Defending Virunga's Treasures | Explorer

[Music] I am hunting down the story, but I'm not your standard, uh, correspondent. I'm a wide-eyed, enthusiastic guy that loves the world we live in. I mean, of course, I've heard a lot about Congo, but I can't sort of get away from these, uh, romantic notions that my childhood built into my head—of peaked volcanoes, of dense jungle, almost Tarzan-like adventures, Romancing the Stone. It's an adventurous paradise.

But as soon as you start drilling into it, you realize that this beautiful paradise has such a complexity, so many layers. Essentially, in the last 125 years of this country's history, it's been viewed as a pot of gold, a huge area of immense natural wealth. There's gold, there's diamonds, there's complex rare earth minerals, tantalum, and coltan. There's timber, there's zinc—there's all of these things that our world needs. And everyone from the outside has viewed it as this treasure trove.

The one thing they seem to have all had in mind is the inconvenience of having people living there. Being with Innocent when we stumbled upon the gorillas was a beautiful moment. Look at this beautiful—here's a guy whose charge is to protect the most important section of the world in relation to mountain gorillas. More than half of all the mountain gorillas left in the world are in his area and are his charge.

And this guy, you can see in his eyes when we stumbled upon the silverback and the gorillas; it all sort of hit me. Actually, I was just thinking—the Rangers there have lost 140-plus guys in the field doing what they do to protect this beautiful, magnificent creature. And I looked at him, and I asked him, "Man, is this why you do it?" He looked at me and didn't have to say anything, man. It was just the power in that.

I feel so privileged to have been in his company and those like him who just stand in front of bullets for what they feel and believe is right—in the defense of these [Music] creatures.