(upbeat music)
The first thing I think of when you say Amazon
is blue tape and too much bubble wrap.
You say Amazon, I think Prime.
Tall, beautiful women,
then Jeff Bezos, then the forest.
Long before Jeff Bezos,
bubble wrap and porch pirates,
there was, and is, another Amazon.
The real Amazon.
The Amazon is a place of statistics
that are so extraordinary that they're scarcely believable.
There are obviously other rainforests,
but this is by far the largest.
It's larger than the next two rainforests combined.
There are something like 400 billion trees there.
It's also a place of legendary riches.
It's about finding the golden city, the golden king.
And innumberable dangers.
It's just millions of years of evolution
where everything either wants to be a predator
or doesn't want to be prey.
For centuries, it has attracted fortune seekers
and adventurers from all over the world.
From gold hungry Spanish conquerors,
to audacious ex presidents,
to wine guzzling long distance swimmers.
This is the extraordinary story of the Amazon,
revealed through numbers.
How we've used it, how we've abused it
and 200 billion reasons why we have to save it.
Understanding the Amazon is key
to understanding our survival as a species.
(upbeat music)
It's nearly impossible
to exaggerate the sheer size of the Amazon rainforest.
You can fly over it hour after hour
and see nothing but rain forest from the horizon on.
It's just stunning.
The Amazon is the greatest expanse
of tropical forest on the planet.
It's a universe unto itself.
But the forest
isn't the only number one around.
It also happens to have the world's
most powerful river running through it.
It's the second largest river in the world,
second only to the Nile,
and, in terms of volume, it's the largest.
The mighty Amazon River
is more than 4,000 miles long
and channels 20% of the world's total fresh water.
Starting from the Andes mountains
and ending in the Atlantic Ocean.
Wowza!
The surrounding Amazon rainforest
is a whopping 3.2 million square miles.
It's this immense physical space
in which you could put pretty much all of the United States.
If the Amazon River began in California,
it would come out in New York.
It's that big.
(gentle music)
But, for all its size and strength,
the Amazon is shrinking fast.
In the last 50 years, we've lost about 18%
of the Amazon to deforestation.
(chainsaw buzzing) Timber!
An area larger than France.
Sacre Bleu!
In 2020 alone,
some five million acres were cut down.
That's an area the size of Israel.
Oy vey!
As we see accelerating deforestation in the Amazon,
that's a huge loss for the ecology of the planet.
If you clear too much forest,
you can get an ecological collapse.
And we're closer to that tipping point than we would like.
(upbeat music)
How did the Amazon become so important?
Let's start with the powerhouse Amazon River,
fed by more than 1100 tributaries.
Every second, the river blasts more than 700,000 cubic feet
of water into the Atlantic Ocean.
That's over three million gallons every minute,
or the equivalent of 5,500 Olympic sized swimming pools.
(whistle blowing) That's a lot of laps.
The amount of water that flows into the Atlantic
every second would allow about 500 people
to have a bath a week for 325 million years.
The immense outflow
blossoms into the Amazon plume,
a massive expanse of the Atlantic
dominated by the river's freshwater discharge.
Water flowing into the Atlantic from the mouth
of the Amazon can be drunk 150 kilometers off shore.
The Amazon rainforest
has been around for about 10 million years.
The forest straddles the equator.
Here, the sun hits the Earth from directly above
at a 90 degree angle.
The intense solar energy evaporates moisture
trapped in the lush jungle growth,
which falls again as rain,
as much as 10 feet per year.
The native soil in the Amazon isn't all that fertile.
The soil in rainforests actually tends to be fairly poor.
It's a very thin soil, most of the nutrients
are leaching out of it continuously
from the movements of water.
But the forest has a secret weapon.
Each year, Atlantic winds blow
182 million tons of dust from here, the Sahara Desert,
towards South America.
27.7 million tons of it settle over the Amazon,
enough to fill two million dump trucks.
The dust delivers 22,000 tons
of fertilizing phosphorus to the Amazon soil.
And the result is an explosion of life
unlike anywhere else on Earth.
(gentle music)
There's just a thousand shades of green,
a kind of infinitude of form, shape and texture.
10% Of the over 1.7 million known species
live here, making it the most biodiverse region on Earth.
It's almost as if you have to close your eyes
and just listen to the hum of biological activity.
The wonder of the Amazon
wasn't lost on its first inhabitants,
who tagged an eight mile stretch of cliffs in Columbia
depicting the rich life around them.
A little more red.
The cliff murals date back
from about 12,500 BCE.
We're able to date this rock art
because of what's being depicted in it.
We see paintings of mastodons and giant sloth,
species that went extinct before the end of the Pleistocene.
It's an astonishing history
of the prehistoric Amazon in red pigment.
This area of cliffs has been called
the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon.
I've never heard of this Michelangelo.
(upbeat music)
Today, in the Brazilian Amazon alone,
scientists discover about one new species every other day.
The diversity of plant, animal, insect,
fungi, and birds is what is so extraordinary.
There's been expedition after expedition
to try to document stuff, but it remains,
still, a place of enigmas and ciphers.
Insects are the undisputed kings here,
making up 90% of all species in the Amazon.
Just one square mile can have
more than 50,000 insect species.
It's estimated the Amazon region is home
to around 2.5 million in total,
although only around 8,000 have been identified.
You lie down and your body practically is lifted up
and carried away by ants.
Are you saying that I could lay down in the Amazon
and not have to walk?
Cause that's not bad.
The ant thing?
Oh.
The thoughts of being covered in bugs,
unless I'm winning $50,000 on "Fear Factor",
it makes absolutely no sense to me.
The Amazon River is also brimming with life.
Some of it can give people nightmares.
The black caiman can grow to as big as 16.5 feet long.
From 2000 to 2016, 23 fatal attacks
by the black caiman were recorded in the Amazon.
The electric eel can generate a pulse of 860 volts,
enough to cause cardiac arrest in humans.
The toothy red bellied piranha packs a powerful bite.
(yelping)
Strong enough to cut through a human finger bone
like a pair of bolt cutters.
And then there's the candiru.
It's one of only two species on Earth
that survive solely on blood,
the other being the vampire bat.
Usually what it does is it swims through
the gill chamber of a fish,
gets what it needs and then it swims on out.
On rare occasions, it can swim inside of a human.
It goes into any orifice.
What?
(upbeat music)
In 1897, George Boulenger, a Belgian zoologist,
presents a candiru to the Zoological Society of London.
Here you go.
Oh what a cute little fishy.
He also describes the extreme lengths
some Amazon men will go to rid themselves of a candiru.
They believe that the only way to stop it
from reaching the bladder, where it causes inflammation
and ultimately death, is to immediately amputate the penis.
(screaming) Not my willy.
Did you just tell me a fish can fly up someone's pee-hole?
Would I go swimming in the Amazon River?
Hell no.
There's piranhas, weird things, you can't see the bottom.
No.
That stuff only thrills white people.
Why am I inside a piranha's living room?
(upbeat music)
The Amazon River
is filled with scary creatures
but that doesn't stop people from swimming in it.
In 2007, one man decides to swim the whole thing.
His name is Martin Strel, an eccentric Slovenian swimmer
who rose to fame after completing massive distances
on some of the world's longest rivers.
In 2000, Strel swam the Danube in central Europe.
Two years later, he conquered the much longer Mississippi.
Two years after that, he upped the ante once again
by swimming the Yangtze River in China.
Phew, that's a lot of swimming.
(upbeat music)
But the Amazon is unlike
anything Strel has attempted before.
I'm gonna guess Martin Strel is the kind of person that,
once he sets his mind to something,
he could not be dissuaded
because there are many, many reasons
why he should not have attempted to swim the entire Amazon.
Besides things like sharks and piranha,
there's a whole universe of microbial life
that can enter the body and do serious harm.
Oh my God he's crazy.
To protect himself, Strel wears a wet suit
coated with lanolin and gasoline.
Lube me up fellas.
On February 1st, 2007,
(upbeat music) 52 year old Strel
plunges into the Amazon's headwaters in Peru
and begins front crawling his way towards the Atlantic.
He had his teammates pouring blood
on other sides of the river-
Ew.
To try to lure away piranhas.
Here fishy, fishy.
And yet still ended up getting bitten.
The gasoline, it does nothing.
Strel swims an exhausting 10 hours a day,
burning 10,000 to 12,000 calories in that time.
The average man burns 2,500 daily.
Alcohol is not generally considered
a performance enhancer, but Strel says
that he was drinking his local Slovenian wine
and that was a magic elixir for him.
Bottoms up.
Up to two bottles a day to help him going forward.
Despite the extra fortification,
he ends up sick and delirious
from the microbes he also swallows.
(retching)
66 days and 3,273 miles later,
Martin Strel enters the Atlantic Ocean.
He's conquered the Amazon, but at a heavy price.
By the time Strel reached the finish line,
he was not in good condition.
I'm so tired.
He was dehydrated and famished, he was bitten up,
he was infected with parasites.
He needed to go to the hospital.
Thankfully he does recover.
(crowd cheering)
(gentle music)
Martin Strel had a rough ride through the Amazon.
Compared to others though, he got off easy.
Case in point, Teddy Roosevelt.
Bison hunter.
(gun firing)
War hero.
26th President of the United States
who took a bullet in the chest and lived to tell the tale.
December, 1913, Roosevelt has just lost
the 1912 presidential election.
So, like any 55 year old in a midlife crisis,
he decides to do something really, really reckless.
Theodore Roosevelt had a pattern in his life.
So again and again, when he would face tragedy or loss,
he would throw himself into these
very, very difficult and dangerous situations.
Accompanied by his 23 year old son Kermit
and a veteran Brazilian explorer
named Colonel Candido Rondon, Roosevelt sets out to map
a newly discovered Amazon tributary
and name it after himself.
Easy enough, right?
Well, the problems start with their dugout canoes.
They're going down basically class four rapids
in these hollowed out tree trunks.
(screaming) Oh my god!
Help! -: These canoes suck.
They would get to points where
it was impossible to get them through
and so then, then they would have to
haul them through the rainforest.
It's early honey.
The delays put a huge strain on their supplies.
My my that's a big gun.
And forced them to hunt and forage for food.
I'll take mine medium rare.
But this is just a taste of what's to come.
(dramatic music) One night, as they're clearing
a spot on the riverbank to camp,
Roosevelt comes face to face, or toe to toe,
with one of the deadliest creatures in the Amazon.
(hissing)
He steps on a coral snake
that reaches out and bites him.
And there was no cure for a bite from a coral snake.
If someone were poisoned by one,
they would just wait for them to die.
And it was a really terrible death.
Roosevelt was very, very lucky
because he was wearing thick leather boots
and the venom went into the heel of the boot
instead of into him.
As they continue down river,
Roosevelt and his team are pursued by the Cinta Larga,
a local indigenous tribe.
Anyone get the feeling we're being watched?
At one point,
Rondon and his dog were walking ahead.
Come on boy.
And Rondon's dog went in front of him
and they killed the dog.
And Rondon realized that it could have been him.
The Conta Larga had every reason to kill them,
they were obviously a potential threat,
and, if they had decided to attack,
it's very, very, very likely that Roosevelt
and all of his men, everyone on the expedition
would have been killed.
As the expedition
inches its way toward the finish line,
Teddy Roosevelt is nearly at death's door.
One day, Roosevelt cuts his leg on a rock,
this gash and you're in the Amazon,
there are all kinds of ways that it can get infected
and it did and he got horribly, horribly sick
and he was delirious and he was mumbling.
Roosevelt had brought
a lethal dose of morphine just in case.
And he decides it's time to take it.
He doesn't want to be a danger to other men on the trip.
Only reason he didn't take that lethal dose of morphine
was because his son was with him
and he realized that the best way to save his son
was to let his son save him.
Let his son find a way to get him,
Theodore Roosevelt, out of the Amazon alive.
Let's go home boy.
On April 26th, 1914,
the battered expedition finally emerges from the jungle.
Of the 22 men who started the journey, 19 survive,
including Teddy Roosevelt.
But the Amazon isn't finished with him yet.
By the time Roosevelt emerged from the Amazon rainforest,
he was just a shell of his former self.
He had lost 50 pounds and he was incredibly weak
and he never would fully recover.
And he lived only another five years.
But hey, at least he got his river.
Roosevelt wasn't the first outsider
to slap a name tag on an unmarked river.
Let's rewind the tape four centuries
to see how the Amazon got its name.
The man responsible?
Spanish conquistador, Francisco de Orellana
We'll just call him Frank.
He was actually a cousin of Pizarro,
who was the conqueror of Peru
and the Pizarro family were frantic conquistadors,
bloodthirsty and goldthirsty.
In 1541, he leads a massive expedition
to find and conquer the mythical city of gold, El Dorado.
De Orellana didn't go into the Amazon
with the intention of having
any positive interactions with local peoples.
He was there to extract resources.
The 243 man expedition
doesn't exactly pack light.
They take over 200 horses,
over 2000 pigs,
2000 dogs,
and more than 4,000 indigenous people
as porters and servants.
Along the way, Frank stumbles upon indigenous villages.
They are not made of gold but he is not picky.
The Conquistadores gotta conquer apparently.
The locals have other ideas,
they fight back hard.
In a particular conflict with local villagers,
he came across some female warriors
who were particularly ferocious and,
understandably, didn't want him there.
Outmatched, Frank calls the retreat.
They left enough of a mark on him
to remind him of the Amazonian warriors of Greek mythology
and he named the area after them.
That's how the Amazon got its name.
But, as bizarre as the Amazon women
must have looked to Frank,
imagine how weird he looked to them.
Seeing people in armor probably made them think
that these strange people look kind of like insects.
(upbeat music)
Big Frank scuttles away,
heading east along the newly christened Amazon River.
It's the beginning of a 3,100 mile odyssey
that will carry him through the heart
of an ancient rainforest civilization.
(upbeat music)
What they describe is an inhabited world.
He didn't see a sort of forest primeval.
It was very heavily populated.
Massive cities along the riverbank
stretching as far as 15 miles.
Inhabited areas that take a full two days
and two nights to pass through.
We have an idea that the Amazon is this pristine jungle
and that there's very few human touches to it,
but that's not accurate at all.
There's been a million plus people living in the area
for thousands of years.
When Frank passes through,
there are anywhere between six and 20 million
indigenous people living in the region.
Incredibly, more than 100 of these ancient cultures
still exist today.
Pretty much unchanged for hundreds of years.
The Amazon is one of just two places on Earth,
where there are still groups of people
who have had no contact with the outside world.
I think it's actually cool that there are people
in the Amazon who have never used Amazon.
I can't go a day without my cell phone.
It'd be such a bummer to be cut off
from the outside world.
And then it's like, hey, we're happy to meet you.
We're burning the planet to the ground,
you got 10 years left.
The vast cultural gulf with outsiders
often makes contact more than a little awkward.
(gentle music)
In 1955, five American missionaries.
Hey fellas, let's go save us some souls.
Set out to spread Christianity
to the Huaorani people of the jungles of Ecuador.
This story, in its essence, it's repeated so many times,
essentially it involves evangelicals
who see an indigenous group,
want to save them from the hell
they feel like they would inevitably face.
(screaming)
(chuckling)
So they set up camp near Huaorani territory
and start airdropping gifts for them.
Who wants presents?
They fly around in tight circles with the gifts
in a canvas bucket at the end of a 1,500 foot rope.
The first drop contains a kettle,
some buttons and rock salt.
They drop this stuff down,
the indigenous population takes it and you know,
doesn't seem to be particularly aggressive.
Then they start expecting to have gifts given back to them
and they think it's a good sign
when other things are left in exchange.
They like us, praise the Lord.
The missionaries want to meet
the Huaorani face-to-face and come up with a plan
that they think will ease everybody into it.
Got to get my good side.
They drop eight by 10
glossy photos of themselves,
hoping the Huaorani people will recognize them in person
and go, ah, these must be the nice guys
that are sending us the presents.
But it doesn't go as planned.
Two Huaorani, a young man and a young woman,
pluck up the courage to visit the missionaries.
They tried to be friendly,
they take the young man on an airplane ride
to show him his village from above.
That's where you live.
It's also a bit of showing off I imagine.
And they hope that this is going to put them
on a positive standing to make
further contact with the community.
What the missionaries don't know
is that the young woman's family
is furious she visited them.
To deflect attention, the young man
claims the missionaries had attacked them.
Two days later, a pair of Huaorani women appear
near the missionary camp.
The evangelicals think wow, it's so great,
they're coming out, they're going to talk to us.
And then someone says, "Hello, it's so nice to see you."
That's when the Huaorani spring their trap
and spear the five men to death.
(dramatic music)
It may seem like the missionaries are the victims here
because they're the ones that ended up murdered.
But we have to question why they were there
in the first place.
They went into this community to try to convert them
and to say that your religious experience is wrong,
let us show you the right way.
Historically indigenous people
have had by far the most to fear
from contact with outsiders.
Today, the Amazon region is home
to more than 30 million people,
but only about nine percent,
or 2.7 million of the population, is indigenous.
It's important to realize that the interaction
between white people and indigenous populations
has a deep history of, not only loss of life,
but loss of worlds.
The Spanish and Portuguese
first arrived in the region around the year 1500.
Land ho!
They brought guns
and other weapons used to kill many indigenous people.
But they brought something even more dangerous.
The disease was much more deadly.
Largely smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza.
They certainly died in vast numbers over a period of years.
Less than 100 years after Europeans arrived,
the Amazon's indigenous population was reduced by 90%.
(gentle music)
Many of these dangers still exist today.
(speaking foreign language)
Almir Surui is Chief of the Paiter Surui tribe,
who have traditionally occupied a 957 square mile tract
of Amazonian rainforest in Western Brazil.
(speaking foreign language)
Losing indigenous lives
also means losing the incredible cultures and innovations
they have refined over millennia.
(upbeat music)
Most of us think of the Amazon jungle
as wild and overgrown, the opposite of farmland,
but recent studies have found that that's not the case.
Really?
What's interesting in the Amazon,
we've actually discovered areas that have
very good fertile soil and that's unusual in a rainforest.
And we now recognize that this was
intentional human terraforming.
They were actively managing the soil there
to make it better for agriculture.
It turns out that about 12%
of the Amazon's dry forests have been farmed
by indigenous communities for 5,000 years.
Well that's a long time.
And their approach to agriculture
is radically different from what
most of the world practices today.
Modern agriculture is a monocultural agriculture.
You basically take this complex world
and reduce it to a couple of species.
Indigenous agriculture is rooted
in poly culture and agroforestry.
So you don't just have one of your trees growing
and one of your root crops, but that you have both
the mixturing of the wild and the tame.
(speaking foreign language)
Conventional agriculture plants crops
that are harvested every one to three years
and requires huge swaths of forest to be cut down.
Like, that's bad, right?
Indigenous Amazonians plant crops
that can keep producing for 20 years
and grow in harmony with the forest.
(speaking foreign language)
But, over the years, outsiders have been
more than happy to tear the Amazon apart to make big bucks.
(upbeat music)
The Amazon is incredibly rich in natural resources,
which has been both a blessing and a curse.
There's just an unbelievable variety.
But, wherever there's an opportunity,
it's immediately exploited.
One of the first resources
to attract greedy outsiders?
Number 79 on the periodic table of elements,
gold.
Ooh shiny.
(gentle music)
Myths about gold in the Amazon
have been around for as long as we've had contact
with people in the Amazon.
The Amazon gold rush is the longest in history.
It lasts two centuries from the late 1600s
to the late 1800s.
In Brazil, you have one of the largest extractions of gold
that occurs until the late 20th century.
Today, demand for Amazon gold is on the rebound
and has been rising steadily since the early 2000s.
The result?
Some 500,000 small, mostly illegal, mining operations.
They are responsible for up to 10%
of deforestation in the region.
It's terrible for the local environment and people.
This environmental exploitation
is not something in the past, it's happening right now.
The idea that we're doing this for gold,
what do we do with gold?
We take gold out of the ground to smelt it into blocks
that we then put back into the ground in bank vaults.
That's something indigenous people just do not understand.
Gold isn't the only resource
to ignite a global frenzy for a piece of the Amazon.
For one of the most coveted of all,
look no further than these trees.
(upbeat music)
There are three species of trees that yield a white latex
that became the source of caucho, of rubber.
Rubber is kind of an amazing material.
Though it's something that we get from plants,
it's elastic, it's flexible,
you can do so many things with it.
So when rubber as a compound was discovered in the Amazon,
it was very high value.
The arrival of the automobile
sends the Amazon rubber industry into overdrive.
(upbeat music)
1908, Henry Ford would be making
the first of 15 million Model T's
and every one of them needed rubber.
And the only source was in the Amazon.
By 1910, rubber makes up
over 40% of all Brazil's exports.
Harvesting it is a massive undertaking.
In order to get to the trees worth tapping,
you had to mobilize labor by the thousands.
The vast majority of those tappers
are the indigenous people who know where the best trees are.
Over here!
The horrific, barbaric treatment of rubber tappers
unleashed by barons defies imagining.
A priest once said that, "The best that could be said
of a white man is he didn't kill his Indians for sport."
By the end of the boom,
for every ton of rubber produced,
10 indigenous people would die.
To speed up production, Amazon rubber barons
start growing trees in plantations.
But the seeds of the boom's destruction
have already been sown.
Let's wind the clock back to the 1870s.
The Brazilian government worked very hard
to maintain control over the supply chain of rubber.
But the British worked quite hard to get control of it.
It had been trying to get seeds out of Brazil for ever,
but the rubber seed has a lot of oil
and it rots very quickly.
That all changes in 1876,
when a man named Henry Wickham pulls off
the heist of the century.
Wickham was able to actually smuggle
rubber seeds out of Brazil,
the Brazilian government had an embargo on exporting them,
but he found a way to sneak
some of these out of the country
quick enough for the seeds to survive.
Wickham smuggles 70,000 seeds
from Brazil to the U.K.
They get planted inside the hot houses of Kew Gardens,
where 2,700 of them sprout.
Once the seedlings were established,
they were shipped, destined for Singapore.
Because of this act of industrial espionage,
Britain was able to become a huge player
in the world rubber market.
It's a devastating blow
to the Brazilian producers,
whose fate is all but sealed in 1933,
when the Amazon's rubber plantations
are consumed by a leaf blight.
It was as if God had a blowtorch.
The south American leaf blight
just ravaged the entire investment.
By 1940, 95% of the world's rubber supply
is being grown in British owned
plantations in Southeast Asia.
But in 1941, one seismic event
will bounce the rubber industry
right back into the Amazon court.
On December 7th, 1941,
when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
and within six weeks, the Japanese had taken control
of 97% of the world's rubber supply.
It was the biggest crisis of World War II.
A single Sherman tank
requires a half ton of rubber,
a heavy bomber, a full ton.
Some warships contain as many as 20,000 rubber parts.
Don't want any leaks.
It was an extraordinary crisis
upon almost the entire fate of the Allied cause
and, indeed, the fate of civilization literally hinged.
The Allies desperately need rubber.
They have no choice but to turn to the original source.
Hey guys, no hard feelings?
The U.S. offers Brazil $100 per tapper
in return for restarting the Amazon's rubber industry.
Brazil quickly recruits more than 55,000 people
to tap rubber trees deep in the jungle.
They become known as the rubber soldiers.
We see a lot of child labor at this time.
Children, as young as five being sent
into the forest to gather rubber.
The average tapper's
workday starts before dawn.
They're given only a kerosene lamp for the gloom
and a machete for bushwhacking.
Lucky recruits get a rifle for protection.
The rubber tappers would be working
for the Allied and the war effort.
And it was seen, not as the oppression of young men,
but rather about young patriotic men saving the country
through their labors in the tropical forest.
The day to day was not nearly as illustrious.
Tappers spend their morning
scouring the forest for rubber trees to tap.
There's one.
In the afternoon,
they retrace their steps to collect the sap
and haul it back to camp in the dark.
Even then, the fun is only getting started.
Back at the camp, they have to cure the day's rubber haul
on a paddle over a smokey fire.
Once that's done, it's finally time to eat.
I'm so hungry!
However, the Brazilian government
isn't serving up any rations.
So dinner is whatever they managed to bag
in between tapping trees,
no matter how unappetizing.
(gentle music)
People were worked so hard and in dangerous conditions
that they were heavily exploited.
25,000 Brazilian troops serve on the front lines
in the Second World War.
457 lose their lives.
But vastly more Brazilians die on the homefront
thanks to the demand for rubber.
30,000 rubber soldiers make the supreme sacrifice,
a staggering 55% of those recruited.
(upbeat music)
The Amazon rainforest helped save the free world
from fascism in the 1940s.
Now we need it again to save
the entire human race from extinction.
By means of a 200 gigaton secret locked in its leaves.
(upbeat music)
Is the Amazon dangerous?
Yes.
So-so dangerous yes.
Everything, everything is dangerous.
Anywhere where there is something
that is trying to eat me is immediately a problem.
It's no secret that the Amazon
has many ways to kill us.
What's less known is that it may have
infinitely more ways to save us.
It's a story that starts
with the Amazon's most dangerous creature.
The most dangerous creature in the Amazon.
There are so many options to choose from.
Well, aside from the penis fish, maybe an anaconda.
It's probably some mushroom that you accidentally step on
and then you just explode.
Or your skin falls off.
Or both.
(gentle music) (hissing)
There's lots of scary and dangerous animals in the Amazon
but probably the most deadly is the mosquito.
You wanna piece of me?
How dangerous is the mosquito?
Well, sharks kill around six people every year.
Venomous snakes, they kill an estimated 50,000.
But even they are nothing compared to the deadly mosquito.
According to the World Health Organization, in 2019,
there were 229 million cases of malaria worldwide,
resulting in 409,000 deaths.
Malaria is a parasite carried inside mosquitoes,
and it's still one of the major causes
of death in the world today.
Most of the mortality occurs in children.
So control of this is very important.
It's also preventable and treatable.
Where did the first
malaria treatment come from?
The Amazon of course.
(upbeat music)
The story goes that, in 1631,
the Spanish Countess of Cinchona,
who was married to the Viceroy of Peru,
got sick with terrible chills.
Oh so cold.
And a dangerously high fever,
textbook malaria symptoms.
The count turns to his doctors,
who are Jesuit priests, for help.
What're we gonna do?
The Jesuits acted as if they just had
some brilliant inside information.
Don't worry, we've got just the thing.
Jesuits, in general, were very interested in medicine.
They kept medicinal gardens in Europe.
The Jesuits rush off
and get a cinnamon colored bark,
which they grind up into a fine powder.
That'll do just fine.
They mix that into a drink
and then hurry back to the countess.
Down the hatch.
It was a very bitter, disgusting thing to drink.
But it does the trick.
The countess is cured of malaria.
Well, that's a relief.
And the Jesuits look like geniuses.
Except it might not have happened that way.
What they didn't reveal was
where they got that information, which rather unsurprisingly
came from local indigenous people
who have known for hundreds of years how to treat malaria.
Today, the tree that grows that miraculous bark
is known as the Cinchona tree, after the countess.
Cinchona is in the Rubiaceae family,
the coffee family, and the bark yields quinine,
which is a naturally occurring antimalarial agent.
By the 1640s,
the Jesuits are exporting Cinchona from Peru back to Europe,
where it becomes known as Jesuit's Powder,
the wonder cure for malaria.
Step right up, step right up.
Get your malaria cure here.
But the Jesuits knew where it really came from.
It's the first recorded treatment for the deadly illness
and its importance can't be overstated.
Quinine was one of the major medical discoveries.
You can kind of think of it as equal to
the discovery of penicillin in that it really handled
a global scourge extremely well
when nothing else seemed to work.
The Amazon is the largest natural pharmacy
and much of the flora has yielded
some of our more important drugs.
In the 1940s, one man's efforts
will unlock the Amazon's enormous curative potential,
(upbeat music)
Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes.
In fact, it's the World War II rubber crisis
that lands Schultes a ticket to the jungle.
Schultes was sent into the Amazon
to find a way to break the Asian monopoly,
to find a way to grow rubber in plantations in the Americas.
While looking for
disease resistant rubber trees,
Schultes collects and catalogs as many different
plant species as he can find.
I'll take one of those and one of those.
Oh this one is good too.
But, of course he doesn't do it on his own.
Schultes comes to these societies
who have never seen an outsider coming to them humbly,
not as a master, but as a student,
revering them as the teacher.
He was the first to draw attention
to the extraordinary knowledge of those
who know the forest best, the indigenous people.
He showed that they were true natural philosophers.
Guided by indigenous people,
Schultes then puts his own extraordinary skills to work.
Most of us, when we see a tropical forest,
we see a series of shades of green,
but Schultes could detect diversity
just by holding a blossom to the light.
Schultes collected roughly 30,000 individual collections.
That's also a lot.
But with each collection,
there could have been as many as
a hundred individual specimens.
Each thought to be a new species.
During his 12 years in the Amazon,
Schultes collects 2000 plants.
Which later turned out to have
previously unknown medicinal properties.
Today, 25% of all medicinal drugs
are derived from rainforest plants.
The U.S. National Cancer Institute
has identified about 3000 plants
with anti-cancer properties.
70% of them are found in the rainforest.
But a growing worldwide obsession with one animal
threatens to destroy this vital resource.
The cow or, more specifically, its meat.
The world loves beef.
Each year, we produce about 67 million tons of it.
But all that tasty meat
comes at a steep environmental cost.
If you look at the carbon footprint of cattle,
it's one of the worst things you could grow.
It requires so much forest to be cut down
in order to produce so little beef.
Brazil is the number two
beef producing nation in the world,
raising about 215 million head of cattle per year.
And that production has hit the Amazon hard.
You might assume it's logging,
but actually 80% of deforestation in the Amazon
is because of cattle production.
To increase the amount of grazing land,
they have to burn down the Amazon forest to create space.
By some estimates,
200 square feet of rainforest is destroyed
for every pound of beef produced.
That's the size of an extra large parking space.
The average head of cattle produces 490 pounds of beef.
Holy cow.
That's about one Manhattan block per cow.
By burning down these trees, you're immediately
introducing carbon dioxide into the environment
and then the cattle moving in
are a major contributor to methane production.
So we're seeing multiple greenhouse gases
being produced through cattle raising.
Remember the miracle cure for malaria?
Our insatiable appetite for beef is robbing us
of an untold number of future medicines.
Maybe I'll stick with tofu.
(gentle music)
Every time you destroy an acre of forest,
the level of biological knowledge that is put at risk,
it's like burning down a library.
It's not just that we're transforming
this priceless treasure of nature.
We cut it down to create meat.
Do we really need more meat?
Stop eating beef, find a cure for cancer.
I would stop, it'd be hard.
I love meat.
I really like steak.
Can we like figure out the whole cancer cure thing
and then go back to the steak or is it one or the other?
If that isn't enough,
the rainforest contains 200 billion other reasons
to stop cutting it down now.
The Amazon represents about 54%
of the total rain forest on Earth,
and it plays a vital role in maintaining a stable climate.
The Amazon is often described as the lungs of the planet.
So, as we see accelerating deforestation in the Amazon,
that's fewer trees to uptake carbon dioxide.
In its trees and soils, the Amazon stores
the equivalent of four to five years worth
of human made carbon emissions,
up to 200 gigatons or 200 billion tons of carbon.
That sure is a whole lot of zeros.
(speaking foreign language)
The Amazon is the unique product
of millions of years of Earth's evolution
and it's irreplaceable.
It's something that's absolutely unique to our world.
And the idea that we would just let it burn up
or dismiss it in any way is just a tragedy.
If we can't figure out how to save the Amazon,
we don't have much hope for the future of humanity.
But there's still time
for us to flip the script.
(gentle music)
I think it's easy to get really
discouraged about the future of the Amazon
but there also are positive stories too.
There are a number of species
that were on the brink of extinction that,
through active interventions, have been saved.
Like the golden lion tamarins for instance.
Mercifully, the Amazon remains a big place.
We have an initiative right now
called the Path of the Anaconda where we're trying to
create a single protected area that will go
from the Andes to the Atlantic
across the entire northern reaches of the Amazon.
(speaking foreign language)
There are reasons to be hopeful.
We just really need to be actively involved
in protecting this part of the world.
I honestly didn't realize that the Amazon
was so important to our planet.
But, if it goes, I'm guessing we're going to be next.
I'm pretty positive we'll be screwed.
Completely screwed.
It's not even like a question,
we would die without the Amazon
and so now I'm getting super nervous.
It's the end of the movie, credits are rolling,
we're all going home.
To our maker.
We don't want that.
Give a damn.