Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Picture yourself as a young spider monkey in the Amazon canopy, still learning how to use your impossibly long arms and that incredible prehensile tail to swing through the treetops that have always been your home.
Then one morning, the tree you slept in the night before starts to fall. And on the breeze, you catch something that burns your lungs and makes your eyes water.
Your troop is moving frantically around you, and you rush to find your mother because something is deeply, unmistakably wrong.
The forest that has always stretched endlessly in every direction is disappearing, and all you can do is run.
Vast spider monkey story is playing out across the Amazon right now in forests that are being cut apart faster than most of us realize.
And when a forest gets fragmented, divided by roads, cleared land, and the slow creep of farms and settlements pushing in from every direction, it becomes broken. Where wildlife can't move between the patches that remain, and where the land slowly loses its ability to recover.
But what I found when I started investigating this story is that there are people actively rebuilding what's been severed. And at a scale that I could barely believe.
This is episode three of Rewilding Amazonia by Rewildology.
I'm Brooke Mitchell.
Let's go where the forest ends.
When was the last time you thought about roads? They're so unequivocally part of our lives that we barely notice them.
Roads connect, cities move goods, give us the freedom to travel and provide remote communities with access to healthcare and opportunity.
Nobody builds a road to destroy a forest. And yet in the Amazon, that's exactly what's happening.
So I had to ask, what is the real cost of opening up the Amazon? And is there a way to build without paying that price?
To answer that question, I called Juliana Martens, a road ecologist and PhD candidate at the Imperial College of London, who has spent the past several years studying how roads affect wildlife in the Amazon.
But before we move forward, you might be asking yourself, what the heck is road ecology?
Trust me, I had the same reaction when I first heard this term. Juliana does a wonderful job explaining the relatively new field and what it studies.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: World ecologist is quite a new field.
So there are publications back in the in the 60s, but it really grew after the 80s. It was when also the technological advancements came. So we had faster cars and we needed infrastructure for these faster cars. The road network grew immensely and it's still growing a lot. It is estimated that in 2050, 25 million kilometers of new roads will be built. And this is 60% more on what we had in 2010, and 90% of them will be in the developing countries or in the Global South. And most of these countries are tropical countries, which holds most of the tropical biodiversities. The most obvious impact is road kill. But there are many other impacts, indirect impacts. So the road itself causes an impact much more than just the surface of the road itself. There is habitat loss, edge effect, barrier effects. For example, 95% of all deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, it occurs in 5km from roads.
So roads are the initial step for many environmental crimes. For hunting, the illegal mining. There are many benefits to roads, of course, increased economic opportunity and social mobility. But if they are bad planned, they can create a huge environmental impact.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: The most important aspect of Juliana's work isn't the science, it's who she does it with.
Juliana is on the Projecto Reconnected team who works along the Waimiri Achari, an indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon region, and is helping them build the scientific case for something. They've known for decades that the highway cutting through their territory has been damaging the forest and every being who depends on it. For over 50 years.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: In the 70s and 80s, Brazil had a military government. So we had a dictatorship. And during this detectorship, one of the main policies was called Integrate to not Surrender. It was a second colonization of the Amazon, based on the premise that neighboring countries were trying to steal the Amazon from us. They started to build a lot of infrastructure projects, especially highways and roads. And they completely ignored that already millions of people already lived in the Amazon. One of the highways that they built was crossing the Waimedia threading indigenous territory. So it's the highway BR174 that connects Manaus to Boa Vista. Manaus is a and Buevista are two very important capitals in the Amazon. And this is the only access through land to Manaus, to the northern part of the country.
And also the only access to other countries such as Venezuela and Guyana. It's a very important highway economically. And the Waimidia Truari people, they are warriors. So protecting their territory and being a warrior is really part of their culture. So they really fought back against the government. And at the time, the military, they used machine guns, bombs, even Agent Orange on the Waimediatoedi people in the villages.
And the Waimediatoedi people only had bows and arrows to fight against the. Against the government. 90% of the population was killed. So it was one of the worst genocides of any indigenous communities during this time. And they were killed until they were only 300 and it was recent. It was in 1977, since the end of the military dictatorship. The Waimedia Traery community, they started to do a lot of mitigation measures to mitigate the impact of the highway in their territory. They started counting roadkill. Since 1997, they count roadkill every day.
And this is the longest running citizen science project in road ecology in the world. They counted almost 20,000 road kills during all this time.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: For decades, the Warmilochari have been closing the BR174 every night at 6pm by putting chains across the highway, laying tire spikes on the road and standing guard until 6am it works and they know it.
But knowing something and proving it to a government are two very different things.
That's where Juliana came in. I asked her what the community told her when she arrived.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: I asked them, why do you close the road? And then they answered me, don't you lock your house when you go to sleep? The forest is our house, so we also lock our house when we go to sleep.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Juliana and her supervisor, Dr. Fernanda Abra, along with the Projecta Reconnected team, have been monitoring wildlife along the 125 kilometer stretch of BR 174 that runs through the Waimiriyachari territory. Comparing what's happening inside the indigenous land, where the highway closes at night, to what's happening outside it, what they're finding is striking.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: From very preliminary data, we can see that inside the indigenous land the diversity is much higher. And we also find less roadkill.
The white lipped peccary and the colored peccary, they avoid the road. The relative abundance is much higher at 1km from the road, rather than closer to the road. And pumas further away from the world, they are mainly diurnal. Closer to the road, they are mainly nocturnal. Other species that we didn't see, the difference in relative abundance, does that mean that road doesn't affect them? That's actually the opposite. If they don't avoid the highway because they don't see it as a risk, they can go to the highway and be road killed.
So we found many species roadkills, such as giant anteater.
Road ecology is very complex, so we really need to study case by case and species by species.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: It's obvious from the data that the highway is affecting wildlife. So how are they reducing the highway's impact?
What they've come up with is both surprisingly simple and potentially transformative for the rest of the Amazon.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: They also plant trees that they knew.
This was in partnership with Professor Marcel Lugordo from the University of Amazonas. So they joined forces to choose some specific species of trees that would form the canopy over the highway to create natural bridges.
So you have a right way to cut the trees so they can form this arch. And that's what they did. So you can actually, actually see some species of primates crossing the road using these natural bridges.
There's also the canopy bridges. And in the Reconnecta project we do the canopy bridges made by rope, which is a much cheaper solution. We started with Dr. Fernanda Abre in the Waimelia trailing indigenous territory. But this is a case study that could be expanded throughout the whole Amazon because it's much cheaper than the ones made by iron. And we can already see that the species using a lot these canopy bridges. So this is especially for arborical mammals.
[00:09:59] Speaker A: What the Waimiri Acharya and Projecta Reconnecta have built together is incredibly moving.
But it also raised a question I kept coming back to during our conversation.
If we know roads cause this much damage, why aren't we building them differently? I asked Juliana exactly that.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: If we are bringing roads and if it's economically justifiable and it's going to be beneficial, and we know that road has the secondary effects of new roads and deforestation. So let's build a road, but create protected areas around the road so we don't have these crimes.
Assessing these new roads and doing illegal hunting or illegal deforestation. And the other thing, and most important, I think we should really empower the people from the Amazon, indigenous people that they are the ones who've been protecting the Amazon for thousands of years. And I really believe that we will only be able to save the Amazon if they are the protagonists and we, we give them the means to, to do what they've been already doing for all these years. They know the land, they know how to have their resources without putting so much pressure on their land.
So the idea is not to have more income at any cost, but to have more quality of life. And I think they have the right to live their lifestyles the way they want to live.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Juliana told me that being a conservationist can be deeply frustrating.
Waking up to news of fires, deforestation, environmental disasters, and feeling like the work is never enough.
But she said it's the Waimiri Achary who give her energy to keep going.
Because when she asked them what would happen if they ever lost the right to close the highway, they gave her an answer she'll never forget.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Once I asked them, what if people decide to that you don't have the right to close the highway anymore. And then you have to open the highway. And then they said, well, that's not gonna happen. And I'm like, how come not? And then they said, yeah, we're not gonna let that happen.
If they try to open the highway, we're gonna be there. The only way that they will do it is if they kill us all. Last time they couldn't kill us all, and now we came back much stronger. But then if they want to open this highway again, they will have to kill everyone.
If there's one way media threat is standing, that road won't be open.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: By the end of my chat with Julianna, I was already feeling better about Rhodes and the BR 174 issue.
Here was an example of a community using its rights to protect its people and wildlife. And the data proved it was working.
Next, I wanted to find someone restoring large swaths of the Amazon, turning degraded land into a thriving landscape.
Luckily, I didn't have to look very far. A few Google searches later and I found one of the largest rewilding projects on Earth.
The Arguay Biodiversity Corridor in Brazil by the Black Jaguar Foundation.
The Arguay biodiversity corridor runs 2,600 km through the heart of Brazil, roughly the distance from Boston to Miami.
It sits at a remarkable ecological crossroads where two of South America's most extraordinary ecosystems meet.
The cerrado, the world's most biodiverse tropical savanna, and the Amazon rainforest.
If the cerrado rings a bell, it might be because of Rewildology's four part series In Search of a Journey through the Pantanal, where I spent time in the Brazilian Pantanal and Cerrau and completely fell in love with the ecosystem.
And as we discussed in that series and throughout this one, the landscape has become alarmingly fragmented.
Decades of forest fires, illegal mining, agricultural expansion and the slow creep of cattle ranching have fragmented the connection between the Amazon and the Cerra, leaving isolated patches of forest with no way to reach each other.
Ben Volks, a Dutch entrepreneur turned conservationist, saw that fragmentation and decided to do something about it.
The first thing I wanted to understand was why here, with so much of the Amazon in need of restoration, what made the Araguai Corridor the one?
[00:14:31] Speaker C: This area has been carefully selected because it's one of the only areas which connects the Araguaia river with the Tocantins river, and it also connects the Cerrado savannah with the Amazon rainforest. This is one reason this corridor was selected. Another reason is that it fortunately has one of the most pristine river islands in the world. It's called the Bananal Island. And the Bananal island used to be completely intact and is the biggest river island in the world. So this is in the center of the Araguaia Biodiversity corridor. It's a great example, like the pearl, of intact nature. And the last key reason is that fortunately, this river has only one big hydro dam. And as you might know, in Brazil, many rivers are completely destroyed by every 3, 4, 500 kilometers.
The construction of a huge hydro dam. You have to destroy so much forest for it. The whole ecosystem is gone in the surrounding areas of the hydro dam. And in this stretch of 2,600 kilometers, I would say almost 2,000 miles, there's only one hydrodam. That means if we bring back nature, nature can come back. Because there is a possible connectivity between existing nature patches.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: I was blown away by the sheer scale of what Ben and the Black Jaguar team are attempting and how long it took just to get started.
This isn't a project you launch overnight.
[00:16:10] Speaker C: This project is so big. And I am not, fortunately, Elon Musk. So I do not have the funds of $9.4 billion. And it is so complex as well. So I dedicated six years of my life to only the preparation phase of the Black General Foundation. Six years, Only preparation. That means we carried out a full cost benefit study for the whole Araguaia biodiversity corridor. It was more than six to seven years of preparation. And now we are in our sixth year of implementation.
So we are the workbeast. We are, with all due respect, not one of these organizations sitting in Washington on the 25th floor. No, we are the doers. We are like 100% boots on the ground.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Being boots on the ground means something very specific to Ben.
When I dug into how the Black Jaguar foundation restores land, I found that planting trees is only one small part of the process.
[00:17:12] Speaker C: We believe only in quality restoration to really bring back biodiversity. So we have brought amazing forest engineers from all over Brazil. And step by step, we are learning that it is so much more than planting a seed or planting a tree. Now, in our sixth year, we say that we have developed a 17 step approach of restoration. And planting a tree or a seed is just one of the 17.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Here's something I didn't know before researching this.
Brazil actually has some of the strongest land protection laws in the world.
Landowners in the Amazon are legally required to preserve up to 80% of their land as native forest.
In the center of Brazil, that number is 35%.
But many landowners have Fallen behind on that legal obligation. And that's where Black Jaguar foundation comes in.
There are over 13,000 farmers along the Argaway corridor alone. And getting them on board isn't easy.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: When we approach the first farmer, he was very hesitant when we show him the map and say, hey, your farm is in this amazing plan of Araguaya biodiversity corridor and we are here to help you restore part of your land into native forest.
So who are you? And that time our team was only three. And I'm originally born in Holland. Maybe my heart is in Brazil. I speak okay basic Portuguese, but of course anyone can understand that my accent is not from here.
So hey, gringo. Many of them have been approached by organizations who promise a lot of. And then they see the complexity and they run away. They think we are like only an environmentalist, a leftist organization against the farmer. In a long story short, we need always to do what we promise. And by doing what we promise builds trust.
So the first five farmers we approached, five became a partner and we did exactly what we had promised. And then they say, wow, you have even helped our meeting the legislation. You have helped preserve our water sources. And even nature is coming back. Because without the forest, the farmer cannot continue to farm. Keep in mind the water levels. If we don't take action, the water levels of the entire Araguai region is going down every year. So it's not just a joke. It's not only about biodiversity. The forest is a key factor for the farmer to keep on farming. So the first five, then one farmer speaks to the other and one community speaks to the other. And then we were able to have 10 and 15 and 20.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: The next part of the project made my heart swell. All of the hard work, the trust building, the six years of preparation felt worth it.
[00:20:12] Speaker C: We have installed the first wildlife trap cameras in areas which we have start to restore five years ago. Five years ago, this area was as flat and empty as a soccer field. Nada. Today I could not believe the result of this wildlife trap camera. You find a giant anteater with his babies on his shoulders, passing by. Deer, tapirs, all the animals are coming back. And we even have the first jaguars passing through.
Nature is coming back. Nature and the communities. For just three years.
We as humans are good in destroying. We cannot live without the nature. Nature is coming back so quickly. But we have to help.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Ben's work answers one half of the connectivity question.
How do you restore what's been lost?
But there's another half. How do you protect what still remains?
That question took me to Ecuador.
Here's something else I didn't know before I started researching this episode. The Amazon makes up half of Ecuador's national territory. And for most of history, the majority of this region sat outside of any formal protection.
When I found that out, I thought, someone must be doing something about this.
That line of thinking led me to a conservation organization called Nature and Culture International, or NCI for short, and one of their coordinators, Bruno Paladinas, who has spent over two decades working to protect Ecuador's Amazon.
[00:21:45] Speaker D: Ecuador has is less than 2% of the entire Amazon. That is the share of Ecuador.
But within Ecuador, the Amazon basin is more than 50% of the country.
So it is crucial for us because it's half of the country a bit more.
And what happened there is that approximately 120,000 square kilometers, approximately, that is the Amazonian basin. And from that total, approximately 30, 40,000 square kilometers were protected, let's say by the national system of protected areas.
But the question was, what happened outside of source?
In 2016, we saw the map and identified approximately 60,000 square kilometers that were in a very good conservation state, were connected, but were outside the national system of protected areas.
Our idea was, I mean, we should work there with local communities and with the municipalities and provinces. There is a possibility for the creation of municipal and provincial areas of approximately
[00:23:02] Speaker A: 60,000 square kilometers, around 60,000 square kilometers of intact connected forest.
But the threats closing in on it are accelerating.
[00:23:13] Speaker D: As in most of the countries, probably all the Amazonian countries, we have huge problems and threats now.
Illegal mining probably is the worst or the newest because in Ecuador we did not have this strong and aggressive rise of mining. Illegal mining. Now provinces like the southern province of Zamora, Chincipe have huge threats with illegal mining. Cattle was always a problem in the rise of the Russian frontier. They gave rise to huge amounts of deforestation, roads, the construction of roads, for example, in the northern part of the country because of oil.
Deforestation because of the road system is huge.
Ecuador. Until 5, 8 years, Ecuador was a very peaceful place to work. We as nci, we have never had problems, fortunately, but we now are taking into account all these new contexts that is in place is not an easy thing to think and to plan and to do.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: So what do you do when the threats are moving faster than the national government?
NCI's answer was to creatively go around it.
The team went directly to Ecuador's six Amazonian provinces and the indigenous nationalities who own these forests and asked them to come together under one protect the Amazon.
This IDEA became known as the Amazonian Platform.
After hearing this, I wondered how in the world do you pull off such a massive project?
[00:24:59] Speaker D: In 2015, we received the invitation of the Pastaza province to start thinking about this new way of development, new new approaches to take conservation into account. Crucial role of the indigenous peoples.
We found the possibility to start thinking about an agreement. An agreement between the six provinces of the Amazon. And the idea for the creation of a political decision in order to start working under a complementary vision to protect this huge amount of forest came to. In 2017, the six provinces signed an agreement that was the start of this Amazonian platform strategy. The interesting thing was that that agreement was also signed with the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Amazonian part of Equal.
So it was the first time that in agreement to start thinking collaboratively between not only one province, but the six provinces and the indigenous peoples was a reality, let's say. And then NCI became a technical partner of this strategy to make this political decision to start working at the field.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: Already the backbone of the whole platform is something called the Amazon Future Fund, a financial mechanism for conservation that for the first time puts indigenous nationalities and provincial governments together as equal partners in deciding how conservation money gets spent.
I asked Bruno how decisions actually get made, because on paper, getting six provincial governments and multiple nationalities to agree on anything sounds nearly impossible.
[00:26:54] Speaker D: The design of the projects will be made by them that are part of the fund. NCI is a technical partner that will help will support their visions.
So we have this possibility of sitting together first, identify the necessities, design the projects and raise the money to attend those necessities. All these decisions are taken under the free and prior consultancy processes Consulta Premia Libre that is crucial for them to decide and take the decision they want.
It takes a time, it takes money, but it's the way they have decided they want. If the decisions are taken by them based on their priorities and the projects might be designed together and you have the trust fund that will help in the administration of those resources, then let's say the model is improving.
That has not happened before.
You see, it is the beginning. It's not easy, but we believe is the way we need to take.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: It's already producing results.
Four provincial reserves have been formally established totaling 4.2 million hectares, which is larger than the entire national protected Area system. On Ecuador's Amazon site side.
The goal is 5 million hectares under the platform by the end of next year.
And Bruno told me the next frontier is taking this unified voice. Provinces, indigenous leaders and Conservation organizations together into International forums like COP30.
Not separately or as an NGO speaking on behalf of communities, but all three partners at the same table.
[00:28:48] Speaker D: Our vision now is to go together, not as an NGO or as a indigenous leader alone.
That was also the problem. You have an indigenous leader going to the cop, to Brazil, or to the US or to the uk, to speak alone about what for them is conservation.
Our strategy is to have all the three partners, state, indigenous peoples and the cooperation, sitting together and defending this vision.
To have politicians and indigenous leaders talking together and under one communication speech together. That's part of what we are building
[00:29:36] Speaker A: now, one unified voice.
And with the Amazon facing more and more threats, the timing couldn't be better.
All this connectivity work brought me back to my conversation with Mario in episode two.
We talked at length about protecting and rewilding jaguars. But if there isn't anywhere safe to release the Jaguars 2, then the project is doomed to fail.
So Mario and the On Safari team decided to do something about it.
[00:30:07] Speaker E: The way we started buying land and preserving land started because of this rewilding process. The first time in the Amazon with two females. It's a place in the southern Amazon estate called Para, which is right at the Arch of deforestation, right? So deforestation comes from north to south, so people clear the land, put cattle, then soybean comes, takes over, and then the cattle goes forward and keeps going like that. Every time I flew to that place, I could see the forest disappearing. You know, it was really shocking how fast things were happening.
So when we released these two cats, I said, look, we need to do something here because otherwise these two cats won't have a chance of surviving in the future because their home is going to be gone.
So we decided to use that river as a barrier to stopping deforestation going north, we started buying land. We joined with other landowners, other lodges that are there, and kind of created a buffer zone, you know, that couldn't be deforested any further up.
With time, we managed to convince the governor of that state to create a wildlife refuge on the other side of the river. You have still, amazingly, 6 million hectares of preserved land. We wanted to stop deforestation there so we couldn't reach the other side.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: The jaguar has always been a symbol of the Amazon's health. And what Mario just described is the through line of everything you've heard today.
Restoring what's been lost, protecting what remains, and making sure the people who've always been here are the ones leading the way.
Because none of it works in isolation.
The corridor, the platform, the refuge. They only function if they connect.
So you may be wondering, as I did, how do you measure a healing forest? How do you track destruction happening across millions of hectares in real time?
As it turns out, some very clever people have figured out how to see what the human eye simply can't.
That's next on Rewilding Amazonia. I'm Brooke Mitchell. See you in episode four.
