Paul Rosolie: evaluation

Transcript context

…So all the money you’re trying to raise and all the land that you’re trying to save, it’s all towards that, protecting the deep jungle. So when you buy up the jungle, you just want to let it be, let the natural ecosystem come back to life in the cases when it was logged or just flourish— …if it hasn’t? Again, we’re talking about the last great jungle. I always called it the last endless forest because this place is so incredibly remote. The other question I always get is, “Why is this river so important?” For my whole career, 20 years in the Amazon, it’s been that it’s massively intact forest. Places like the ancient forest where the trees have never been cut, so it’s forest that’s been growing since the dawn of time. Thousands of species can be on a single Shihuahuaco tree. It’s Avatar on Earth. You can see the sweat come off your skin and rain down and then drink it out of the river; you’re part of the chemical physical reality there. It’s one of the last places that’s untouched. This changed everything because we realized that along with the butterflies and the monkeys and the jaguars and the trees and the ecosystem, there’s also a human culture that will, in the next few years, cease to exist, that will be exterminated if we don’t protect them. When you look back at what happened to indigenous cultures all over the world over the past few centuries, we collectively now have a chance to undo all of those injustices by at least doing one right—by saying these people want one thing: to just be left alone. Imagine if we just protected the river. Then it’s not that they’re this thing that’s vanishing from reality, but they get to continue living that way. And if they want to come out and contact us, great, and if they want to continue living like this for the next 10,000 years, they can. That’s what we’re working with now. It’s become so much more important than just trying to protect the environment. It’s like protecting Yellowstone or Yosemite or the sequoias that occur nowhere else on Earth. You protect the things that are unique and special, the crown jewels. In both a biological way and an anthropocentric way, this has now become a river with global historic significance because this story is going to play out in the next 18 months. You’re further and further trying to save more and more rainforest. And the mission is clear because there’s just this deep jungle— —that’s full of this incredible life. And now we know with uncontacted tribes, there’s a lot of interests that don’t care about the jungle, they’re pushing— —and want to cut it down, want to destroy it. And the mission is pretty clear. You just want this whole territory to be preserved.…

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