I Bought a Rain Forest, Part 2 | Nat Geo Live

Conservation is a bourgeois concept. What we do is we create a huge amount of carbon, and we expect poor people to look after our carbon sink for us. And they can't because they haven't got anything.

I went to live with more illegal loggers. I wanted to understand their lives more. His beta baito is very religious; he believes that the rainforest is the living embodiment of Christ, yet he's cutting it down. So I, you know, I wanted to know why a man with such reverence for the forests—such respect for it—would do that.

And his wife left him. He stopped two girls; he's putting them through college. Neither of them will speak to him because he's a logger, and that's beneath them. All his money goes to send his girls to go through college. He's now an alcoholic, so he's living this tragic life and having to do that like the worst thing he can.

But I thought, you know, I thought illegal logging was bad in Manu and Peru, and then I went to Brazil. This part of the Amazon looks like an Accra in western Brazil. You know, not you one to send—ish, 90% of rainforest destruction in the Amazon is for agriculture.

So I went there, and this really was the badlands. This is my buddy Dino; he's just about the most environmentally destructive human being I've ever met. He really is the worst nightmare. He was a peasant, and he found his dad dead. He'd hanged himself when he was a boy. He managed to get himself a little bit of land in the rainforest, had a family, managed to pull it off, got himself a farm. That's how he survives.

This is his granddaughter, Anna Clara. Yeah, every time we got a camera, Ana Clara was there, and she was so happy to have, like, loading new people to hang. Yeah, and everyone did everything together. It was a real family affair.

But what they did was this: you know, though vodka, quince, goop, make a hard Kabila's Kahlua, St. John. Look at myself, a flaw. Yeah, I run desperate for me to light the fire, stumbles, need good idea; was in some thoughtful, huh? There are you do, yeah. I like whoa, that critical. That's already—I can feel heat coming off that thing—that fifty feet away. Everyone's getting the hell out.

I know he's not—he's going to start some more. Lucia, Lucia, now I think 100 today gods are given us to make mine. We run back. The next day I saw the rainforest look like one of the reasons what Dino does is so bad was because what you're doing is you're cutting down a rainforest, which produces oxygen. You're burning it, releasing all the carbon, then you're covering it in grass and grazing it with cows.

Globally, cows produce more greenhouse gases than all of the transport combined—every plane, car, ship, you name it, globally. So it couldn't be any worse for the environment, what Dino does. Do I like him any less for it? Now, I have a huge amount of respect for Dino. I learnt a hell of a lot from him. He taught me I had to be a better dad; I had to be a better family man.

But he taught me also that to him, the forest is a resource. To me, it's a, you know, romantic ideal. To him, it's a resource. And when we think of people of the forest, we think of this romantic notion of people living in harmony with the forest. You know, Dino, Erasmus, Baito, Ilyas— they're just as much people of the forest. And until we start understanding that, realizing and accepting it, we're going to struggle to go forward.

The one thing I think I came away knowing most was that conservation is a bourgeois concept. You know, I have the time and the money to care, and these guys don't have that. And, you know, when you look at the problems of the Amazon, what you're looking at is really four main things: you're looking at the extraction of gold, cocaine, Brazilian beef, and tropical hardwood trees like mahogany.

And we are the end users of those products. And what we do is we create a huge amount of carbon, much more than these guys; we pump into the atmosphere, and we expect poor people with nothing to look after our carbon sink for us. And they can't because they haven't got anything. And when we shout and moan, we call them bastards for chopping down the room for us.

So what was I going to do with Ilyas? That was the big thing. You know, at this man, I've done my journey—what am I going to do? Well, I gave him a job. That's it.

"All right, you're the worst illegal logger in the area—replant." I'm trepidatious; I'm not stupid. This is a very high chance of failure, but I'm not going to let that cloud my excitement about the whole idea. Vilius is working with me, and yes, it might fail, but I do trust him.

As well as paying Ilyas, Charlie's going to bring in experts who understand how to restore damaged rainforest. Rainforest a killer, yep—a tenemos otra Spencer case! A na one, como tu serais? Hey—loco, no es muy bien—al agua no hace más abajo a me it doses.

In the Brazilian, they're going to plant a mixture of hardwoods and fast-growing soft woods, as well as bananas and other crops that can grow alongside the trees and provide Elias with a second income. With any luck, he'll be self-sufficient within five years.

I think the thing about this is it's so simple and symbolic—planting trees—but it's who want with here today doing it. And, you know, doing this with Ilyas, and that's the key to this—not putting trees in the ground, like trees!

"Goats, who I'm actually here, you're doing it with!" Corner nesting in here—we do it together. Got a lot more of these to go in here; we got a whole rainforest to plant.

"How to stop? Now, right on! We'll eat any beer." Charlie didn't find a way to protect the National Park, but in this corner of the Amazon, he has already made a difference.

Watching Heidi in Ilyas, I felt quite proud, I suppose—it hits me in there, sort of a very happy way, because it was a very nice moment to watch. But it was something really wretched about it as well because it's not solving a massive problem; it's solving a very tiny problem, and it hasn't even solved it yet.

But I feel like at least I'm doing something, even if it's just one tiny small thing, which this is. You know, all we can do is hope, isn't it? Actually, no. That's—oh, we can—this hope—get off our asses and do something.

Two years later, did it work? No. You have too many other pressures on his life. I saw him in the summer, and he was all embarrassed.

And I thought, "Don't be embarrassed—you know, I don't live in your shoes." I judge you, or, you know, have any blame at all. But it was very sad because he was—you know, he kind of felt like he'd let himself down, and I—I didn't—I don't know how hard his life is, so I couldn't say.

But they had a new daughter kneeling called Jasmine, and he might be, you know, the most awful illegal logger, but he's a nice guy. Not sending my talk you.