Paul Rosolie

And so you have people coming in from Brazil, from the south, you have Peru, you have Ecuador, you have all these countries.

And the Amazon is tremendous.

But at this point, if you look at the human deforestation across the Amazon, we've lost over 20% of the Amazon rainforest.

And the reason that's so devastating right now is that the Amazon produces its own moisture.

And so if the Amazon rainforest keeps producing, I mean, 20 trillion liters of water a day come off the canopy, form the cloud cover, and then the rain comes back down.

If we remove too much of the trees, we lose that moisture cycle, that sacred cycle that's been going for millions of years before we got here, that's made life on earth possible.

we are at risk of putting the Amazon rainforest past the tipping point where it dries out and then ceases to be the Amazon rainforest and turns into the burned, destroyed forest grassland where the Amazon used to be.

And aside from losing species and the home for indigenous people and all the undiscovered medicines that we would have had, then we're gonna throw the climate into sort of a post-apocalyptic reality.

And I'm not a doomsday person, I'm a hope person, but this is like, man, don't mess with it.

Yeah, and so that's why it's great actually to be on here today because it's like you hear these doom and gloom things.

And what I've spent the last 20 years doing is trying to find a way to have hope against all of that.

And so the fact that yesterday we signed 20,000 acres

We can, how many acres are in a football field?

I'm not sure, but it's probably like an acre and a half, but 20,000 of those.

So the new book I came out with, Jungle Keepers, really the story of all of this from being a kid to now directing this organization called Jungle Keepers.

And I still work with JJ and he's this indigenous guy who became my mentor and taught me everything about the jungle.

And we've been on this adventure together because he wanted to save his forest.

and so the what this involves is us doing things like this me going on podcasts and writing books and doing social media and telling the world that we have the opportunity to protect this place and then people all over the world joining into jungle keepers and becoming monthly donors what i always tell people is like for the price of a starbucks coffee once a month for five or six dollars a lot of those little raindrops make a flood and so we bring in enough money to employ loggers and gold miners as conservation rangers

And then larger donors come in and make it possible for us to buy these chunks of the forest and where JJ and I and the team have been putting together what's gonna be an ecological corridor.

And so we're gonna save this whole river basin.