Paul Rosolie, Protecting the Amazon Rainforest

solve for now. And with that, let's start the show. This is Solvable. I'm Ronald doing Junior to just listen. You're flying over a field abroccoli and there is nothing else. That massive field is the Amazon rainforest, stretching from Brazil to Bolivia, Peru, Eador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, French, Guyana and Surinam, sometimes called the lungs of the Earth, or its ability to absorb massive amounts of CO two and produce oxygen. The Amazon now suffers from man made fires and deforestation.

If somebody came to your backyard and started you or your block and started cutting down all the trees and bulldozing the sidewalk, I mean you'd have the cops out there in a second. We'd never allowed that. The jungle is changing as people increasingly view the Amazon as a resource for things like wood and gold, and so bit by bit, day by day, they've just been shipping away at it. People are cutting timber from rainforest, people are

gold mining from rainforest. Paul Rosalie is a conservationist and author. In August twenty nineteen, he posted a video showing the results of the wildfires destroying the Amazon rainforest. At that time, it was viewed over one point four million times and received a lot of media attention. Just by people posting and resharing his video, Paul and his team got the word out about what was being lost in those fires.

Give me a reason to be working in the Amazon at a purpose I was helping with something, which is something I really wanted, was to not just be you know, being like, yeah, it's a lot of fun and to take pictures. It was like, no, I'm actually helping these

people to protect their land. Through his eco tourism company and his team of forest rangers, Rosalie is trying to get people to see why the rainforest exists, why it's important to our daily lives, and what can be done to preserve the thousands of animal and plant species that make the rainforest their home. A single tree can be covered in reptiles, and birds and frogs will be living on the mosses, lichens, vines, all this stuff. It's just

like a skyscraper of life. The Amazon's existence is also crucial to our own existence, helping to stabilize the climate. Rosalie remains optimistic that his efforts to save the rainforest will not be in vain. Saving the Amazon rainforest is a solvable problem. Do you remember the earliest time that you fell in love with wildlife or with nature? And you tell me about how that came to be for you.

So I was born in Brooklyn, and my parents wanted to get away from the city, so so they moved to like northern New Jersey, and so we had I had access to a lot of forests. People don't realize, like doing New York and New Jersey, there's actually a lot of forests there. And so my parents used to taking me on hikes. I loved like stormy summer days when the foliage is really thick. I wanted to pretend it was the jungle, and I used to love going out and looking for snakes and turtles. And then as

I got older, took me to the Bronx Zoo. It's like it's like legendary. You see these animals that you know from all over the world that are so incredible. It just stuck in my head that that's something that you can do, that a person can do. And then when I was a teenager, it was like going out into the woods with like a knife and one match and my dog and I'd have to like survive for the whole weekend. So yeah, one match, add your dog

doesn't seem like enough to survive for the weekend. So you dropped out of high school with your parents encouragement, Tell me tell me that story. Yeah it always people always scratch their head and I tell them that. But I was the worst student you have ever heard of. Well, no, second worst. There's always that kid that takes it to another level. Always there's always that guy. But no, I was.

I think I got detention or suspended how many times through middle school and then in high school it was like I was old enough to be like getting in fights with people and just failing all my classes and miserable and depressed, I mean, you know, it sounds like, oh, it was school, but it's like when you're a kid, you're in a room and they tell you you're gonna be in this room for a long time. It's January and you got months ahead of you, and next year

is gonna be the same thing. And when you grow up, you're gonna sit in an office and it's gonna be the same thing again. And it's just assignments and it's boring. And so I'd be like, all right, well, at least I'm going to read, and then like no, Paul gave me the book. And then I'd be like, you're not taking the book. Give us the book now, or else you're onto the principal office. We're going to call this a kid. It was My mom came to me and she was like, look, if you want drop out, and

I was like what. She's like, yeah, you're not going to be a couch kid. She's like, you're not gonna go work at you know, the gas station. She's like, you got to go to college. She's like, but you can get your geed right now, which is two years of high school. And I tell this to kids like it's it's a get out of Jail free card. If you're ready to go do something, if you want to learn a trade, if you want to go exploring, whatever does you want to do. You don't need to sit

for the second two years of high school. It's not made for everybody. And if you're one of those people, it's not made for you. Take this test. And I went straight to community college and then I applied to state school and I just you know, I did my undergrad and that gave me the time to start focusing on what I really wanted. And at that very very young age, at like seventeen, I was already going, Okay, well what about what am I doing here? You ended up in Peru somehow, so take me on that trip.

It was actually, I think in school a teacher had made a joke about like, oh, you know this wood that they're cutting down the Amazon rainforest for and I sort of said, wait a second, this is that's a real place that theoretically I could go to. And so I like got in my head and I started doing searches on the internet, and like, you know, the first thing you look up, like go to the rainforest, you found like tours and stuff, and I was like, I don't want to do that, you know, I want to go.

I want to go and do something. I want to go be part of something, something authentic. And I found this local indigenous guy who was working with mccause, you know, the color for the big colorful parrots. And I sent out an email and I asked it that like one hundred and thirty other emails too. But I waited like a month and a half, heard nothing, and then one day I got an email back and it was like, hey, you know, if you're if you're good in the outdoors

and you feel this and that, you can come. It was. It was very surreal and I had to fight that one. I had to fight with my parents with because they were like, you are too young to be getting on a plane by yourself, going to the middle of the jungle down a road completely out of contact for days and days and days and weeks and with anacondas and bushmasters and jaguars and poachers and all this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, So that one was tough. That was a tough one

to sell. And I basically had to play the you know, if I'm turning eighteen, I can do it without your things. So I'd rather do it with you, so I had to. We got into it on that one. But yeah, getting there the first time was that was an adventure. Describe how big the Amazon is and I don't know if you have any comparative terms. I can't really imagine the scope in the size the Amazon basin itself is larger

than the continental US, and we Yeah, it's huge. And when you're in this forest, when you fly over it, I was lucky enough to be in like a small cess and of flying over we were monitoring for shorterier dogs and you we reach parts where you can't see anything but forest. It just looks like you're flying over a field a broccoli and there's nothing else. Yeah, as far as the eye can see. And it's just it's

such a massive forest. And it's not just jungle. It's a lot of people don't realize there's in the Amazon. There's grasslands, and there's wetlands, there's the pentanale, there's there's all this different other types of ecosystems there's been but bamboo forests. It floods and it recedes is it's so so much more complex than we think. That. My big thing there that that really blew my mind. Was that you show up and you see a bunch of green

and these giant trees, and you're like, okay, cool. But then it takes you a few years of learning to learn how much you don't know. Because once you learn all, you know, let's say, out of out of fifteen hundred tree species, I learned, you know, thirty trees, you know, and and fifty birds and a few snakes and the Okay, so I learned those things, But I say, well, wait, the size of this jungle is so beyond our comparison that it's other than comparing it to the to the

United States. I don't I can't even I can't even begin. It's just massive. Do you remember the first time you stepped in there? I imagine that's different from the New York forests. So what what was it like? You ever see the beginning of Jurassic Park? Would you see the broad of sources? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, he like grabs her face and she she stands up and like everyone gets

chills when you see that. And it was like the first time I stepped off the boat and saw a giant, you know, thousand year old capoc tree and trails of leaf cutter ends and you hear two cans and there's spider monkeys. It was literally just like, this is where I am supposed to be. It felt like it felt like it felt like waking up from the matrix for the first time. I was like, oh, this is what it's supposed to be. Like, this is great. The one thing that my teacher didn't know was he was scared

of snakes, and I had. I had grown up like rescuing snakes. Like one time on a trail in like New York, in New Jersey, this some old guy was trying to kill a copper head and I just, you know, stepped in and like picked it up and moved it. Which by that point I'd caught hundreds of non venomous snakes and so I knew how to do it. No, thank you, Paul. This is yeah with your guy, no trying to stay away from them. I mean, I support

you on that. Everybody should stay away from them. But the funny thing is a snake will never, in any circumstances um attack a person. You know, anybody that's messing with a snake. You know, you hear about people like killing rattlesnakes and stuff. It's like, well you could do that or you could just keep walking like you just you just not you know what a radical copdown. It's it's amazing and there's a lot of that in conservation um. But yeah, going to going to the jungle for the

first time absolutely was a major life changing moment. That moment of seeing the jungle for the first time, that's it. That was like really the start of my actual life. As you got there and you know, you see this, you have this Jurassic Park moment. Were there? Did you have another Jurassic Park moment when you know the juggle kind of turned, don't you? Or you saw less less glamorous parts of the jungle that weren't so weren't so great, the grittier parts you know about visiting and living in

the Amazon. Well, the thing is I love everything about the jungle. I mean the you know, people say, what about the piranhas, what about this? What about that? It's like, dude, piranhas are delicious, Fried piranhas are delicious. I mean anaconda's

black Cayman. I've had close en concounters with jaguars. The only thing that that after I had started learning and gone on adventures and and sort of got in my jungle feet, which is something you literally had to do because the native guys they're like, look, you're too loud with boots on, take them off. So they want you to walk barefoot with the scorpions and the snakes and the spikes and the jung yads. No, thank you, this is all Ronald repellent. You're describing a place that Ronald

Will Will we'll see from Afar on a tour. Wait, but your team just told me they got your plane tickets. You're coming with me next week. Yeah. My My goal to preserve the Amazon is by staying out of it. So that's you're not a lot of people that really help us protect the Amazon. I've said the same thing. They're like, look in in theory, I want to protect the rainforest. I don't want to set foot there. I'm glad that it exists, and hey, you know, I respect

I really respect that. At least for me, there's a huge benefit of that. I enjoy it. You wanted to go yourself. How do you get other people excited about about the Amazon, about preserving it? How do you get somebody that you know that maybe apathetic or indifferent about the Amazon. How do you get them excited about your work and what it is that you're doing. The rainforests are huge global forces in the stabilization of our climate

that keep tons of carbon in the ground. That's where all of our bio diversity is, huge amounts of land for indigenous people. I mean, there's there's just the crown jewel of planet Earth, and some people still don't care. Yeah, you know, But the thing is, if that's where you get to the level of like, yeah, but a bad environment, if you can't breathe the air and drink the water, it ain't good for business either. I I was on a Fox News show at some point and the guy,

he was actually nice off camera. He goes, luck, he goes, I'm about to come after you. And I went, Okay, he goes, but this is a financial show. And and then they started and he goes and I got a tree hugger on here. Now, why would we want to protect the Amazon? And I was like, you got millions of starving people because there's no rainforest, and everybody up here starts choking and the weather goes all out of whack. I was like, that is not good for your third

quarter or whatever it is you're worried about. And that's the truth. You know, we need a function ecosystem. You started the eco tourism company, Tamandua Expeditions, telling a little bit about how that came about. The local guy I first met. His name is Juan Julio, and he just told everybody to call him JJ because he thought that was easier for the green goes. But it stucks now we all call him JJ. Originally he was doing that. He was saying, look, you know, I'll bring people onto

my land because I'm trying. He was trying to protect his land, and he said, look, we'll take you out for animals, and he worked with scientists and so like, go out in the morning and take that on my cause, and then at night I'd be free to run out and look for snakes or do whatever else I wanted to do, climb trees and stuff. Originally that was the first thing I was told, was like, do that, you know, bring people that'll help. And it also gave me a

reason to be working in the Amazon. Had a purpose. I was helping with something. Our deal is that we want to take people on authentic wildlife experiences. And so that's whether that's tracking tigers in India or coming to the Amazon and taking part in conservation, it's it's always like the real deal. And then also like now that we have a ranger team and that we have all these projects running, I mean, things have grown so much that now the so much for people to see when

they come. How do you think eco tourism drives conservation. I've heard people criticize ecotourism for conservation, and I think in some places there's you know, like anything. I mean in some places, I mean, water is great, you know, until it's a flood. But in the Amazon, in my region, it is incredibly beneficial. If you're a guy with some forest, or if you're an indigenous community with some forests, you might not have a way of interacting with the global economy.

Even if you're an indigenous community that mostly survives off of piranha and monkeys and a few crops. At some point you're going to need gasoline for your boat motor and it's like, well you got to buy that. And then when the loggers come and try to cut down your land, it's like, well, now I need a lawyer. So you do have to interact with the global economy, and so if you want to do that, you have to earn a little cash. And it's like, well, ecotourism

is a great way to do that, Paul. Can you talk me through some of the ways that people are pillaging I guess we're, lack of a better word, the rainforest. Yes, if somebody came to your backyard and started, you know, or your block and started cutting down all the trees and bulldozing the sidewalk, I mean you'd have the cops

out there in a second. We'd never allow that. Yeah, But when it's the middle of the Amazon, a lot of times no one's here to see it, and so bit by bit, day by day, they've just been chipping away at it. People are cutting timber from rainforests, People are gold mining from rainforests. And so in my experience, I've seen the logging industry going after giant ironwood trees.

These are five hundred, six hundred, sometimes maybe thousand year old trees that are habitat for thousands of other species, and that at first even I was like, wait, thousands, but yes, it's a single tree can be covered in you know, reptiles and birds and all this other stuff. Frogs will be living on the mosses, lichens, vines, all this stuff is just like a skyscraper of life. And so when you cut that down, this is all this

habitat that's gone. You started a second organization called jungle Keepers. Yes, tell me about what that does and how that fights some of the extraction that you're talking about right now. What we have is a team of eight local rangers, a fleet of boats, We have a ranger station, and we are currently protecting fifty five thousand acres along this river, so a lot of a lot of the area right

around where we were starting to see that deforestation. We're sort of trying to arrest the cutting, protecting old growth forest specifically. You know, it's like we can all do something. It doesn't have to be you know, running with a sword on fire towards a bulldozer trying to save the rainforest and one heroic you know, last hand. So I imagine you guys aren't running at bulldozs with flaming swords.

What are some of the things that you guys do in order to stop them, Like we're not talking about like a citizen's arrest here, but if you guys are patrolling. I imagine there's some sort of execution factor where you guys are actually stopping folks from doing the things that they're doing to extract from the rainforest. We gave them a better job. One of our most esteemed colleagues is and he drives boat for us, and he does maintenance for us. He does all this stuff. Name is Victor.

He was a logger. Wow, I mean with logging. He was like, yeah, man, it's dangerous. The trees fall over and there's snakes and all the stuff, and you gotta be out there cutting and it's weeks on end away from your family. And I was like, what if you came to us because you're like an expert on the river now right, And he's like, yeah, I know, this river like came back of my hand. I was like, okay, so what if you drive travelers up and down and help us out with what we do? And he was like, well,

what else? And I was like, well that's really it. And he's like, so I get good food, a clean bed, I get to hang out with people that I've never met before. And he was like, and you're gonna pay me more? And I was like yeah. I was like, what is logging pain? And he's like fifty souls to day. I was like, bro, let's make it a hundred. I mean, but really no, it's so cheap. It's so cheap. They're working for a wage that is keeping them poor and starving.

And it's like when we started tim and do it, one of the things we said was, if we're going to bring people that have the resources to travel, yeah, make sure that the local team is paid in such a way that they're not just getting paid like a like a day wage, that they're professionals at what they do.

And well, like, are you guys just the jobs creating organization or do you guys ever find yourself in situations where you have to do maybe like documentation and prosecuting And you know, what does patrolling look like for you? Because I imagine you guys don't have you know, a big backing like organization. You're not necessarily the FBI of the rainforest. So how do you get you know, the type of you know, the type of executive branch stopping power to actually get in there and um and and

and and stop you know, stop the extractions. And you're right, I'm excited about this one thing about how we've been able to convert so many people. But you can't do that for everybody. We can't just make you know, five thousand jobs. You can't do that. So yeah, on a normal day, our rangers are patrolling and monitoring wildlife, so they're they're checking, you know, where the spider monkeys are,

do you see jaguar tracks. Enforcement is something we do periodically where it's like, when we need enforcement, we collaborate with the police. And then because it's keru, a lot of times we have to actually pay the police to come out and do their job out there. But in order to get the police out there, they don't have them too, they don't have the resources to do what

they're doing. Then when we say, hey, can you guys take a three day trip out with us into the bush, They're like yes, but it's got to be like, you know, gasoline, you got to handle our bedding, food, There's a whole bunch of things to basically we have to plan like

a wilderness expedition for them. And it's funny. I went with friends the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens not that long ago, and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens are currently fighting a developer that wants to put up a building that will shield the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens from all their sunlight. Yeah, to reinforest where it's like, we gotta get everybody to know

about it. First, we got to start up, we gotta have you know, fundraising and storytelling campaign, and we got to get people upset about this and not knowing about this, and then we have to hire lawyers. And we found after COVID that there were like I think it was seventeen football fields cut right in one of the core areas that we're protecting, and it was like, who are

these people? If we had to do some drone flights over then we had to take that information back to the city, show the law enforcement try and get them out there. But then the people had heard us coming and they ran away, so there's no one to arrest. And it's like it's absolutely brutal work, but that is day to day, that is what we're doing. We are just putting out little fires, trying to trying to protect this one river because that is right now. That's what

we can do. Tell me what listeners can do if they want to help with conservation or learn more about your work. Thousands of people donate small amounts, even like five dollars, two dollars, I mean, there's also people that do a thousand dollars. But whatever it is, it helps to go straight to paying our rangers, getting gasoline for our boats, scientific equipment, camera traps. It's the most direct

way to protect the Amazon. And then of course there's all the other things like you know, being a responsible consumer, not eating fast food beef. I mean, beef is one of the largest contributors to deforestation in the Amazon because they go and they cut down huge areas for cattle

farming and it just destroying the Amazon. So there's there's also just at this point like getting sharing stuff like on social media, the fact that people share, the fact that when the fires came out that people shared that video, got it to the news, got it to people that now are big time plunders and actually put some serious fuel behind this work and make us able to do this work. So it really is like it is a

solvable thing. It is, you know, in conservation. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is not cut down a tree. You know, giraffes aren't going to go extinct on their own. It's only if we kill them. So like, this is a very solvable problem. We just need humans to focus for a second. So really keeping it as part of the dialogue, helping good conservation organizations all over the world traveling the eco tourism thing still works. Support you know, whether it's Costa Rica

or Africa or Peru. Come see the work we're doing. Get out there. Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate you. This has been great and I really appreciate you. Avenue. You've really brought the rain for us to life for me. I appreciate it man. And just this, you know, sharing the news and people being able to hear this, that's important. That's how we do this, that's how we get it done. So thank you for helping us protect the forest. Really appreciate it. Good talking with

you man. Absolutely keep the snakes away from me. Paul Rosley is a conservationist, author and award winning filmmaker. He's the co founder of Tom and Dua Expeditions and Jungle Keepers. You can find links to those organizations and the information about the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in our show notes. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, Research by David Jah, Booking

by Lisa Dunn, Editing help from Kishell Williams. Our managing producer is Sashimathias, and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. From all of us on the Solvable team and the Pushkin family, we hope you learned ideas and strategies that you'll use to make your community and the world better places. I'm Ronald Young, Junior. Thanks for listening.