these figures of humans transforming into jaguars and snakes. It's
this beautiful ceramic pottery. And in the archaeologists up until
mid nineties they said, oh, that that came down from

(18:45):
the Andes. There's no way that these primitive people could
have had such sophisticated ceramic trigians. They must have learned
it from the Andes. And so there's this idea that
the Amazon is this primitive place. The indigenous people's lives
sort of on the verge of starvation, and they have
they have a very low level of culture, not like
the Incas and the Aztecs Mayas a very low level
of culture, and the Amazon is this big, wild, pristine place.

(19:08):
What we're discovering recently in the past twenty years is
that the Amazon has been farmed in garden by indigenous
peoples for thousands of years in ways that don't destroy it.
And this is what we need to learn from Ravan.
Cutting down all the trees for planting soybeans or bringing
cattle are destroying it with gold mines. We need to
learn from these people how to make it productive for
food crops and Assai palm and medicinal plants, and it

(19:32):
can be done ethnobotanist Glenn Shepherd. If you like conversations
with passionate conservationists, check out my interview with biologists Charles Mutton.
It was his love of birds that originally drew him
to the Amazon. If you're interested in birds and working

(19:53):
in the Amazon is the one of the most amazing
things you can do if you're a bird scientist, because
the bird diversity there is much higher than than anywhere else.
In the wor role. You'll have five species of birds
in just a few square miles. So there's one park
about the size of Massachusetts has has ten percent of
all the bird species in the world. So once you're
working there, you become spoiled. If you're an ornithologist or

(20:13):
bird scientists, you really want to continue working in such
a station of birds. Pretty much. Here more of my
conversation with Charles Mutton that Here's the Thing dot Org.
After the break, Glenn Shepherd talks about his work with
the Cayepo people of northern Brazil to update a thirty
year old exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.

(20:46):
I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
In his decades in the Amazon, Glenn Shepherd has worked
closely with indigenous people, particularly the much A Gengga of
Manu in southeastern Peru where the Amazon begins, and the
coy Epo near the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil.
Glenn Shepherd is a researcher at the Emilio Gueldy Museum

(21:09):
in Bellum, Brazil, one of the oldest and most important
research institutes in the Amazon. He's lived in northern Brazil
for two decades. But that wasn't always the plan. My
plan was sort of the more the traditional, you know,
do a PhD, get a university job in the States,
god teach, do teach, do summers. But I married a
Brazilian and moved to Brazil. Met her at Berkeley. She's

(21:33):
a biologist at Berkeley, and she was returning home to Brazil,
and so I got married and we had three kids,
and I just sort of stayed. It was it wasn't
the plan to stay, but you know, it opens doors
when you're there, like not not just in Brazil, but
I'm in the Brazilian Amazon, so people coming through and
you just you just have these opportunities. I mean, for example,
I worked with the Cayapo and I just got a

(21:55):
job in the Gueldy Museum. It's sort of like the
Smithsony of the Amazon Sis. It's this second oldest museum
in Brazil in Malaying on the Brazilian Amazon where you
are nor northern region, and it's sort of like a
natural history museum, you know, with them anthropology, archaeology, animals, baleontology.
And I just moved there. They didn't stay. To me
as a curator of the ethnographic collections, and these Cayapo

(22:17):
Indians come to town and they were they were visiting
the collections and they were looking at collections of objects
from their culture, war clubs and feather crowns from the
early nineteen hundreds, and they say, we really like this.
We want to come back and do more of this.
Can you find us some money to bring us back
to do this I said, sure, I'll try, And then
he said, and but make sure you buy cameras because

(22:38):
we want to learn how to make films so we
can film these objects in the museum and show them
back home. But we make these things still. We don't
want you to think that we we've forgotten all this
stuff here. We know how to make all this stuff.
So we want to make films in the village to
show you the rituals and how we make these things.
Oh you know, by the way, we're we're going to
do an initiation ritual in a month and a half.
You want to come and film it? And I was
like yeah, So they just came. Normally the anthropologist shows

(23:02):
up in the village with the strange idea. I want
to say, this is the Cayapo, the anthropos thea where
are they in relation to where you were in there
there in the north as well, they're in They're in
southern Parta, so I'm in I'm in the northern part
of Pata on the Amazon River. They're in the headwaters
of the Shingu River. That's the name that you hear
a lot, so they're impacted by it's sill northern Brazil.
But it's the southern part. And these are states or provinces,

(23:25):
what are they call another I mean, Amazon is really huge.
If it weren't for its vastness, it would have been
gone long ago. It's huge. I mean, if you the
Amazon basin itself is bigger than all of Europe. The
country of Brazil is bigger than the United States without Alaska.
People don't the way the maps are done, countries around
the equator looks smaller, and Brazil is bigger than the

(23:45):
United States without Alaska. And the Amazon is bigger than
all of Europe. Amazon is huge, and and it is
being cut down at a tremendous rate. But because there's
just so much of it, there is still some left.
If it were anywhere else, it would have been gone
long ago. Now, you had an exhibit planned last year
the American Museum of Natural History about the Kayapo. Yeah,

(24:06):
thirty years ago. Robert Carnaro, who was the curator of
South American Mythology from almost fifty years. He recently passed away.
He passed away just early last year. He put up
an exhibit at the American Museum in the late nineteen eighties.
It's a beautiful exhibit. You've probably seen it. It shows
indigenous peoples as they were at the moment of contact.
So it shows these wonderful mannequins, lifelike mannequins, indigenous peoples

(24:30):
of different Amazonian cultures, wearing their traditional clothes and performing
different traditional activities. He's sort of conceived of the exhibit
is like themes and variations. So there's shamanism, what are
the different kinds of shamanism? Houses, what are the different
kinds of houses that Amazon and people build? How's warfare
work in the Amazon agriculture, hunting, and so it's it's
an exhibit that shows people as they were at the time,

(24:53):
like in the nineteen fifties. And among those exhibits there
is an image it's probably the most powerful figure in exhibit.
It's a Kayapo warrior all covered in face paint, body paint,
with this feather crown and this huge war club and
this big lip plug like Rowney the leader with his
big lip plug. And it's just and it's in the
section on war fan. It's just a very impressive object.

(25:13):
And it just so happened that in the Kayapo leaders
were in New York with Terence Turner. Famous are anthropologists
from Chicago who passed away also recently, and he brought
these Kayapo activists. They were they were going to the
World Bank and visiting New York and he's thought by
the museum and visited and so they looked at this
kayapol warrior and Robert Cornero said, what do you think

(25:34):
is it? He was afraid that they would they wouldn't
like the sabbathe, you know, presentation as a savage with oh,
this is great, we love it. This is the way
where we're very warlike. We love this thing. But you're
missing a head dress, and he needs body paint and
you should put on a necklace. And so they took
their own body adornants and put them onto this mannequin,
a head dress, a necklace, I think, arm bands, and

(25:55):
they painted it. So the paint that's on that mannequin,
the Kaiapo actually put on it. And so then I
came up to the American Museum last year January, and
the idea was to do an exhibit, a new exhibit
about the Yapo that reflected on this visit of the
Kayapo thirty years ago to the museum and how they've

(26:16):
changed in the meantime. The idea was to create that
shows the Kaipo warrior holding this war club. What we did,
there's a big photograph of a Kayapo warrior holding rather
than a war club, he's holding a camera, video camera,
looking at us. Because the Kayapo, they see the camera
as a kind of weapon. In the old days of warfare,
the Cayapo, when they would raid each other, they had
like these the war raids, and they were interested in

(26:38):
capturing trophies. They would capture weapons, war clubs, songs, body ornaments.
They would capture guns from their enemies. So the idea
isn't so that the warfare isn't about conquering your your
enemies land and taking over the land. It's about conquering
the trappings of their civilization and incorporating them into your civilization.
And so for them, they think of the video camera

(26:59):
and they say this literally, the video camera is a weapon.
It's like bowl and arrows. We capture the weapon, this
camera from the white people. They call them coubing white people,
non indigenous people's and then we use that as a
weapon to defend our culture. And so the exhibit is
all about how they use cameras. They want to give
their own narrative about what's going on rather than the
official Brazilian areta. There's two things I want to finish

(27:21):
with one thing, I believe that the pandemic was the
dress rehearsal for what's going to happen in terms of
global warming. In this society, people have been asked to
make sacrifices and to understand certain limitations and to understand
their own personal responsibility and participating in a program is
going to help us to manage some of these problems.

(27:42):
And we've come out with a very poor score, and
that the global warming is going to come and going
to create a whole other menu of edicts we have
to live by, uh, in terms of sacrifices and and
and a big part of that that has to do with food.
You're not gonna be able to eat whatever you want
whenever you're You're gonna have to eat less speef because
the production is very toxifying and so forth. What is

(28:03):
your opinion about that? Are you seeing any signs of
global warming down where you are? Absolutely the rainfall patterns
are completely different. Now. Indigenous people talk about this, they say,
you know it used to it used to be you
could count on it raining in such and such a
time and not raining, so you could plant your crops
and now it will be a drought and then the
rains come and you know, villages have been washed away
and other places you know they plant. The climate has

(28:25):
gone completely crazy. And the Amazon is this huge pump.
It pumps water from northern Brazil to southern Brazil. It's
this gigantic like suction pump that sends water to the
farmers in southern Brazil who are funding Bolsonado and the destruction.
And it's going to come back, and it could turn
southern Brazilian too. If you look all around the globe

(28:46):
at the latitude of where southern Brasili is, it's the
Gobi Desert, it's the it's the Kalahari, It's that same
latitude these productive farmlands in Brazil. Everywhere else in the
world is a desert. And the only reason it's not
a desert and Brazil is because of the Amazon. You know,
one of the things you see in the work you do,
the unifying idea behind all this kind of work is
that we've lived in a country that has gone around

(29:08):
the world and told everybody what we can teach them,
and global warming is going to teach us what those
people can teach us, what can the indigenous people's and
even historically, what can they teach us. It's gonna help
us to at least address not solved, but at least
address the climate change problem that's going to come pouring
down on top of us in some horrible way. Well,

(29:29):
there's an interesting statistic. If you take all of the
fruits of these edible fruits that indigenous people's manage in
the Amazon rap Ice Brazilias i e. Dozens and dozens
of fruits, they produce something like forty times the protein
of all the cattle that's produced in the Amazon. So
it's there's no lack of food in the Amazon. It's

(29:51):
the model. We're not getting it wrong across the board,
but pretty close, pretty close. Ethnobotanist Glenn Shepherd. Philippe Deondrade
has a singular mission to help everyone care about wild animals,
and he'll go to any lengths to do it. De

(30:12):
Andrade envisioned his career from the time he got his
first camera. His big break came in two thousand fifteen,
when he won a national geographic film competition. He made
a short film called adapt It's an apt title for
both nature and Philippe's own story. De Andrade grew up
extremely poor, first in Brazil and then as an undocumented

(30:36):
immigrant in Cleveland. I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
And what that allowed me to have at such an
early age, which was an injection of wild life into
the system. And what I mean by that is my
mom would take me to the Amazon, she would take
me floating down rivers. We would go camping for months
at a time. I would go swimming in the ocean,

(30:57):
I would go tree climbing. This was my introduction to
life and it wasn't until about six when we moved
to Cleveland, and so I had that kind of taken
away from me, that zestin and surrounding of nature, and
it never truly left the system. If anything, it just
kind of made me hungry for more wildlife, for more adventure.

(31:21):
That's basically what set me on this path to doing
what I do today, which is trying to reintegrate myself
into nature as as often as I can in my
line of work as a National Geographic explorer. But at
an early age I had an interesting relationship with my
biological father he was a very abusive person. He was
on drugs, and he was uh not the nicest person

(31:44):
to my mom. So family life wasn't necessarily the best
as I was growing up, and that simultaneously with that
passion for nature also created an escape for me. It
allowed me to connect with nature, sure into wild animals
because a lot of people say animals don't have a voice,

(32:05):
and I believe it's rather that people aren't listening. You know,
communication is a is a major element across every single species,
not just the human. So animals are talking to us,
it's just that we're not necessarily listening. And as an
immigrant raised by a single mother in poverty and illegal immigrant,
at that I felt like I had a voice in

(32:25):
people weren't listening. So it was this affinity passion. Animals
make my heart sing and then you a company that
with this escapism that I found at an early age,
and because animals in a way saved me, it became
my life's mission to save them. So you're in Rio,

(32:46):
but your mother would take you to the countryside, you
go out to the country absolutely. So we actually got
displaced because of a flood, and that's what took us
to real I was born in the real hospital, but
then was raised on the countryside. But because of a flood,
we went back to Rio DIGIONEI on the favelas. Uh So, yeah,
it was always about getting back to the roots, getting
back to home. I mean, my mom had not pet monkeys,

(33:08):
but she had monkeys at the house. Growing up. She
had anacondas. You know, they saw jaguars on the red
So this was something that she grew up with and
kind of try to instill in us well as for
people who don't know about what a favela is. And
some of the cities of of Brazil and beyond the
favelas that I saw were people picking through garbage dumps

(33:30):
and um, you know, like some of the fiercest poverty
I've ever seen in my life. Is that was that
how you grew up. That's actually exactly how we grew up.
As you could imagine whenever we we think about like
immigrating in the sense of moving from one country to another,
but when you're raised in a developing nation, you can
immigrate even within your own country and find that it's

(33:52):
a complete culture shock. Right. So, growing up in the countryside,
we were poor, but we didn't know, we were poor.
We had every thing that we needed. You know, we
were poor financially, but we had food every day, we
had experiences, we had clean water, there was no violence,
and then all of a sudden we go to Rio
de Janeiro and we're like, we're poor. You know, it
was it was weird that somebody you knew didn't die

(34:15):
that week. Um, and that's what I think led my
father down this path of just violence and rage and
drugs and ultimately the reason why my mom wanted to
get us out of there. You know. So yeah, when
you picture like flavellas or slums or you know, the
kind of bottom of the barrel um in terms of

(34:38):
quality of life, that's what we were. That's what we
had in Reo Dejaneiro. So anything was better. Now when
you go from Brazil to Cleveland, Ohio, was there a
job waiting for your father or your mother there? So
it was interesting. We we came to the States, my mom,
my sister, and I because my dad had worked here.

(35:00):
But then when we came here, he was just kind
of out of control and he went back to Brazil
and he took all of our documents. So this is
something that a lot of people think with immigrants is like,
you know, they're always looking for a way out. That
couldn't be further from the truth. We were actually pretty
much stranded in the States because we had no way
of going back. We didn't have passports, any documentation, anything

(35:21):
like that. So I think my mom just looked up,
you know, cost of living and was like, Oh, this
place is cheap enough, it's developing enough. It looks like
there's a small Brazilian population. You know why we didn't
go to Boston and said, I don't know where there's
a healthier and bigger Brazilian population, but we chose Cleveland. Interesting,
so the boy from the favela who goes to Cleveland

(35:43):
ends up at the University of Florida. Where were you
in Gainesville or where I was in Gainesville, Florida. How
did you pay for it? Well? I worked my ass off.
I literally worked three jobs full time, and I did everything.
I washed dishes, I photographed Bob mitzvuzz I worked at
the TV and radio station. And I don't even want
to say it was like a difficulty because there was

(36:07):
no other option. I just watched my mom do whatever
she had to do to make it, no questions asked,
just work her ass off and get it done. And
so I went into university with that same mindset. I
realized that I was lucky to have a higher education.
I was going to make something of it. And so
college for me probably looked a lot different than most people,

(36:29):
because I never thought I was going to go to college.
You know, I was illegal for almost fifteen years, so
university was very, very very far off in the distance.
So when I actually had the opportunity, I was like,
I'm gonna pick my dream school. I'm gonna do whatever
I have to to make it happen. I'm gonna double major,
and I'm gonna work my ass off and absolutely make

(36:51):
something of myself. And so I worked throughout university, like
I said, double major, and I was as active as
a college student could possibly be, every single week and
making films every single weekend, you know, volunteering doing internships,
catching alligators, catching snakes, tagging sharks. I was involved in

(37:12):
biology and in film, and I also saw an opportunity
alec because there was no track for wildlife filmmakers or
for you know, budding national geographic photographers are explorers, so
I had to go and do that myself. If I
were going to make it happen, this is the thing
you had your site some from the beginning, you were
going to become a wildlife documentary filmmaker. For me, it's

(37:36):
kind of always been a plan A type of thing,
and when you come out of the background that you
know I talked about earlier, there's only an upside. So
I've always had it wedged in my mentality that if
I got the opportunity, or if I was going to
become legal in this country, there is no plan B.
Plan A for me has always been to work for

(37:57):
National Geographic to become an explorer, to make wildlife films,
to tell conservation stories, and to spend a wildlife to
spend cent of my time in nature, infused in a
setting surrounded by wild characters. So I would say the
first decision I made that set me up for for
my career was going to the University of Florida, paying

(38:19):
out of state tuition, you know, truly living on my own.
And the second decision was before I even graduated, I
decided to hike the Appleasian Trail. So I spent six
months living in the woods, going from Georgia to Maine,
and I mean, you know, when you make a decision
like that, you're all in. And I'll never forget this

(38:41):
instance that I had on the app Latian Trail. The
most critical conversation I've ever had with a human being
was an eighties something, your old man at a Dollar
General in Franklin, North Carolina. And when you look at
the map on the app Lastian Trail, you know, if
it's like this, like if it's a foot. I was
not even an inch, like I barely started with this thing.

(39:05):
And there was this eighties something year old guy at
the dollar General and he looks at me up and
down because I smell like bigfootstoe jam and regret, you know,
just had gotten off the woods and just buying a
pack of Rama noodles. And he's like, are you homeless
or what's going on here? And I was like, I'm
hiking the apples and Trail and he's like, wow, you're
you're actually doing it. And I was like, yeah, it's

(39:25):
something that I convinced myself I was gonna do. And
you know, I I started in Georgia about a month ago.
And he's like, I've always wanted to do something like that.
I've always wanted to take a big adventure in my life.
But what about the odds of failing, what about getting
hungry or hypothermia, or you know, just simply not reaching
your end mark. Aren't you worried about failing? And I

(39:49):
told him, I said, out of all the people that
wish they had taken one step on the Applachian Trail
and hadn't, and about two thousand people a year hyped
this thing, the single fact that I had started already
makes me a success. When I finished this, I would
have been a success six months ago, not because of

(40:11):
the destination, but because of the mentality that pushed me
onto the mountain in the first place. And I could
see this guy breaking down in front of me, this
eighties something year old, you know, gentleman, speaking to me
about this, and he just told me, never ever ever
live with regret, keep that mentality and don't allow failing

(40:31):
something to keep you from doing it, because that's what
kept me from going after my dreams. And it was
at a Dollar General and Fink Glenn, North Carolina, where
I was like, Okay, I'm not just literally on the
right path with this hiking thing. I'm metaphorically on the
right path with this mentality of just go after it start. Now.
Some people have suggested that you're the next Steve Irwin

(40:56):
in some case, but we all know how he ended up.
Describe a couple occasions where you bit off more than
you could chew. Where you thought you were in trouble,
you thought you were in danger. Well, my first night
in New York City after having never been there before.
You're on the subway. Humans scared the ship out of me. Significt.

(41:18):
I will take a jaguar, I will take a shark.
I will take a snake any day over a human being.
I got bit by an individual my first train ride
in New York City, and I had just got done
on the App York. Yeah, I had seventeen cents to
my name, and I was so exhausted that I put

(41:39):
my giant backpack next to me fell asleep on the train,
and I guess this gentleman next to me was like
shaking me to get off of him, and I wasn't
quite responding, and so I just literally had something bit
me and woke up to this guy on a train
yelling at me, like, get the f off me. Man, like,
where do you think you're at? And I was just
like wow. So the scaredest I've ever been when it

(42:00):
comes to a wild animal is getting bit by somebody
I didn't know on the New York City. So other
than you're the subway in New York, where in the
wild encountering an animal, have you ever been really in danger?
I've never been in danger from an animal. The one
instance where I will say I truly had my heart

(42:21):
jump out of my chest is my first documentary for
National Geographic was Jaguar Beach, where we were documenting jaguars
eating sea turtles in Costa Rica. And I waited twenty
one days inside of a camera hide. Twenty one days
inside of a hide in the dry forest feels like
you're inside of a dragon's womb. I mean, there's no

(42:42):
other way around it. It's so many mosquitoes that you
think you're gonna get lifted off the ground. You've got
one bucket for your water, you've got another bucket to
go to the bathroom in and you can't confuse the two.
And it's it's miserable, to say the least. And I
had this jaguar out of twenty one days I had
a ten minute experience with the jaguar, and she was pregnant,

(43:04):
and she got a bit curious. We were filming with
infrared lights, which means that she couldn't they weren't white lights,
so she couldn't see the light emitting from our lights
because they were red, and their eyes don't pick up
on that sensor. And so she just kept coming closer, closer, closer,
and closer. And I was in the middle of the
dry forest by myself. You know, I didn't know how

(43:27):
far away I was from the next human being, with
a wild, hungry jaguar literally breathing down my neck on
the other side of this camera hide, which was made
out of you know, nylon tent material. And in that moment,
I was like, what the hell did I get myself into?
But I kept my composure. I just stayed there. I

(43:52):
didn't make a single noise, and I knew that she
could feel me because the whiskers of a cat work
similarly to the set three organs of a shark, where
they can just pick up on environmental changes, you know,
things like change in wind direction, smell density. Jaguars just
have a knack of picking up like something's different without

(44:14):
even seeing it, and so she knew that I was
there even though she couldn't see me. And in that moment,
I literally had the most powerful presence I've ever been
presented with right in front of me. And the crazy
thing about that jaguar is two months after we left,
she had those cubs and the scientists let me name them,

(44:36):
and so I named one Jane, after my idol, Jane Goodall,
and I said, you guys get to name the next one,
and they said, we're gonna name it Philippe. So now
there's a Jane Goodall and there's a Philip jaguar cub
running around the beaches of Costa Rica causing terror. And
even though nothing happened, and I can't say that something

(44:58):
would have happened if I behave differently, just being presented
in that kind of situation was enough to make you
realize how small you are in nature. When you go
on these trips and you're going to be shooting, how
many people do you bring with you? So in in
this line of work, less is more. Typically, anytime I'm scouting, researching,

(45:20):
like you know, trying to figure something out, it's me
and a biologist or me and a ranger, or me
and a poacher or somebody that understands the animal in
the area. That's typically it. So two people I like
to keep it to when I'm working and we're filming,
a team of three or four is absolutely perfect. Are
you ever armed? Never armed? Is anybody armed? Absolutely not?

(45:43):
And I will say that's not to say that in
certain situations you shouldn't. But for anybody listening to this,
you know, and and this is a critical element of
what I do. If you're kind of looking to get
into this, you know, preparation is absolutely key. Preparation is
absolutely name of the game. And so the only instance,
which is kind of funny, where I've ever been armed

(46:06):
was my first assignment with National Geographic was in Botswana,
which is Jurassic Park, the oka Ana Delta. It's just
everything you could ever hope for. Everybody should visit there
and they would lock onto why we need to save
this planet. But we were documenting lions eating elephants, and
so we spent twenty four hours a day for the

(46:28):
first month and a half that I was there, side
by side with the elephants. But this is what I
mean when it comes to preparation. You hear of all
these accidents lions ripping tourists out of vehicles, or you know,
person sticking out their hand and getting their hand bitten
off by a line when they're trying to take a photo.
That's because either a they're not understanding the animal, or

(46:49):
be they're not listening to what the guide is telling them.
When we film lions in Africa, we keep all of
our body parts inside the vehicle. We don't have windshields,
we don't have doors, we don't have windows. It's three
sixty degree view and the car is entirely open. I've
had leopards, lions, hyenas stick their heads inside of a vehicle.

(47:10):
I've woken up to a snouted cobra on the steering wheel,
which is infamously the snake that killed Cleopatra. You know,
I was truly excited about that, my first snouted cobra,
something I've always wanted to see because I had an
obsession with Cleopatra when I was younger. So anyways, what
I mean by that is the animals sees the vehicle
as a single unit, as long as you don't break

(47:31):
the unit by sticking your arm out, sticking your head
out getting out of the vehicle. They don't distinguish you
from that unit. So it's just about knowing the situation
that you're getting yourself into and abiding by the rules
because in nature, animals make the rules. So when you
break those rules, that's when you have accidents. It's no
different than when it's you know, diving with the shark.

(47:53):
Sharks will speak to you when she doesn't want you
in the area anymore. She'll lower her pectoral fins and
show arch her back and just kind of change the
body language that she's giving you. And when that happens,
trust me, you want to listen to her. So it's
about reading the situation, understanding what you're getting yourself into,

(48:14):
and being able to speak animal. And I guarantee you
if you can do that, accidents are very, very very
very minimal in my line of work. The host of
nat Geo Wilde's Untamed series, Philippe Deondrode, if you're enjoying
this conversation, don't keep it to yourself, Tell a friend

(48:35):
and follow here's the thing on the I Heart radio app,
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Philippe Deondrode talks about his introduction to wildlife killing contests.

(49:01):
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. Earlier
this year, Philippe de Andrade released a film in collaboration
with Project Coyote to bring awareness to wildlife killing contests.
It's basically a hunting tournament where the goal is to
kill as many animals as possible, and they target important
and critical predators like foxes, wolves, bobcats, pumas in coyotes.

(49:25):
And to give you an idea of what this looks
like is it's purely animal genocide. I went to one
tournament in Texas in two thousand and twenty called the
West Texas Big Bobcat Tournament. In one tournament in one state,
in one weekend, seven hundred and eighteen teams signed up
and one team killed a hundred in sixteen animals. And

(49:49):
it's happening in over forty states. Where did you first
encounter this? Okay, so I'm about to tell this for
the first time publicly. I found out about these killing
contests because I was doing a documentary with my great
friend Ben Masters about Trump's physical law as it relates

(50:11):
to wildlife. Because it was something that nobody was talking about.
So we said, what if we do the entire Rio
grand along the border between Texas and Mexico by horse
back riding, mountain biking, and canoeing as to do in
ecological survey of how a physical barrier would obstruct nature.

(50:35):
And one day we ended up on this guy's property
that he was managing on the Texas side and we
got held up. And so the next day at breakfast,
we were a day late, and he goes, hey, you're
the cat guy, right, And that week I was National
and Geographics two thousand eighteen Big Cat Ambassador, so I

(50:56):
was doing all these commercials and social media campaign to
cause uproar, you know, a donation based incentive to keep
cats around on our planet. So this guy recognized me
from that and was like, I got you guys, beers.
I got you guys breakfast, Come and sit down, enjoy
a warm hot meal. So we're sitting there eating a
breakfast burrito and he goes, hey, cat guy, how do

(51:17):
you like your breakfast? And I was like, man, it's
the first warm thing we've had in a week, Like,
thank you so much. He goes into his truck and
he comes back with a dead bobcat, just the head
and the skin just hanging there, lifeless, and he walks
over to me and he says, if you're gonna stand
me up for breakfast, then I'm gonna feed you cat,
and he just throws the bobcat at me. And I

(51:41):
just tried to break this down psychologically, and I was mad.
I was hurt, I was sad. I was all these
crop pots of human emotion, but more than anything, I
was confused. And I was like, you just shot a
bobcat and fed it to us as a prank, Like
is that your version of funny? And he goes, oh, well,
it's fine. I call him in every weekend. And I

(52:02):
was like, what do you mean call him in? And
he's like, I do these predator killing contests and I
was like, what are those? And he starts to show
me photos and he is a competitor in these wildlife
killing contests. So the way I got exposed to this
niche community that is growing was by being fed one
of my favorite animals the same week that I was

(52:24):
running a campaign with National Geographic to protect wild cats.
So that was the universe giving me a call, and
I was just lucky enough to answer the call and
to say, Okay, I have to learn more about this,
I have to investigate this, and I have to see
what's going on here. And when I did, and I
started to pull back that band aid, it was the

(52:47):
ugliest cut that I had seen in American culture when
it comes to our relationship with wildlife, because it's not
people killing to survive, it's not people killing to feed
their family. It's people killing for sport. It's people killing
because it shows how far we've lost ourselves as a culture,
as a species, as as a race when it comes

(53:10):
to our relationship with nature, and that we think that,
you know, for a belt buckle or for a couple
of hundred bucks, that validates calling in a wild animal,
shooting it, showing up to a way in and then
throwing in a pit as if it were garbage, or
throwing it in a pit with other animals and setting
that on fire. Because that is literally what's happening at

(53:32):
these tournaments. It's not for wildlife management because indiscriminate killing
doesn't work. It's not helping farmers. It's just simply to kill.
It's sport killing. And that to me is the indifference
of good men. It's killing to kill What was what
was something you said that was glorious? So I'll give

(53:54):
you as a quick story right now of the positive note.
And when I was in the Osa Peninsula, which is
two point five percent of the Earth's biodiversity. It's the
most ecologically intense hotspot in the world according to National
Geographic and Osa Peninsula is on the border of Costa
Rica in Panama. I went down there. We took out
thirty school kids on a boat and took them to

(54:16):
Kanye Island, which is the only place, one of the
only one of few places in the world where the
northern and Southern humpback whales aggregate to give birth. And
we showed them whales and dolphins for the first time,
and they absolutely like their minds exploded. They saw dolphins
bow riding in front of and behind the boat, jumping

(54:37):
around the boat. They saw whales breaching, they saw whale babies.
And then we made them pick pieces of plastic out
of the ocean because we said here's these animals. We
could see them falling in love with it immediately. And
then we wanted to educate them about the destruction that
human beings are having on their habitat the next time
I went down to the Osa, I was at a

(54:57):
wedding and a mom came up to me super upset
and was like, because of you, I can't buy Natella
because it has palm oil in it, and my daughter
tells me that it's cutting down the rainforest of the jaguar.
And we can't buy plastic because it's my daughter told
me that it ends up inside of the whale. And
just this lightbulb went off and I was like, wow, Like,

(55:20):
this is how you influence parents. This is how you
influence you know, the generation of voters and of people
with money as you reach their kids. And so I
wrote an environmental education curriculum through National Geographic We got
it funded working with the Ministry of of Education, Environment
and Tourism down in Costa Rica, and we're implementing environmental

(55:42):
education into the entire public school system of Costa Rica,
making it the first country in the world where kids
are going to be learning about conservation. And why I
deemed this a major upside is because kids have this
unspoiled interpretation of truth and so when you give them
the truth and they can see it making sense in

(56:03):
front of them. They make responsible decisions and they can
also influence their parents to make responsible decisions. So when
everybody says kids are the future, I don't believe that
kids are the absolute right now, someone that wants to
follow in your footsteps, what is your recommendation to them
as should they start? Well, it's it's funny because Darwin

(56:25):
said it wasn't the smartest, it wasn't the strongest, It
wasn't the fastest species. It was the species most adaptable.
Which is why I name my my film adapt Um
to somebody that wants to get involved, whatever age, and
it doesn't have to be somebody young, because I believe
it or not. I get more of this question from
people looking for a second or third career change or

(56:47):
a parent than anything, you know, because they see the
signs all around them, and they love their kids and
they don't want their kids to grow up in a
world that's burning down around them, so they I get
questions from parents all the time, what can I do?
How can I get involved? And what I always am
a big preacher of is honesty. Be honest with yourself.

(57:07):
What type of person are you? What makes your heart sing?
What is the least friction that you could introduce into
your life where you will translate the message that you
have in your heart about wild life, about conservation, about
the planet streamlined. If you're somebody that's a photographer, use
your camera as an excuse, as a vessel to share

(57:30):
your stories. So find out who you are, find what
makes your heart sing, and get into it in a
way that invigorates your passion and add your voice to conservation. Listen,
my thanks to be safe and we'll see you down
the road. Okay, stay wild, alec my thanks to Glenn

(57:51):
Shephard and Philippe de Andrade. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
carried Donna Hu and Zach McNeice. Our engineers Frank impureal
hi'm at like Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to
you by iHeart Radio.