Rewildology

In June 1992, 179 nations made two pledges that still shape every international conservation agreement today, and thirty years later, the world's most important climate conference was held inside a tropical rainforest. What happens in those halls matters—but so does everything that happens after.

James Deutsch, CEO of Rainforest Trust, breaks down how a half-billion-dollar pledge helped catalyze the 30x30 target, why the Tropical Forests Forever Facility could fix a structural flaw in carbon finance, and where he sees the next window for real conservation progress.

Constanza Prieto Figelist, Legal Director for Latin America at the Earth Law Center, explains how a Peruvian court recognized the Marañón River as a subject of rights, and why four articles in Ecuador's constitution have stopped more destructive projects than years of protest ever could.

Catarina Nefertari of Amazônia de Pé was on the ground in Belém when COP30 arrived, and has spent years closing the distance between communities most affected by Amazon destruction and the rooms where decisions about its future are made.

This is the series finale of Rewilding Amazonia. The Amazon's next chapter is still being forged.

If this series changed how you see the Amazon, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Rio 1992 & the road to COP30
1:45 James Deutsch (Rainforest Trust)
4:03 The 30x30 pledge
5:07 How private conservation finance works
7:13 COP30 outcomes & the T Triple F
9:37 US funding withdrawal
11:23 Indigenous land rights
12:42 Constanza Prieto (Earth Law Center)
15:54 Criminalizing indigenous defenders
17:52 Rights of Nature & the Marañón River case
21:48 Catarina (Amazônia de Pé)
23:27 Brazil's fossil fuel dilemma
24:32 What COP30 delivered
28:25 Series closing: 22 voices, 6 countries
31:00 Call to action & outro

SUPPORT
This episode is supported by Rainforest Trust—protecting tropical forests and endangered wildlife since 1988. Through local partnerships, community engagement, and donor support, they've safeguarded over 66 million acres in almost 70 countries. Learn more at rainforesttrust.org.

CREDITS
Executive Producer & Host: Brooke Mitchell
Associate Producer & Music Composer: Brad Parsons

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Chapters

(00:00:03) - Rewilding Amazonia: When Policy Meets Reality
(00:03:34) - Rainforest Trust's role in global conservation targets
(00:10:58) - The guardianship of nature
(00:13:03) - The role law plays in the Amazon
(00:21:11) - COP 30: The fight for the Amazon
(00:29:24) - What motivates people to protect the forest?
(00:30:57) - Rewilding the Amazon: Stories from the Amazon

What does it take to make the Amazon worth more standing than gone? Not in theory—but in practice, on the ground, with real communities, real businesses, and real money. This episode of Rewilding Amazonia follows three people who have built economic models that answer that question from completely different angles.

Eduardo Nycander founded Rainforest Expeditions in Peru's Tambopata region in 1989—a community ecotourism joint venture with the Ese'eja people that has proven a healthy forest is worth more per hectare than any alternative land use. 

Drago Bozovich's company manages 183,000 hectares of FSC-certified forest in Madre de Dios, harvesting less than one tree per hectare every twenty years while running Brazil nut operations that provide year-round employment—and his company’s forests now have jaguar densities higher than Manu National Park. 

Isabel Felandro of Cool Earth is tackling a different problem: the communities with no product to sell and no income stable enough to resist the pressure to destroy what they have. Her answer is unconditional cash transfers—and the first conservation basic income pilot in the Peruvian Amazon is already showing results.

The economic case for the standing forest isn't idealism. It's evidence. If this episode changed how you think about conservation, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Would you like to give to Rewildology? Donate here: https://givebutter.com/supportrewildology

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Introduction: Dawn on the river
1:44 Eduardo Nycander: 35 years in the Amazon
3:53 Rainforest Expeditions: Building the business
6:02 Partnership with the Ese'Eja community of Infierno
8:41 Spreading the economic benefit
9:57 The macaw nesting crisis
12:39 Eduardo's legacy & training the wider region
14:08 Drago Bozovich: Three generations of Amazon forestry
15:43 FSC-certified sustainable harvesting explained
17:56 20 years later: The forest comes back
19:55 Brazil nuts & year-round employment
21:03 Jaguars denser than national parks
22:18 Isabel Felandro: From Cambridge to the field
25:05 Cool Earth's model: Direct cash to communities
26:22 The climate finance gap
28:09 Conservation basic income pilot
30:33 Early results: Less stress, more conservation
33:24 Economic stability & indigenous land defenders
35:20 Advocacy & the shift in climate finance
37:01 Conclusion: The economic case for the standing forest

CREDITS
Executive Producer & Host: Brooke Mitchell
Associate Producer & Music Composer: Brad Parsons

LISTEN TO THE FULL SERIES
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What does it cost to defend the Amazon? Not in dollars or hectares—but years spent in exile, family members taken in the night, court rulings that win on paper and go unenforced for nearly two decades. This episode of Rewilding Amazonia follows five people who have dedicated their lives to defending the Amazon.

Daniel Aristizábal, PIACI Process Director at the Amazon Conservation Team, works to protect indigenous communities that have chosen isolation from the outside world—and explains how they are now sitting on top of some of the most coveted mineral deposits on the continent.

Cristina Vollmer Burelli, founder of SOSOrinoco, documents Venezuela's state-sponsored illegal mining from exile—exposing how a government became the architect of its own people's destruction.

Hugo Jabini, Goldman Prize-winning Saamaka-Maroon leader from Suriname, tells the story of how his people fled slavery in 1690, built 74 communities across 1.4 million hectares of tropical forest, won a landmark ruling in the 2000s after years of legal battles—and are still waiting for full compliance 19 years later. 

Cesar Carrasco, Ese'eja lodge manager at Rainforest Expeditions in the Peruvian Amazon, survived the gold mines at 17 and spent three decades helping his community build an economic foundation that didn’t depend on extraction.

The episode closes with Rosa Espinoza—the chemical biologist and science communicator who grew up steeped in traditional ecological knowledge—and her belief that the deepest form of conservation is learning to live beautifully alongside nature.

If this story moved you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who cares about the Amazon.

Would you like to give to Rewildology? Donate here: https://givebutter.com/supportrewildology

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Support and Content Warning
00:42 Papaya Farm Front
02:09 Isolation as Choice
03:36 Quarantine and Territory
05:39 Policy Wins Under Fire
07:19 Green Minerals Dilemma
09:12 Venezuela Mining State
14:04 Gold Economy Trap
19:48 Suriname Logging Shock
21:27 Saamaka Rights Fight
27:39 Exile and COP30
31:27 Peru Mining and Mercury
35:40 Tourism and Culture
37:57 Live Beautifully Closing

SUPPORT
This episode is supported by Cool Earth, a charity that gives cash and data directly to Indigenous communities to protect rainforest and fight the climate crisis. Learn more at coolearth.org.

CREDITS
Executive Producer & Host: Brooke Mitchell
Associate Producer & Music Composer: Brad Parsons

LISTEN TO THE FULL SERIES
https://rewildology.com/episode-group/rewilding-amazonia/

SHOW NOTES & NEWSLETTER
Show notes & subscribe to newsletter, https://rewildology.com/

SUPPORT REWILDOLOGY
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The Amazon isn't just a forest. It's three interconnected systems that have taken forty million years to build, and all of them are under pressure. In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I set out to understand how the Amazon functions—not as a place on a map, but as a living system where atmosphere, water, and deep earth are in constant conversation.

Dr. Carlos Nobre, the Brazilian climate scientist who coined the concept of the Amazon's tipping point, explains how the forest engineers its own rainfall through "flying rivers"—invisible atmospheric currents carrying moisture across an entire continent—and what happens to the global climate if we push past the 20% deforestation threshold he first identified in 1988.

Jimena Valderrama, National Geographic Explorer and scientist with Colombia's Omacha Foundation, uses the health of Amazon river dolphins as a diagnostic tool for the health of the Amazon’s river systems. What her team is finding in their blood, including mercury levels seventy times the permitted limit, tells a troubling story about what’s entering the water.

And geothermal scientist Andres Ruzo takes us to the Boiling River, a thermal river running at 87 degrees Celsius and 700 kilometers from the nearest active volcano, sitting atop a geothermal world that remained hidden from scientists until recently.

This episode is about understanding the Amazon as a system: because the more you understand how these layers talk to each other, the clearer it becomes what's at stake when they start to break down, and what it means to protect them while we still can.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Amazon Tipping Point
00:43 Three Interconnected Layers
01:59 Geology Shapes Rainfall
03:20 Flying Rivers Explained
05:55 Carbon and Collapse Risk
06:18 Tipping Thresholds Today
09:38 Avoiding the Point
10:14 River World and Dolphins
13:34 Dolphins as Health Mirrors
15:06 Mercury and Mining
17:52 Sentinel Species Wins
20:15 Geothermal Underworld
22:37 Legend of Boiling River
25:07 Discovery and Protection
28:34 Extremophiles and Biotech
30:58 El Dorado City of Life
33:17 Final Takeaways and Next

Would you like to give to Rewildology? Donate here: https://givebutter.com/supportrewildology

CREDITS
Executive Producer & Host: Brooke Mitchell
Associate Producer & Music Composer: Brad Parsons

LISTEN TO THE FULL SERIES
https://rewildology.com/episode-group/rewilding-amazonia/

SHOW NOTES & NEWSLETTER
Show notes & subscribe to newsletter, https://rewildology.com/

SUPPORT REWILDOLOGY
https://rewildology.com/support-the-show/

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FOLLOW REWILDOLOGY
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DISCLAIMER
The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and...

The Amazon is one of the most remote places on Earth—and one of the most watched. In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I follow the people who have built new eyes to see what's happening inside a forest too vast, dangerous, and politically complicated for traditional monitoring to reach.

Brian Hettler, Director of Mapping at the Amazon Conservation Team, has spent fourteen years using high-resolution satellite imagery to track illegal mining barges pushing into protected indigenous territories on the Colombian-Brazilian border, and to help communities legally prove their presence on lands they risk losing not through violence, but through paperwork.

Cristina Vollmer Burelli of SOSOrinoco built an anonymous open-source intelligence network of journalists, scientists, and indigenous witnesses to document over 1,000 hectares of illegal gold mines inside Venezuela's Canaima National Park—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—when physical access was impossible and speaking out could get you killed.

And Brazilian entomologist Leo Lanna of Projeto Mantis has spent a decade discovering that praying mantis community diversity is one of the most accurate indicators of Amazon forest health available, and that the "invisible islands" these insects occupy have profound implications for how we approach reforestation.

This episode is about visibility: what it means to be able to document almost everything happening in the Amazon—and what it will take to get the world to act on what we're seeing. 

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Guard Post Porto Franco Post Burns
01:37 Watching the Amazon from Space
03:09 Mapping And Titling
05:04 How River Mining Works
07:36 Turning Images Into Action
08:31 Hope In New Clearings
09:39 Venezuela Park Exposé
12:48 Anonymous Network
14:32 AI Needs Human Eyes
16:20 Borders And Balloon Effect
18:41 Meet The Mantis Scientist
20:36 Insects As Forest Signals
22:30 Invisible Islands Insight
25:07 Night Forest And UV
27:48 What Gives Hope
29:23 You Cant Protect Unseen
29:49 Next Episode Tease

Would you like to give to Rewildology? Donate here: https://givebutter.com/supportrewildology

CREDITS
Executive Producer & Host: Brooke Mitchell
Associate Producer & Music Composer: Brad Parsons

LISTEN TO THE FULL SERIES
https://rewildology.com/episode-group/rewilding-amazonia/

SHOW NOTES & NEWSLETTER
Show notes & subscribe to newsletter, https://rewildology.com/

SUPPORT REWILDOLOGY
https://rewildology.com/support-the-show/

LISTEN TO THE REWILDOLOGY PODCAST
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3YXWSsF
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3oW6artLcvxX0QoW1TCcrq?si=ff3b5e2ec90542a2

FOLLOW REWILDOLOGY
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DISCLAIMER
The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and details may change—always do your own research and consult primary sources where it matters.<...