Deadly Conservation | Explorer

[Music] There are a multitude of issues that are impacting Barunga, 4 million people living just a day's walk away from the park's border, and those people have nothing but nature to rely on. So that obviously puts an enormous amount of pressure on the park and its principles of protecting the natural resources.

In addition to that, you've got somewhere in the region of 5 to 8,000 armed militia that are vying for control of the natural resources. We looked at the story from two sides. You know, we as the team from Explorer, we thought that it was imperative that we gained unique access to an element of the story I hadn't been told before.

Working with the park rangers, Emanuel Deod and his team, these are people that on a daily basis face bullets. The statistics are extraordinary; it's singly the most dangerous place to work in conservation on the planet. 140 people have died in the last 15 years—that's more or less one a month. So these are the bravest souls out there.

That was one side, and then flipping to the other, the Myi, they're a particularly tricky group to deal with because they're mostly comprised of young kids, from 11 through to 21 years old. These kids are born of trauma; they've witnessed the horrific, systematic pillaging of their villages, and they've banded together for a multitude of reasons. But one is revenge and power, banded under the gun, some form of camaraderie, some form of family.

The cocktail of adolescence, AK-47s, and alcohol is never going to be an easy one. So being with them was fairly challenging. But their objective, at least expressed to me, was to defend the park for the people's rights that live on the outskirts.

I think one of the really important messages of our film is that there's a really complex set of historical factors that have forged the day-to-day reality of this area. What Emanuel and the Vera Alliance are doing is trying to create infrastructure that will nurture growth in the form of education, health care, electrification of the region, and defense of the national park. I think that's a really, really, really positive message.