Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: There used to be a guard post called Porto Franco on the Colombian Brazilian border, named after a researcher who spent his life protecting the isolated indigenous peoples of that region.
It was one of the most remote monitoring stations in the Colombian Amazon, staffed by rangers whose job was to watch, document and witness what was happening on the Rio Pure in a national park that exists to protect two groups of people who have never made contact with the outside world.
About six years ago, armed groups told the park staff to leave, and within months of being abandoned, Porto Franco was burned to the ground.
By then, Brian Hitler and the Amazon Conservation team had already been watching the river from orbit for years.
In a forest this remote, satellites have always been part of the answer.
But what they were seeing in the imagery raised alarm.
Hundreds of mining barges were pushing deeper into protected territory, and no one was left to enforce that protection on the ground.
The post was gone, but the satellites kept taking photos.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: I think it shows that with modern technology, with all these satellite imagery, the data that's being created, we can see almost everything that's happening in the Amazon, whether it be illegal mining, illegal logging, agricultural expansion.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: This is episode four of Rewilding Amazonia. I'm Brooke McC.
Let's travel into space.
Brian hetler has spent 14 years watching the Amazon from orbit. As director of mapping at the Amazon Conservation Team, his job is to monitor a forest the size of a continent, systematically, persistently, and at a scale no human presence on the ground could match.
And the thing that has consumed most of his attention in recent years, illegal mining.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: At act, we use remote technologies like satellite imagery and data sets derived from satellite imagery to help monitor some of the threats that are affecting the Amazon rainforest. We've done a lot of regional mapping, looking at threats like oil extraction, logging, mining, road construction, and all these things that are leading to forest loss across the region. One topic that we've really keyed in on is illegal mining. We've seen a few rivers near the border with Colombia and Brazil just really be transformed just in the past few years by the influx of mining activity.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: That satellite access happened through a strategic
[00:02:38] Speaker B: partnership without any national park staff there. The monitors that had been there previously. Due to the security situation, we had to depend entirely on remote technologies. Fortunately, we have a really important partner at act. We work with a company called Vantor. It's a commercial provider of satellite imagery. So we've been using this high resolution satellite imagery, 50 centimeter to 30 centimeter resolution. So very detailed imagery.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: But tracking destruction is only one thing. Satellites can do the same. Technology also helps Communities prove they were always there.
ACT has been programming satellites to prioritize imagery over specific areas of concern for about 10 years.
And on the Rio Pure, that work has logged more than 800 observations of illegal mining barges. Over the last five years.
Indigenous communities and scientists across the region have used participatory mapping exercises, which consists of laying satellite images flat on a table, placing a sheet of plastic over them, and community members drawing directly onto the images to document land use, place names, sacred sites, migration routes, and the locations of resources their families have tracked for generations.
These maps aren't just cultural records.
In the legal systems of most Amazonian nations, a community that cannot prove its presence in a territory is with documented land use and gps, measured boundaries, runs the risk of losing their territory, not through conquest, but through paperwork.
ACT has helped title more than 2.7 million hectares of indigenous territory in Colombia alone.
But titling only holds as long as someone with a political will to enforce it is paying attention.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: At the end of the day, it comes down to some political willingness. Even if we are able to show that through these cultural maps, you know, there's a long history of these communities being in these territories. Of course, these communities are highly organized. They've been working on these land requests sometimes 20 to 30 years. So these communities are highly organized, highly committed. And even with all that and the support that we offer at the end, it does come down to the political willingness.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: On the river's. Brian watches. Political willingness has a very specific adversary.
He describes what he sees in the satellite imagery with the precision of someone who has been counting these things for a long time.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: The area that we've been looking at has been most affected by alluvial or river mining. So these are barges that move up and down rivers that have ability to kind of suck up the sediment off the bottom of the river, and they'll have, like, a big crane on the front to actually be able to start taking down trees and cut away at the riverbank. But they take the sediment out of the river, the river bottom, separate out the gold from the sediment using mercury in a sluice box on the boat. And then they dump all the residue that's not the gold, including all the toxic mercury, back into the rivers. It's probably something like a gold rush, where they hear about people hitting in a certain region, and there can be just a huge invasion of these mining barges.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: And behind those barges is a financial architecture that Brian describes as with a kind of wariness, because this isn't just environmental crime, it's organized Crime with a commodity.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: These armed groups have historically made a lot of money from drug trafficking, and now, more recently, they're getting involved in illegal gold mining as well. So kind of diversifying their portfolio. The mining sector in South America is poorly monitored, and it's an opportunity for laundering money made from the drug trade.
And a lot of this is obviously driven by the skyrocketing price of gold worldwide. You know, all this economic uncertainty in the world is leading to higher price of gold, driving more people to do illegal gold mining in the Amazon. This is not a supply side problem. It's a demand problem. Right. Of course, it always gets blamed on these South American countries.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: A 2024 study published in Nature Communications put numbers to what Brian is describing.
By 2022, illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon had expanded to more than 12 times the area it occupied in 1985, with 77% of detected operations showing clear signs of illegality.
The global gold price nearly doubled between 2018 and 2023, and the invasion tracked it almost perfectly.
But even at that scale, satellites kept capturing every new barge, and people like Brian are turning those images into evidence that can finally be used on the Rio Pure. The satellite intelligence feeds into aarimo, a local coalition of organizations working to coordinate the response on the ground.
Information generated from that imagery has helped Colombian military authorities better understand illegal mining trends and strengthen environmental enforcement actions leading to the destruction of approximately 100 barges, including 14 in a single operation this past September.
It is slow and difficult work conducted against illegal miners that keep coming back as long as gold stays expensive.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: We can see almost everything that's happening in the Amazon, whether it be illegal mining, illegal logging, agricultural expansion. We can see all this happening. It's just about getting local decision makers and stakeholders to act on this information and help enforce the law in these remote areas.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: The satellites keep watching. And occasionally, amid the barge counts and the deforestation alerts, Brian finds something else.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: It's not only monitoring threats, but we also monitor, remotely monitor some of the settlement patterns of these isolated indigenous groups. And it gives me some hope to see them, you know, continuing to thrive. Occasionally we'll see a new house being built in a new area, which gives an idea, you know, that they're expanding and hopefully doing well. I think what inspires me and gives me hope is the resilience I see in the indigenous partners that we work with. You know, a lot of these groups have been through so much over the past hundreds of years, and just to see how they still work to connect to nature, to preserve Nature often doing it with a smile on their face as well, and a lot of grace and wisdom.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: A new house visible from space. A tiny clearing found only because somebody sat down and carefully looked at what the satellites captured.
14 years of showing up one frame at a time.
Canaima national park in southeastern Venezuela is one of the most extraordinary places on earth.
It spans 3 million hectares and is famous for its dramatic, tepuisancient tabletop mountains, with sheer cliffs and flat summits that rise like islands above the forest.
These unique formations cover about 65% of the park, creating a lost world landscape full of endemic species and breathtaking scenery.
Among the highlights is Angel Falls, the world's highest uninterrupted waterfall, plunging 979 meters from one of the tepuis.
The park was named a UNESCO World heritage site in 1994. And for much of the 20th century, Venezuela was recognized as a leader in conservation across South America.
In 2018, Cristina Borelli heard rumors that the Chinese were mining inside the park.
[00:10:37] Speaker C: I reached out to UNESCO to find out what they knew. Was this on their radar screen? And they didn't know anything. They just said, we just get whatever the Maduro regime tells us.
And so I started calling people in Venezuela, experts who knew a little bit about what was going on.
And the first thing I realized was that there was a lot of fear and hesitation when it came to talking factually about what was going on. But what I picked up was that, yeah, there was illegal mining happening. So UNESCO said, we need a technical report, but it has to come from people who are on the ground. So I reached out to experts in Venezuela, and they said that they would only be willing to do it if they could do it anonymously. UNESCO said, fine, as long as it's technical, we can accept a report from an anonymous group. So we went ahead and wrote the first report on illegal mining in Canaima. And what we found was horrific. Over a thousand hectares of illegal gold mines, over 30 sections of mines in all this park, and nobody really knew about this. And we were able to report on this because Maxar gave us very high resolution satellite images, because it's impossible to go there and see these mines. The only way to actually measure georeference and prove that these mines exist is with satellite imagery.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: That first report became the foundation of SOS Oranaco, the organization Christina has led since 2018.
It now has between 15 and 25 people. Journalists, scientists, witnesses and indigenous leaders, all operating under code names and anonymously in Venezuela, speaking out against what's happening in the southern Amazon can get you killed.
Physical access to most of these areas is controlled entirely by armed criminal groups.
The only way in is from orbit.
[00:12:48] Speaker C: The beauty of open source intelligence is that we actively use open source intelligence to document factually what's going on on the ground. So everything from high resolution satellite images, you know, we scour the Internet for information.
There are indigenous people, there are people living in communities who post information, who send information. They say, you know, there's a dredge or there are five new dredges on the river. We've become very good and very efficient at doing a very systematic search on information that's out there. We have people on the ground who are become witnesses and who give us information.
A lot of the team members of SOS Orinoco are experts in their fields. They know the country very well. Many of them have worked on the ground in previous administrations. And so with that knowledge and whatever information we're able to get from witnesses, from social media, from satellite images, you can deduct a lot of information.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: What they're deducing and documenting has a scale that takes a moment to absorb.
In 25 years, southern Venezuela has lost 945,000 hectares of forest.
37% of that loss has occurred in the last decade alone. And it is accelerating at the current rate. The destruction is running at roughly 75,000 hectares per year inside what is supposed to be one of the most protected landscapes in the hemisphere.
Christina is careful about where AI fits into this picture.
[00:14:37] Speaker C: There's a lot of talk about monitoring deforestation via AI.
This is the big new thing, particularly in Amazonia. So you have, you know, a lot of organizations that are mapping deforestation, mining with AI, but that's confusing. You need to have a very educated eye because sometimes you see deforestation and it's not man made. It could be something in, you know, that particular area, stone or maybe it's an indigenous community and they're traditional Shabonos and it's not a mining area. So AI is good, obviously, but you need an educated eye to differentiate, you know, between all the different types of and origins of deforestation.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: The educated eye in SOS Aranako's case belongs to people who can't safely identify themselves.
Anonymity shapes everything about how the organization works. And it reveals something important about what monitoring actually requires. In the most dangerous parts of the Amazon, satellites can spot and AI can flag. But making sense of what you're seeing and staying alive long enough to report on it requires human knowledge that can't be automated.
There's a much darker layer to Christina's story that we'll return to in episode six. But I want to leave you with one thing she said about why criminal networks thrive specifically at the borders between countries.
Because it connects directly to everything we've been discussing in this episode about the limits of monitoring from any single vantage point.
[00:16:20] Speaker C: The Amazonian biome doesn't really have any borders or frontiers. They're all political.
Flora, fauna, Even indigenous groups live across the borders, like the Yanomami. You know, part of them live in Brazil, part live in Venezuela. They consider themselves brothers.
They don't see that border, the political border, in the same way, I believe that criminal groups don't see borders either. The Amazon biome is one, and they work seamlessly across the borders. And borders tend to be the most remote areas, vulnerable, difficult to patrol. And they also happen to be, you know, where indigenous people live. And so that is why these criminal organizations go to these places, because they know that they can run freely across the borders.
When Lula came to power, within days he was there. Helicopters were bombing illegal mines, destroying planes and helicopters that belonged to the ganipedos. What did those ganipedos do? They just ran over the border into Venezuela, where they knew that they could do good business with the Venezuelan military authorities on the border.
So Lula's problem became our problem.
I call it the Lula balloon effect.
You pressure here, and you push the balloon over the border, and it's somebody else's problem.
The only way of tackling this is by governments and civil society and indigenous communities coming together and fighting against them.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: The balloon effect.
One country cracks down and the destruction simply relocates to wherever the monitoring is weakest. And the armed groups are the most entrenched.
Which is exactly why the work of making the invisible visible, satellite by satellite, witness by witness, code name by code name, has to operate at the same scale as the problem it's tracking.
We'll hear the rest of Christina's story in episode six.
Leo Lana is an entomologist, photographer, poet, and PhD researcher based in the Brazilian countryside about three hours outside of Rio de Janeiro.
He has spent the last 10 years studying praying mantises in tropical rainforests, mostly at night. He did not set out to do this, however.
He first studied business, then switched to biology and. And was fully prepared to never think about insects again.
[00:19:09] Speaker D: I remember, I always say, my mother told me, like, okay, you can do a second graduation. Just don't go for insects. And I said, like, of course. Who would Ever go for insects? You have birds, you have whales, you have polar bears, you have like jaguars who would go for insects, you know, like bugs. So I never thought about doing that.
I found the praying mantis at the balcony of my parents home. That insect was looking at my eyes and I never saw an insect that looked so deeply.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: That mantis, encountered on a balcony in the same town where Leo now lives, launched what has become Projectomantis, a research organization run by Leo and his husband Lucas, a graphic designer and visual artist.
Together they conducted expeditions across Brazil and into the Amazon. Photographing, documenting and studying praying mantises in some of the most biodiverse and least surveyed forest patches of the Amazon.
They have around 20 species in line for formal description. A painstaking process that, with just two people doing the work, takes considerable time for each one.
In most of the places they go, up to a third of the species they find have never been named.
But the reason Leo is in this episode isn't just discovery. It's what the mantises tell him about the health of everything around them.
[00:20:36] Speaker D: Once you cut down the forest, once you degradate the environment, it never comes back as it used to be in terms of insect diversity. And many of them are linked to that place in such a way that if you break that cycle, they're not coming back, not easily or not ever. A single praying mantis or a single species is not telling anything about the health of the forest.
But the community, the diversity of this group is what tells us. I live in the countryside, but around me I only have eucalyptus plantation and pasture.
I have like two or three species of praying mantis in my home that appear frequently.
But what we expect for a rainforest in Brazil is around 20 to 30 species.
So if I go to an expedition in Amazonia and I find only 10 species of praying mansis, probably there's something going on with that area. But if I find that 20, 30, then it tells me this area is very well preserved.
So they kind of work like sharks for a reef. A single shark may not be telling you about the reef that are healthy, but the community of sharks and the quantity of sharks tells you about the healthiness of a reef. The diversity of primenters you find and how many you find tells you about the health of the forest.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Two to three species means degraded, 20 to 30 means healthy. That's a monitoring signal legible enough to act on, and one that required 10 years of fieldwork across dozens of sites to establish.
It also led Leo to a discovery that reframes how reforestation efforts should be evaluated. Praying mantises, it turns out, are not wanderers.
[00:22:34] Speaker D: We had ideas from our long term expeditions that some species, they tend to stay in the same place for a long time. During the pandemic, I had the chance to observe in my garden as well some specimens, some individuals, like for eight months in the same plant. So it's an insect that is not like randomly walking and hunting, you know, it's like stationary, it lives there. We moved that idea to the reserve and now in the reserve we saw that some fragments of this tray, of the single tray that we work in, stayed there, sometimes in the same leaf over five months.
During these five months there were like thunderstorms and rainstorms, wind storms, you know, like probably opossums and frogs and birds passing through that area, spiders and everything. Five months later, you're still in the same plant. There's something going on. The rainforest is not so random. What we know now with this monitoring and how praying races usually stay on the area, if they're staying on that area, if I could down that area for example, and then regenerate that they're not coming back so fast.
If a forest is missing this kind of frame mountains, how do we help the forest? We reintroduce or we wait, because they seem to be very loyal.
Not a single plant, sometimes a single patch of the forest. I call it the invisible islands that we don't see. For us, as I said, everything is rainforest for them. That patch is an invisible island. Everything around is not suitable, you know, like it's ocean for this land animal and it's living there. But if you go to that patch, you're going to find that species. If you walk like 30 meters away, same rainforest, everything connected, everything preserve it, never cut down. Primary forest, you're not finding that species anymore.
[00:24:28] Speaker C: Why?
[00:24:29] Speaker D: There's invisible things that we don't see. And that's why, like, we have to consider this data that we are gathering.
[00:24:37] Speaker A: Think about that, invisible islands. A mantis whose entire world is a single patch of trees and whose presence or absence multiplied across a community of 30 species can tell you whether a forest is thriving or quietly failing.
It's a monitoring system that doesn't require satellites or code names or commercial imagery partners.
It requires going out at night, knowing what you're looking for and being willing to come back to the same place over and over.
Leo does most of his Amazon monitoring work in darkness, and he'll tell you that's not a limitation. It's where the forest comes alive.
[00:25:17] Speaker D: Everything happens much more than daylight in the rainforest. In tropical rainforests, nighttime is when it comes alive. All the most incredible shapes, colors, all this endless diversity that you don't know what you are going to find. You're going to find some of them that you probably won't ever see again. You will see stuff that you never even imagined existed on Earth. I say it's like a portal that you cross. It takes patience, it takes sensibility to be looking to that something that we lost, especially nowadays with our so accelerated life, you had to be looking like and be open to that experience. And once you're open and you go with someone that knows about the area, you dive in the rainforest at night and you see things that you're never gonna see anywhere on Earth.
And I was afraid of the dark when young, and I still am. Like, I'm not afraid of going out in the dark of the Amazon, but it's like a prohibition in our field work to talk about ghosts, because otherwise Leo is not going out at night. And that's my main work, you know. But in the rainforest at night, I feel like I'm home.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: A few years ago, Leo and his team brought UV lights into the Amazon on a National Geographic Society grant and discovered something incredible.
[00:26:45] Speaker D: We documented over 300 species in UV light. We actually found out that the Amazon, under UV light, shines in all colors. So what seemed to be an exception was actually the room.
The only exception were actually tarantulas. They don't have biofluorescence because you shoot the light and the tarantula gets still black, completely black, because it's absorbing all the light but not giving back any fluorescence.
But all the other animals were shining all these different colors. Every night that we went out, we were discovering so much.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: While the tarantulas remained dark, everything else lit up in a kaleidoscope of colors evolved for birds, amphibians and other mantises.
Leo's point is that a forest monitored only through human eyes is a forest we're fundamentally misreading.
The Amazon is communicating constantly in registers we haven't learned to listen to yet.
When I asked Leo what gives him hope after 10 years of this work, he referenced a Brazilian film, I'm Still Here, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last year, about a woman who lost her husband to the dictatorship and kept fighting for decades.
[00:28:04] Speaker D: Anyway, what gives me hope is that I'm still here and we are still here.
There's people, many people like us, and we're still here. To keep going and doing it.
I never like to say, like, for the future generations, because we have a whole billion people still here, so it's for the present generations as well.
There's a movie called I'm Still Here. A lot of people asking her, like, what gives you hope of finding your husband? It's been like 30 years.
She was still there, you know, like fighting and living and still having the joy in moments and still having the grief moments. As long as I'm here, I'm gonna be talking to you or whoever, the same passion way, trying to live it, trying to bring joy and beauty and wonders and connecting people to this different wars that we have. I've been working with insects for 10 years, and I haven't been with a single person that have closed the doors for us. After hearing what we have to say, you know, like, people are open. So I feel hope for people because I know people can be good.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Satellites, anonymous witnesses, and a researcher counting insects in the dark.
What connects all three is something deceptively simple.
You can't protect what you can't see.
And these people have spent years, in some cases decades, bringing to light what was previously invisible.
The tools are working.
The evidence is building. And that gives me genuine hope.
Remember at the beginning of this series where I said the Amazon is more than just a rainforest, It's a force of nature.
The Amazon is so big that it generates its own rainfall, regulates temperatures and affects the planet's weather patterns.
What happens to the Amazon's global influence as the forest comes under pressure?
That's where we're headed next.
I'm Brooke Mitchell. See you in episode five.
