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. 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 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, 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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,
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
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
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
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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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
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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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,
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 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, 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. 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
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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.
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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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
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.
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
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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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? 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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,
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 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.
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. 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.