Digital Social Hour
Why Saving the Amazon is Saving Ourselves | Paul Rosolie DSH #1286
Tue, 01 Apr 2025
Why Saving the Amazon is Saving Ourselves 🌍✨ Join this riveting conversation as we uncover how protecting the Amazon rainforest is key to safeguarding our planet—and ourselves! From majestic anacondas and ancient trees to communities fighting the odds for conservation, this podcast is packed with valuable insights that will move and inspire you. 🌱🌳 Discover the Amazon’s vital role in maintaining global weather patterns, clean air, and biodiversity. Hear firsthand stories about life in the jungle, the challenges of illegal logging and mining, and the incredible efforts of Jungle Keepers to protect thousands of acres of pristine rainforest. 🌿🔥 This episode isn’t just about the Amazon—it’s about all of us. Don’t miss out on these eye-opening stories and actionable ways to make a difference. Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more powerful conversations on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀🌎 CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:29 - Returning from the Amazon 04:55 - Lumati 05:50 - Importance of the Amazon Rainforest 07:11 - How to Protect the Amazon 09:58 - RXSUGAR 12:58 - Intelligence of Nature 14:31 - Discovering New Species 16:29 - Getting Lost in the Amazon 18:00 - Experience of Getting Lost in the Amazon 22:45 - Diseases in the Amazon 24:07 - Trans-Amazon Highway 26:14 - Conservation Importance 28:30 - Fires in the Amazon 30:28 - Ocean Conservation 32:22 - Individual Suffering in the Amazon 33:31 - How to Help the Amazon 37:05 - MrBeast: Let's Save the Rainforest 40:25 - Tallest Treehouse in the World 42:50 - Elephants' Intelligence 45:50 - Magic of Snakes 47:40 - Anaconda Encounters 51:18 - Poaching Issues 54:09 - Good vs Bad Zoos 56:05 - Local People Eating Monkeys 57:03 - Food in the Amazon 59:05 - Diseases in the Amazon 1:00:55 - Pandemic Insights 1:02:09 - Recent Videos Overview 1:04:28 - Choosing Your Guests 1:06:54 - Media Coverage in Peru 1:08:30 - Taking Action for Change 1:09:45 - Power of Conversations 1:14:08 - Uncontacted Tribes 1:16:07 - John Chau Incident 1:18:22 - Protecting Uncontacted Tribes 1:19:44 - Deforestation Conflicts 1:20:55 - Importance of Jungle Keepers 1:22:54 - Donate to Jungle Keepers APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: jenna@digitalsocialhour.com GUEST: Paul Rosolie https://www.instagram.com/paulrosolie/ SPONSORS: LUMATI: https://www.lumati.com/dsh RXSUGAR: https://rxsugar.com/ LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ #collectiveaction #biodiversityhotspots #whydoweneednature #environmentaljustice #ecosystemservices
Chapter 1: What insights does Paul Rosolie share about the Amazon rainforest?
Okay, guys flew in from, uh, the Amazon jungle. Let's go. We got Paul here. How long you been out there now?
This year, this is like one of the first times I've been in civilization. So like, wow. Yeah. Cold water. Um, all that stuff. It's very, it's very cool. So there's a big change for you. It's a big change for me. I can wear, I have not, I mean, I'm wearing a shirt. I am wearing two shirts. I have shoes on. It's like, yeah, it's a different reality. You spent a lot of years out there then.
I mean, yeah, I went down there first when I was 19 years old. Uh, 18 or 19? No, it's been 19 years. I went down there when I was 18 years old. Jeez. And I mean, the last couple of years I've been spending seven months out of the year in the jungle. So, so really that's, that's become home.
Wow.
Yeah. So coming back to society is weird as hell. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Like I'm like, you know, like, like you ever see like a dog get scared of traffic? Like at this point, like I'm used to falling asleep to the sound of frogs. Wow. So like I come back and, and I just like the sound of air conditioning, the sound of motors. I'm like, you know, it freaks me out.
It must be pretty soothing to fall asleep to nature sounds. Oh, it's the best. You sleep so good. Yeah. Everybody tells me that. I play rain sometimes when I can't sleep. Yeah, dude.
My favorite is like rainforest thunder tracks. When we record our own, we make our own. Oh, you do? Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, you just like leave a recorder out in a swamp for all night. Yeah. And just get the thunder and the water dripping off the leaves. It's fantastic. It's such good sleep. We should actually, we should put that up. Yeah. We should share that with people. That would do well. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How does the destruction of ecosystems affect global biodiversity?
in the last since 1970.
Damn.
So we're in this major cataclysmic moment in history where we're losing our ecosystems. And what's crazy for me is coming back to cities and realizing that 50% of the people on earth live in cities. And most people at this point are pretty cut off from the fact that like farmers still know it, outdoorsmen still know it, but that's where our rain comes from.
You know, clean air, clean water, forests protect us against young mangroves, prevent hurricanes. And it's like, we need these ecosystems and the things that make the ecosystems are the animals. The birds are carrying seeds. The bats are carrying seeds. Frogs or tadpoles are the reason that mosquito populations are kept in check.
And so you kill all the frogs and then all of a sudden you have worse mosquito populations. And then all of a sudden you have higher incidences of diseases. You have malaria skyrocket. And so nature keeps us safe. And so as we lose it, we're losing the security systems that have always kept life on earth safe.
healthy right wow so it all kind of connects every single species it all connects not just locally river to river habitat to habitat it's international you know like the weather system created by the amazon is influenced by what's happening in africa and really so connected yeah i didn't know that i just assumed the weather that happened in your local area that was it yeah that's what i i grew up thinking of of animals as living in the forest and then working in the forest you realize that they're creating it yeah
by carrying those seeds. And so like in habitats where you have elephants, elephants are huge seed dispersers. So they're carrying the seeds through the forest and depositing them all over the ecosystem. And then in the Amazon's case, you have nutrient-rich sands from the Sahara flying over the Atlantic ocean and being deposited down in the Amazon. So there's this exchange between the continents.
Everything is so connected. And that's why watching people destroy ecosystems, it's just, that's become my whole job is just telling people like, you've got to stop. And it doesn't matter whether you like animals or if you like nature, if you're, if you can't, Carl Sagan said this, if you can't breathe the air and drink the water, then nothing else you're interested in is going to happen. Yeah.
We need these things. And we're at this point in history where we still can protect it. We don't have to lose these things. And so that's what's so interesting about our moment in time. Yeah, because we still have that option of saving it. Yeah, we still have so much good stuff. There's still so much to protect.
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Chapter 3: What are the dangers and challenges of conservation in the Amazon?
What's up guys, shout out to RX Sugar, one of my favorite snack brands. I'm about to try a flavor I've never had before, vanilla cream. Let's see what we got here. Mm, that's solid. I love vanilla, it's my favorite ice cream flavor. Definitely check them out guys, RX Sugar.
You can give them a better option, they'll be your friends. If you get in between a person's livelihood and you're trying to stop it, they will take you out.
Right. So you got to be ready to present them a second option where they could potentially make as much or if not more money.
Yes. And it's serious money. These are, you know, illegal gold mining mafias where they, I mean, in Peru, the police won't even go into the areas where there's gold mining. Wow. Because it's just, I mean, it's impossible to imagine it, but it's in the Amazon rainforest. You can see it on Google Earth. You can see it from space.
There's a scar running across the Amazon rainforest in the West, in Peru, where the illegal gold miners have cut the forest over so much area that now there's sandstorms in the barren wasteland where the Amazon used to be. Jeez. So this is... It looks like dune. You're driving a motorcycle over sand, and there's just this...
dust storm blowing you can see the rainforest on the horizon but every year they're eating into that and so it's it's just this incredible problem and then with that comes because it's an illegal lawless area that the police can't get to there's no society there so then the human trafficking spikes the narco traffickers stay there it just becomes sort of a cesspool of everything bad in one place so there's a lot of gold out there then
There's a lot of gold out there, but it's low quality gold and it's in very, very low... There's not a lot of it in any one given area. And so they have to continually remove more of the rainforest to get at the gold. It's not in nuggets like what we think of. They have to continually suck the sand off the ground. So they have to destroy the forest and then have access to the earth.
And the more you take, the more you get. So per football field of... of sand that you, that you pull up, you're getting tiny amounts of gold. That seems like a lot of work for that amount. It's a lot of work and it's terrible work. And so they work day and night, they have horrible lives. And so if you can provide them with a better alternative, they're stoked, you know?
And so that's what we've done. We go to people who are making $20 a day being illegal gold miners. And we're like, what if you were just a ranger? What if we gave you gear and a uniform and a boat and just we gave you medical benefits and pay? And they're like, yes, absolutely. And then half the time they go, I don't want to be cutting these trees.
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Chapter 4: How can local communities help protect the Amazon?
Recently, we saved an area that was 10,000 acres. And when we went there to clear the loggers out, the loggers were like, okay, cool. That's fine. We understand. But can we stay? We went, what? And they went, we just, we love this forest. I went, you love the forest? You're destroying? I went, yeah, we love this place. And we said, can we be rangers? And we were like, yeah, you can be rangers.
wow like yeah it's it's easy like we have we you know make friends not enemies that's cool well there's a lot of new studies on how intelligent um like nature is right how trees are sentient in a way yeah in a way and just the interconnectedness of an ecosystem the the complexity of it i think that people don't understand like the avatar analogy is really good you know what they did with that movie where they explained how connected i mean plug in it's like
When you're in the Amazon rainforest, there's medicines flowing through the trees. There's medicines for diseases that we have not discovered yet. And that entire system, down from the leafcutter ants to the jaguars to the giant trees, everything is just this cycle where it's all getting digested and regenerated. And that whole cycle is, in a way, intelligent.
It's its own thing that we have very, very little understanding of how that works. And that's what we're still trying to study, but we're losing it so fast that... A lot of the scientists I speak to say that they feel like they're documenting destruction instead of studying a current reality. And they worry that our current healthy reality will become an irretrievable reality.
past if we don't do something now and so that's what we're doing we're working with the local people protect that rainforest and also it's like you know we don't you want an earth where where there's huge areas of a vast wilderness with species that have never been described and just giant trees and anacondas and uncontacted tribes there's so much amazing stuff out there that to me it's comforting knowing that that's out there just like you think of
you know, areas in Alaska or Africa where there's just huge areas of wilderness. Like we need that. It's important mentally, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever run into an animal that hasn't been discovered yet? I've definitely many times run into insects where I take a picture of it and send it to my entomologist friends and they go, we have no idea what that is. Yeah, there's a lot of that.
Some of them might be poisonous too, right? Some of them, well, yes. You don't eat the bugs in the Amazon. Don't eat the bugs. Don't lick the frogs. There's a lot of stuff that's poisonous in the Amazon rainforest. I mean, everything that's there, It's, you know, we always say it's a festival of sex and death. It's, it's everything that's there is, is either hunting, being eaten, trying to mate.
And so like when you go out at night in the Amazon rainforest, it's wild. We just got a video. There was a, we saw this bright yellow frog moving in the water and it was, it was moving in a strange way. It went his belly up and we looked at it and we couldn't figure out what was going on. And then it flipped and there was a spider with its fangs in the frog.
And it was just this huge spider sucking this frog out and envenomating it. And you go out there and just, I mean, the Jaguars are hunting for deer and the bats are hunting. It's like everything is moving and you are there and you're part of that ecosystem. It's, it's incredible. So you don't leave at night often, do you? No, we do. We go out every night.
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Chapter 5: What are the impacts of illegal mining and logging in the Amazon?
Trees are that big out there? Trees are that big out there. They do. Yeah. But you got to dodge those and you got to worry about... Yeah. When you go to sleep, you're just like, yo, look, I wake up in the morning like... Oh my gosh. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's the, that to me is one of the scariest things. That is nuts.
Were you at any point worried that that might be it for you when you were lost for three days? Yes.
I started to think I was like, you know, into the wild. I was like, oh man, I just did. I just into the wild did myself. I went out here trying to go on a big adventure and then I'm not going to come back. And then they're going to write an article about how stupid I was. Like, you know. That was a good movie though.
It was a very good movie that, that, that kid, that kid, uh, unfortunately chose too big of an adventure, but. You know, people do that. If you want to go explore places like the tops of mountains and the deep jungle and super deep ocean, it's like you have to take a certain amount of risk to go there. And to go alone seems kind of stupid, which it is.
But at the same time, you get this experience of being out in the middle of nowhere. It's like being on another planet. You go for, you know, you spend three days, you think of the fact that Most of us, when we're born, we're born into a room of people. There's doctors, there's parents, there's people. And your whole life, you very rarely go a day without seeing another human. It's true.
And we're so social and we're so immersed in humanity and our civilizations that we don't even realize that to be separated from that is incredibly rare. And so you're just hiking all day, camp, hiking all day, camp. And then you start to look around and go, you know. the world could have ended for all I know. World War III could have popped off and I'd have no idea.
And it's very, very strange being that far out and your brain starts acting. It's like fasting or being in a deprivation tank. It's like you just, your brain starts acting very, very differently out in the jungle. Yeah, but you really find yourself out there, right? Yeah, you really do. You really find out. You really find out.
And then it's like, you know, because you see something amazing and that same thing with Into the Wild. I mean, his big thing that he took away from it where he was like, he has a great quote and I don't remember what it was, but it was basically like, you know, like life isn't worth it if you can't share it with people. Right.
And when you're out there, you see this amazing stuff or you catch a fish and something, you know, or you survive this, this moment and there's no one there to see it. And so you, you realize you're like, oh man, this is, this is actually more fun with other people.
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Chapter 6: What efforts are being made to preserve the Amazon through Jungle Keepers?
but we stopped using DDT ecosystems got healthier and the Eagles are rebounding. And now there's bald Eagles all over the place in New York. So it's like, you can, it's very clear that if we just stop cutting it and burning it and hunting it until it's gone, nature will take care of itself. It's very easy. It's a really, it's really a win-win here.
And so that's, that's what we're doing is working with the local people in the Amazon who are going, we just, we just want to save the thing that keeps us all alive. It's really simple. Yeah. Are there a lot of wildfires out there? No, there's actually none. There's no wildfires in the sense that the Amazon rainforest doesn't burn.
And so people get confused because they hear that in California, for example, that fires are part of the natural ecology of a forest. In the Amazon rainforest, there's no natural fires. Like you could, lightning could strike the Amazon. You could napalm the Amazon. It's not going to burn. Wow. Humans come in, they cut the trees, they leave them down. They let the tropical sun bake it for a while.
Then they burn it. Hmm. And then they can make a farm on there because rainforest soils are very nutrient poor. And so it's only after you cut the forest and burn the forest, then all of a sudden you can farm for like two years before you've used all the nutrients. That's it? That's it. It's a very, very bad investment. It's a terrible, terrible way to make a living. Yeah.
And so it's really just fixing this problem where you have Beef is a huge reason that the Amazon is being cleared. Soy is the next one. And just industry coming in and the illegal gold mining. But I think as a global society, we need to start thinking about protecting these ecosystems because we've gotten to this point where
historically speaking, we've never been at a turning point before where the entire earth's ecosystems are at risk of being altered in a way that is, that is irreversible. Yeah. And so that's something where, you know, just like in world war two, it was like we had to come together and go, okay, are we going to fix this problem or not?
And right now this is an even bigger issue where if we don't fix the problems that we are waging onto nature, um, then we're gonna have these incredible consequences. And if we can just, you know, we're very clever monkeys, but if we can show true intelligence and keep the systems that keep us alive safe, then the party's on. Yeah. And then, you know.
The ocean ecosystem also scares me with all the microplastics going on.
The ocean with microplastics, what we're doing to our fisheries, it's, the ocean is a whole other, I mean, but that's the thing. It's, that's, that's one thing right now that social media has shown me is that there's amazing work going on all over the world. Right. There's people protecting ocean ecosystems all over the world. There's people protecting elephants in Africa.
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Chapter 7: What are the ecological connections between the Amazon and global ecosystems?
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But that's like, because they don't just randomly attack people, right? They don't. It's very, very, very rare. I mean, it's like, I mean, like in Florida, like alligators very rarely actually eat somebody.
Yeah.
Very, very rarely. But when you have a lot of people and a lot of snakes moving through a jungle, sooner or later, lightning's going to strike and you get a hungry, giant old snake that hasn't eaten in a while. You get a little feeble old person, you know, bending down to get some water and making a little bit of splashing them.
Makes sense.
Have you had any sketchy encounters with snakes? I mean, I've been working with snakes, protecting snakes, educating people about snakes since, since before I was 20, like since for a very long time.
And then now with the anacondas, because they're the top of the riparian ecosystem, they're like, you know, if you think of fish and caiman and birds, anacondas are at the top of that as the apex predator of the Amazon river.
And so we've been trying to study these anacondas also because with the mercury contamination that comes from the illegal logging, they could be the ones that have the most bioaccumulation. So they could be an indicator species for how that's affecting the rest of the ecosystem. And so we've found some huge anacondas, absolutely massive ones.
And the first time that I jumped on a large anaconda, and again, we're trying to restrain them. We're looking at why, is there any baseline data for... populations of anacondas? How many of them are out there? Are they endangered? Are we losing anacondas? We don't know. And what's the reason that we don't know is that they're living in places that scientists don't want to go. Right.
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Chapter 8: What role does wildlife conservation play in maintaining the Amazon?
So that's like, I mean, he's, he's doing business.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're super smart. Yeah. I saw, I saw, I think it was a gibbon in Indonesia that would sit, he sat at the, at the, over the doorway to a bar and he would steal cigarette packs out of people's shirts and smoke them. He was addicted to cigarettes.
That's crazy. Yeah. And if people tried to get their cigarettes back, he would. Yeah. Yeah. It was very scary. Yeah. I've seen those black market videos on YouTube where like someone will have a hidden camera, pull up to an animal black market. It's super sad seeing that stuff, man. No, it's terrible. Yeah. They belong in the wild. Yeah. Locked up in cages. Are they selling them out there too?
Honestly, where I work is so far off the beaten track that we don't see a lot of that. And again, now that we have this huge jungle keepers reserve, we're making sure that there's not people coming in and taking the animals out of the forest. We're protecting the animals. And so the only thing is, you know, the local people, the local people still eat monkeys, but that's, that's what they've done.
Yeah. Yeah. There's no other, there's no cows out there.
Well, that's the thing you want them. It's actually, it helps when people are connected to the ecosystem to a degree, right? If we're, If people are managing our salmon stocks and keeping the rivers healthy because they know that we all depend on those, well, then we have a vested interest in keeping the rivers healthy. So then if a company comes and go, we want to damn this river.
No, all of us depend on that. And that's the type of thing that we need. So when these local people are modernizing, they're trying to figure out how to, you know, we always tell them like we have sustainable amounts of hunting of deer. And on the East Coast, that's an easy one. We grew up with that. And it's like, because we monitor how many deer there are. We give deer tags.
We know that we're not depleting the deer populations too much. We're actually caring for them. And so it's the same thing there where it's like, you guys can continue your native way of life. It's just, you just got to make sure that you're not wiping out species. which as technology gets introduced, people that were hunting with bows and arrows and fish hooks start bringing nets.
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