My last evening in the Amazon. It's late but nothing seems to be sleeping. Little
things. Big things. Everywhere I look life stacked on life. I feel so small a lone
heartbeat swallowed by the enormity of it all.
Woke up thinking about some places i've been. Things I've seen.
People say i'm lucky. Maybe. But I chose to be a traveller. To invest in experiences not things. Be the
first in, and the last out. Sweaty the wet, the soft. And the wild.
It's so much fun.
But this jungle it's slowing me down and making my mind sweat. Two million square miles of
the densest life on earth. How many human breaths come out of these plants every day?
So rich. So fragile. It's like the end never stops beginning.
And everywhere look I hear stories of its demise. Illegal mining illegal
deforestation. Poaching animals. Can I do anything to help protect this place?
Forest degradation is speeding up deforestation is speeding up
Whatever scale of magnitude you're looking at you're looking at an ecosystem. They kill trees
If you mine in the area you killed the whole ecosystem
The miners the people working with wood they shouldn't hunt it.
Travel has got to be more than a bucket list.
The 280 species of trees and of those eighty of them have edible fruits
looks like the onus is on us to find ways that people can actually make more
money by preserving or restoring the forest than by cutting it down so we're
the ones that have to be creative ecotourism in a selfish way is like
getting to see this place through new eyes every time somebody comes.
Can I have some more chocolate? *laughs* Yea, absolutely.
There are 8,000 hectares of forest at the Eco Musa site
and 22 families that depend on the rubber tapping project.
When someone pays for a product made from
this rubber what they're actually doing is buying a story.
This rubber creates income that gives communities an incentive to conserve
this forest rather than to destroy it because they have limited options to
support themselves.
It was interesting to see this process going on.
Where they are not even harming the tree and then in the distance they hear chainsaws going
off in the background they're just chopping down these trees left and right
and these guys well they've become the Guardian of the rainforest.
Oh wow
I realized that by traveling to this community we can not only help these
people to have another income but we can give them a chance to show what they're
doing and that's not just working with rubber but to demonstrate their pride in
keeping these trees alive.
If this project were to stop today.
There would be nothing. No forest, maybe a cattle ranch, or a papaya plantation.
Strip away the noise and it all becomes so clear. Travel is not just about what and how.
it should be about why.
So the community of (...)
carries these for miles
C'mon, I mean he has done it a few times
From these huge trees a Brazil nut fruit falls to the ground and then it's
collected
It's how you do it
This is the champ right here. World record.
5 seconds, 10 Cocos
Brazil nut trees can't be harvested they only flourish in a healthy wild
ecosystem the income generated from this product helps these people preserve this
forest in its natural state
a responsible travelers present can give these communities more options to
protect their wild places I don't think I'm alone we can be the pressure to keep
it going demand supply I want to be the pulse
that helps this forest live rather than help it die