I Bought a Rain Forest, Part 1 | Nat Geo Live

I went on a journey and I went all over the Amazon to try and find out the truth about the Amazon. This idea of these nasty people destroying the Amazon, they're not. They are just people trying to make a living. And what I saw was this endless poverty trap. (audience applause) Three years ago now, I'd bought an illegal coca plantation by mistake. These are raw coca leaves. They have the highest alkaloid content of any coca leaves in the world. Which means they make really good cocaine. And they're mine. - (audience laughter) - (Charlie laughs) So, I became a coca lord by mistake. (audience laughter)

Now, I didn't mean to buy a cocaine plantation, obviously. But, I bought it over the phone. A friend of mine phoned me up and he said, "There's this piece of land at the end of a logging road and the head of the National Park needs someone to buy it. The illegal loggers are going up this track they're going through the land and into the National Park to cut the hardwood trees. And if someone can buy that piece of land we stand a chance of protecting that part of Manu National Park." But, what I actually got, you know, when I got there and saw it several months later was, you know, hundred acres of severely degraded secondary rainforest. And two hectares of illegal coke. I also got an illegal logging camp with an illegal logger living in it. That's Elias there, on the right. I bought the land off Tito, his dad here on the left. And Elias was one of the most infamous notorious illegal loggers in the area. The National Parks hated him, he was a thief he was a liar, he was this, he was that. And as a result, I was absolutely terrified of him. He was so muscly. I've never seen a human being... You can't kind of get it from that picture, but yeah. Anyway, I was terrified of him.

I camped on the land when I first went there and I'd lie down, I could hear the chainsaws at night and I'd come out in the morning and there'd be a massive pile of hardwood in the driveway to my land. And then, two hours later, it had gone. This kind of went on, it went on and then one day... So, we were filming this as a part of a TV documentary and Gavin, the director said to me, "You know, you've really gotta go meet this guy." And I said, "I'm scared. I don't want to." And I talked to National Parks, one of them actually said, "You've bought the most dangerous piece of land off the most dangerous family in the most dangerous part of Southern Peru." And, you know, that scared the hell out of me. And I'm camping on it. (audience laughter)

A few years earlier, in exactly the same spot where I was camping, a group of geologists had been basically held up with guns and robbed. It was a... scary prospect. So, I didn't want to meet Elias. Anyway, Gavin said, "You're gonna have to," and he forced me to do it. So, we marched through the forest. And I tracked Elias, he's really hard to find. I tracked him through-- I could find wet footprints. We did this for about an hour and eventually I heard a chainsaw. And basically, I doorstepped this man in the middle of cutting a tree down, with a whole film crew. And it was a really weird moment because he was like, "What the hell is going on?" You know, really remote part of the Amazon this bloke turns up with a boom pole and a camera. - (Charlie laughs) - (audience laughter)

Anyway, he's not going to attack us, is he? Anyway, we sat down and we hung out and... I basically said, "You gotta leave. You know, it's not working. You can't stay on this land. You are the bad illegal logger. I don't want you on this land, you're gonna have to leave." And he spun me this line about how he had a disabled daughter and it's all he could do, you know, to survive and... keep her, and you know keep his family alive. And you know, I didn't believe him. So, I'm gonna show you this now. (instrumental music) Are you there? Hey! Como estas? (Charlie laughs) Como estas? Hola! - (girl mumbling) -Como estas? Yeah! Hello. Como estas? (speaking Spanish)

Charlie: We-- I just thought, I'd come and say hi. Meet your family. (girl laughing) (speaking Spanish) (woman continues in Spanish) (woman continues in Spanish) (girl laughing) (woman sobbing) (woman continues in Spanish) (Charlie speaking Spanish) Cameraman: Charlie... Do you wanna kick them off the land? Nope. You know, this has just made my decision... infinitely more complicated. I was all agreed in my mind, I was gonna chuck Elias off the land until I went around to his house. What sort of a bastard would I be if I did? There's no way. (instrumental music)

Charlie: Behind every horrific story lie a bunch of perfectly decent people just trying to survive. And I was completely unarmed as a human being to do it. I had no idea what I was going to do. So, I went on a journey to find out the truth about the Amazon trying to find out how can we tackle these problems. And we can tackle them by understanding them. So, I went on a kind of journey of understanding. This is Erasmus. He's one of 35,000 gold miners in Southern Peru. The gold mining is a huge environmental problem. You know, this is like a modern day gold rush.

But, these guys are chasing dust, they're not chasing nuggets. And they use a whole load of chemicals within that process, Mercury particularly. If I give you a sense of scale there. There's a truck. That dot there. When you see that, you start realizing how big it is. There's whole towns have cropped up to supply this trade. And towns of thousands of people. There's prostitution, there's human trafficking, there's crime. And you know, it's a horrible modern day gold rush. So, I went to work with Erasmus on his gold mine. This is one day, they got-- This is six and a half grams of 24 karat gold. That's worth about $190 bucks.

So, it takes around 20 tons of toxic waste to make a gold wedding ring. Here's a little clip of me doing that. (Charlie breathing heavily) Charlie: Every 16 hours, the mats are rinsed and shaken out before the gold bearing sludge is scraped into a barrel. (Erasmus speaking Spanish) (Erasmus continues in Spanish) So, he's mixing the mercury with the sludge? (Erasmus speaking Spanish) One hour? -Yes -Yes? One hour. (Erasmus speaking Spanish)

Charlie: Mercury poisoning can result in brain damage, kidney damage, lung failure and possibly miscarriage. Illegal miners dump nearly 30 tons of this heavy metal into Peruvian rivers every year. And a recent study found that many people in local communities had mercury levels in their bodies five times the safe limit. And somewhere in there, there's a whole lot of gold. But, I can't see any. So, that's the image I took of that guy while he was doing-- He stirred that mercury with his feet for an hour. When you do that, you realize, these guys aren't rich. Okay. The bad guys aren't rich. The gold miners aren't-- No one's getting rich off this at all. It's actually the reverse.

This guy wanted to go to university. He'd gone to become a gold miner to save up for university. He was never gonna go to university. He was poisoning himself to death. He hadn't been paid for two weeks. The other two workers that worked there hadn't been paid for three months. And what I saw was this endless poverty cycle, this trap. People stuck in this poverty trap that they couldn't get out of. The longer they worked and not got paid, the more they were committed to work. So it was all really just miserable and tragic. This was where we got our water from and washed every day. This is a mercury tailings, a sort of gold mining tailings pond full of mercury. So, it makes you realize that these guys aren't doing that for fun. This idea of these nasty people destroying the Amazon, they're not. They're just people trying to make a living.