Paul Rosolie

I just wanted to see a place that was completely wild.

And so I went to the Amazon and I always, I grew up with this environmental stress of like, when they tell you that elephants are going to go extinct in your lifetime, that we're losing the rainforest, the polar ice cops are melting, the pandas won't screw.

And it's like,

That's horrible.

So you're telling me we actually live at the end of days and all these amazing animals that, I mean, for someone that lives on wildlife, that loves animals, that finding a snake on a hike can make my week, you know, looking up at an eagle is just magical to me.

And so someone that's that connected to wildlife telling me that the most amazing things on our planet are going to be destroyed because they're not vanishing.

We're killing them.

And so I went to the rainforest.

I dropped out of high school after sophomore year.

I went to the rainforest because I was like, I have to see this for myself.

I'd seen the videos when I was a kid of the, you hear the chainsaws and in the Congo, you see the trees going over and them stacked, these giant trees.

And I was like, I have to see if this is real.

i got to the amazon rainforest and i had the luck of going to a place that you had to travel by days by boat past the last city past the last shop the last place you could buy a coca-cola and then past the last hut and you go completely into unconstructed net wild dream space where it's as natural as it was 40 000 years ago and i just fell in love

It's like the first scene in Jurassic Park where they realize there's dinosaurs and I went, oh my God, it's real.

Yeah.

I mean, as a kid, I mean, a child, like from the time I could walk, I wanted to go to streams.

And so I'd ask my parents to take me to streams.

And there's videos of me, you know, five years old with my sister, you know, holding her hand as she's like a two-year-old that could barely walk in a stream, but we're barefoot walking through these streams, looking at these big trees.

I was just magnetized to nature.

and that when people cut trees i feel it like it really breaks my heart especially old trees and as a kid to me the the greatest magic and i'd get this feeling when you get those you know they have those big rainforest books in the library i would get those out and it'd be like these explorers with giant snakes and people in the mist you know david attenborough with gorillas and