A journey from student to Amazon “Junglekeeper”: Interview with Paul Rosolie

Paul Rosolie has had a career unlike any other. First traveling to the Peruvian Amazon at the age of 18, Rosolie partnered with Juan Julio Durand, a local member of the Infierno Indigenous group. Together, the pair explored the primeval forest of the Las Piedras River, a tributary of the Amazon River and a place little seen by outsiders.

“It’s climax community, untouched, primordial forest, and we have the chance to save it,” Rosolie tells Mongabay in a new interview.

When roads began to breach the region, Rosolie and Durand turned from young explorers into “junglekeepers,” the name of both their nonprofit and a new book by Rosolie.

Junglekeepers: What it Takes to Change the World is the personal tale of Rosolie’s rise from a wide-eyed student to heading a multimillion-dollar nonprofit devoted to saving part of the western Amazon — and all the challenges in between. The book recently made The New York Times Best Sellers list.

Rosolie says he had many ups and downs in the book. From the Eaten Alive documentary debacle to partnering with billionaire Dax Dasilva to fund the Junglekeepers nonprofit; from discovering the floating forest with its giant anacondas to struggling for years with depression and a plaguing sense of failure.

“At 22, people are like, ‘Yes, go follow your dream.’ At 29, people are like, ‘OK, that’s cool. It’s been going on for a while’ … Then, at 33, 35, people are like, ‘Hey, man. How’s that going, jungle boy?’” Rosolie says.

In the book, he describes almost giving up on his mission altogether.

But today, the Junglekeepers organization has managed to protect 47,000 hectares (117,000 acres) of the Las Piedras watershed, and Rosolie says more is to come. Their ultimate goal is to protect around 121,000 hectares (300,000 acres) and turn it into a national park.

Still, challenges remain. The organization is working on how best to ethically support and sustain local uncontacted Indigenous groups in the region. And, even more challenging, drug traffickers have recently infiltrated the area, threatening to kill anyone who opposes them — including the uncontacted tribes and Rosolie and Durand.

But Rosolie says Junglekeepers is not backing down.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years, and the animals and the trees need us now, and we’ve made promises.”

Instead, they are partnering with law enforcement to tackle the drug trafficking problem.

Rosolie says it’s taken him 20 years to really see some large-scale success — and he’s excited for the future.

“‘Now we’ve done something special, we are going to do something even more special,’” he says of his lifelong mission.

Mongabay’s Jeremy Hance spoke with Paul Rosolie about his new book, uncontacted tribes, the Las Piedras region and the challenges of being Internet famous. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Mongabay: What is Junglekeepers?

Paul Rosolie: At this point, Junglekeepers is the most direct way that people around the world can help Indigenous efforts to save the Amazon Rainforest. We engineered it like that. The organization is Indigenous-led. We’ve made it so that whether people live in Bangalore, Tokyo, New York, it doesn’t matter where you live [you can support the rainforest]…

We buy land before the loggers can log it. Then we take the people that were going to log and just give them jobs as rangers. That’s what Junglekeepers is, in its essence. Right now, it’s the effort to protect 300,000 acres of the Las Piedras watershed, saving that area of pristine forest, and turn it into a national park.

Mongabay: What makes the area so special?

Paul Rosolie: Like I read about on Mongabay when I was just a little boy, the Andes-Amazon interface is the most mega-biodiverse biome on the entire planet. The confluence of the tropical Andes cloud forests and the lowland Amazonia makes this incredible mega-biodiverse ecosystem. Still, even amongst this mega-biodiverse, superlative region of incredible nature, you have this one river that’s remained very unexplored and very untouched.

The Las Piedras River has remained unexplored and untouched for a few reasons. One is that it’s a little bit faster than the other rivers in the region. Some of those whirlpools can be 40-80 feet [12-24 meters] across, and they can sink your boat. When it does flood, it brings down entire trees. You’re talking about a 150-ft [45-m] tree as thick as a school bus charging down the river. If you’re trying to do boat travel on that river, it is not conducive to life.

Really, up until the last 20 years, if you think of the Amazon as a tree of rivers and the uppermost branches as the western Amazon, nobody’s gotten up to these tip-tip-top tributaries.

Now, we have found this incredibly wild place. Between the confluence of biodiversity and the Andes-Amazon interface, and the fact that we have these Indigenous groups living there, and the fact that there are many parts of the forest where no loggers or gold miners or roads have ever been.

It’s climax community, untouched, primordial forest, and we have the chance to save it.

Mongabay: The book has a lot of stories about the uncontacted tribes in the area, including some in which you and your friends and local people have run-ins. Taking a long view of this, what would you like to see happen with these tribes? Do you feel like it’s most important to try and keep them as untouched, uncontacted as possible? Do you feel like some kind of contact is increasingly inevitable and it’s about how to manage that in the safest way for both sides?

Paul Rosolie: There are two prevailing schools of thought on this, and anthropologists fight over it. One school of thought is that they are beautiful, noble savages who need to be left to live their perfect life in balance with nature and that we should aspire to be like them.

The other view is how much blood does it cost to walk a mile? When you meet them, you see the desperation in their eyes. If you walk in the jungle, you understand how hard it is to catch the animals that live there or shoot them with a bow.

When I first heard about the uncontacted tribes, I used to think of them as really cool and sort of be fascinated by their lifestyle. I think the more I’ve seen how they live, and the more remote into the Amazon I’ve gotten, when you see people that live hand to mouth — you have to go catch a turtle before you can eat or you have to go hunt a monkey before you can eat — [I realize] every day is a new hunting expedition so that you can eat.

We have an anthropologist that we’re working with, Dr. Kerry Bowman. He’s been part of the team that has been making sure we are using best practices, doing things responsibly. We’ve had ethicists and lawyers and everybody checking to make sure, because the first thing people do is go, ‘Why did you contact them? You could kill them.’ It’s like, look, the first thing you’re doing is criticizing.

To answer your question specifically: I don’t know. Part of me says we should leave them alone. Part of me says they’re probably suffering and could really, really benefit from some basic life hacks like how to plant bananas and, ‘Here’s a machete.’

What are we doing? Are we treating them like they’re in an aquarium and we want to preserve them for our own amusement?

In a way, I think it’s almost a human rights violation to not try to help them. At the same time, helping them is an incredibly sensitive thing. They have indicated they are very scared of the outside world and that contact is going to take years. It’s really something that’s going to happen between them and the nearest Indigenous communities they interact with. The way we allow that to happen is by Junglekeepers protecting that land and saving the forest.

The one thing I can tell you is that, in the last week, news through the back channels of Peruvians-knowing-Peruvians, there was a mass grave found of Mashco Piro [Indigenous tribe].

Mongabay: Oh my God.

Paul Rosolie: The narcos are coming in and they’re clearing out Mashco land because the narcos are so scared of the Mashco that they almost think of them as mythical. They say if you even see one, you’ll die. These are people from other parts of Peru coming to the scary backcountry, and they’re hearing these terrifying stories. Then what happens is you get a couple of the bosses who come in with machine guns who are not scared, and they will go out and hunt them.

Whatever lies in store for the Mashco Piro — we call them the Nomoles, because they seem to call themselves the Nomoles — whatever their future involves, they won’t have a chance to take part in it if they’re dead. We’re trying to save their forest before it is bulldozed.

Mongabay: Just so people are clear, the Mashco-Piro or Nomoles are not so uncontacted that they have no contact. They are making contact with other Indigenous tribes and seemingly, at times, wanting to trade, right?

Paul Rosolie: I think the name uncontacted leads to this debate about contactability, and it’s kind of irrelevant. I would say [the Nomoles are] a semi-contacted tribe where 99.99% of their life is out in the forest. They’re aware of the outside world. Maybe they’ve stolen a machete or two. One time, [the Nomoles] talked across the river to an anthropologist. This tribe that came out to us that day, none of them had ever spoken to anybody from the outside world before. They are an uncontacted tribe.

They’re still very much an uncontacted tribe. [During a recent encounter] they stole a machete, and they got a few bananas. They asked us why we were cutting down trees. We know nothing about them. They know nothing about us. You can remove the name uncontacted, and then the whole argument falls on its head anyway. They’re nomadic, isolated Indigenous tribes. They need help.

Mongabay: You mentioned the narcos. Your book ends with discussion of how the Las Piedras area is now being infiltrated by drug traffickers. How do you even fight that?

Paul Rosolie: For one thing, you got to double down on your mission because everyone’s first reaction is like, “‘Narcos, just get out.’ They’re like, ‘Never mind.’ It’s like, no, we’ve been doing this for 20 years, and the animals and the trees need us now, and we’ve made promises. We’re working with the Indigenous communities, and there’s too much hope. The narcos suck. They’ve killed a few of our friends.

The way we’ve combated this is by working more closely with Peruvian law enforcement. Whereas before, we were out there on our own. We’d hire the loggers and the gold miners as rangers. Then, if we found more loggers or gold miners, we could deal with them because they tend to be pretty friendly people. They’re just salt of the earth. The narcos will literally kill you if you see them. We are not, in any way, ready to handle that. We had to call in the Peruvian police and anti-drug organizations, which have the firepower and law enforcement background to deal with this.

We’re over here trying to do biological inventories on butterflies with a clipboard. We’re not the people that are going to fight the narcos. They [Peruvian police] are. They sure are. They’ve been fighting them. Junglekeepers has been helping by supporting the Peruvian police with boats and gasoline and on-the-ground information. The local people know the river better than anybody. We’re able to interface with the law enforcement.

The local people don’t want there to be narcos. They’re scared of the narcos. They want it to remain this wild river where they can go fishing and hunt for their monkeys and do the normal things. Nobody wants to worry about these narcos coming in from other places. It’s been terrifying, the fact that they’re trying to kill us. The police did arrest a couple of guys on their phones that actually said, ‘If you see Paul or JJ [Durand], make it happen.’

As I wrote at the end of the book, they actually tried. I wasn’t even there that day. They were hoping for me and JJ, but JJ almost was in the car. It was not good.

Mongabay: That’s terrifying.

Paul Rosolie: It was horrifying. For months, we were in a state of panic after that. It was horrible.

Mongabay: What’s the state of it today?

Paul Rosolie: For about a year and a half, it was really terrifying. I think every day we woke up and we were terrified. Now, it’s gotten a little better. The problem with these people is you just don’t know. You don’t know when you’re going to be fishing on the side of a river and they drive by and shoot. You don’t know if you’re in town having a coffee and they walk up behind you and shoot.

One of the police officers who was helping us — he saved our lives one day. And then later that same day, the narcos killed him.

Mongabay: Oh my God.

Paul Rosolie: We’ve already had deaths on our team. It’s been horrific. It’s been truly, truly horrible. JJ’s had to wonder if he’s going to get shot every day for the last year and a half.

Mongabay: That is absolutely terrifying. That’s really scary.

Paul Rosolie: Again, it’s crazy talking to you about this because you were there when I was like, ‘I’m 19 years old and I’m looking for anacondas.’ Now [the narcos] are like, ‘You guys are the ones. You guys are the ones messing this up for us.’

We’re politically controlling the river now and working with the communities and stopping the roads.

It’s just incredible what’s happening. We just rose [to] 1,000 monthly subscribers to Junglekeepers, which means we’re going to get more funding. We told JJ today, ‘Go get more land.’ There are places where there’s a road coming in and we can now get that piece of land and stop the road from coming in.

Mongabay: In my first interview with you [2010] — to jump to a happier topic — we spoke of a floating forest and giant anacondas (Eunectes murinus). Is the floating forest still there? Are you still exploring that area?

Paul Rosolie: The floating forest is still there. I haven’t been there in a couple of years, but there are still giant anacondas there, that’s for sure. They love it there, and they seem to be able to thrive off of whatever forest is there. Floating forest is still kicking.

Mongabay: That is awesome. I love hearing that because that sticks in my imagination.

Paul Rosolie: I would say the floating forest probably was, story-wise, one of the most important things that ever happened [to us], because I think we came back from the [Las Piedras] with that story, and I think the whole world went, ‘Well, what? A floating forest?’

Which, by the way, when I flew over a river in a helicopter with the military not that long ago, I got to see the forest from 150 feet up, and I’m telling you, I saw lakes.

There are other floating forests out there that have not been discovered and that we can’t see from the ground, and everyone thinks it’s so funny when you’re here. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, yes, the Amazon’s been explored.’ Bitch, get in a Cessna, fly over it, feel the physical immensity of it, and then let me put you in the forest and try to walk a mile. It hasn’t been explored. It has not been explored. Nobody’s been over there. No way. No way. One hundred miles from the nearest tributary. No way.

Mongabay: Yes. I love that that still exists. We’re very lucky.

Paul Rosolie: It’s so crazy, yes. We are very lucky.

Mongabay: We dived into a lot of the themes of your book. I want to get into some more personal stuff because I know the audience is going to have questions about that. One of the things that I found really interesting about your book is that you were really honest about your struggles, and not just the challenges of forming Junglekeepers, but also about mental health, about relationships, about the sacrifices and struggles you’ve had. What was it that made you decide to be so forthright and honest about personal things?

Paul Rosolie: I’d say the people who taught me the most — or the people I learned from their writing or their speaking the most — were the people that were heroically committed to the honesty of their story. That usually involves the bloody details. For me, if I just told a story of, ‘Yes, we caught this anaconda, and we explored this river, and then we somehow ended up protecting this river,’ it’s, like, no.

The most important part to me is the fact that when I started this, I didn’t have a plan. Most people, they go to college to become a blank, and that blank comes with a job. I didn’t have a plan. By the time I fell in love with the jungle, and JJ said we had to protect it, I made it to 25 with no idea. Then you’re in too deep, and so you have to make this decision. Do you come up with a plan B? Do you have enough bandwidth to even come up with a plan B? It was like I didn’t. I had to throw everything into plan A, which was, ‘Let’s explore this incredible jungle.’

I had a feeling this was something almost historically important because the adventures I wanted to go on, I said, ‘Man, there’s very few places on Earth that are this wild.’ I personally, and me for myself, wanted to have these experiences because I cared so much about it. What that ends up costing you is that your friends are getting jobs and have houses and mortgages and cars and relationships that can function, and you don’t.

Again, at 22, people are like, ‘Yes, go follow your dream.’ At 29, people are like, ‘OK, that’s cool. It’s been going on for a while.’ Then, at 33, 35, people are like, ‘Hey, man. How’s that going, jungle boy?’ It starts to get sad after a while. I put that line in the book about many are called, few are chosen. It’s like, how do you know when? There’s this really heroic notion of like, ‘Go all in, take no prisoners, burn the boats, put everything into your dream.’ It’s like, ‘Sure.’

The truth is, if you want to really look at it: how many people start bands, how many of them are going to make it? Of everybody that tries to do anything, start a company, start a restaurant, whatever it is, there’s a lot of failure. In the book, I just thought it was very important as a cautionary tale to show people how close I had come to not making it and exactly how much it cost me in terms of mental health and relationships and finances and everything else to get to the point where we’re at today, which is pretty impressive that we’re protecting 130,000 acres [52,600 hectares]. Even then, we’re still not there.

I think being deadass honest with people in this story was crucial because, at this point, I have hundreds of kids in my DMs every day, emails from all over the world from kids going, ‘I want your job. I want to do what you do.’ I’m like, ‘Kid, you don’t even know what you’re talking about. You do not want it.’ You know how many times I’ve had botflies and dengue and worse things, and stingray bites and bullet ants? It’s brutal. Forget about that. It’s the time away from home. It costs quite a bit to go after something that’s your dream. I thought, in the book, that was very important to tell people.

Mongabay: Many are called, few are chosen, which is from the New Testament. This is a question I had and I crossed out and now I’m going to bring it back. I’m really curious what you think about that, because for the ones who are eventually chosen, for the ones who eventually succeed, do you think it’s luck? Is it resilience? Is it just stamina?

Paul Rosolie: Yes, I think it’s the wildebeest crossing the river. Look, some are going to drown. Some are going to get eaten by crocodiles. Even if you’re the young wildebeest that’s especially athletic and you feel like you’re the main character of this story, which we all do, you might be lucky enough to jump across all the crocodiles and swim across the rapids and get to the other side. Great, you made it.

For everyone that makes it, there’s going to be 40 or 50 other ones that get washed downstream and drown needlessly and get ripped apart by crocs. You might be the one truly athletic, amazing, and you might slip on that day.

I think, for us, it’s the same thing. For everyone that makes it, and again, not making it doesn’t mean always death. It just means maybe you started a band, you tried real hard and people liked a couple of your songs, and then eventually you got really good at whatever your second job was. It’s not the worst thing in the world.

With me, the thing was that once you cross 30 and you’ve never been paid to do a job in your life and you’ve never joined the workforce, it’s like I’d have to restart. All of my skills were learning how to track and fish, using my feet and knowing where spider monkeys were. None of those things apply to the modern world. I did come to a point not all that long ago where I said, ‘OK, no matter what happens, this is just it. I’m just the jungle man. That’s fun.’ It’s like the Jack Sparrow thing. It’s like, ‘I just sail around on boats. That’s what I do. That’s never going to change. That’s fine.’

Once Junglekeepers took shape, and then we had the incredible luck, we made it to the other side. Then we said, ‘Oh, shit, maybe this is worth sticking with.’ Even then, the smart thing would have been to not stick with it. We just kept, kept, kept, kept, kept sticking. I recently read an article on that, that not intelligence or luck, but that relentlessness is the greatest [indicator of success]. It was being able to stick to a common goal for a very, very long time, because most people would try something for a few years, not see success, move on to the next thing, try really hard for a few years, not see success.

So many times, we’ve seen, whether it’s with actors or business people, where people try things for 10, 15 years before they even begin to see any kind of success. That’s exactly what it was like for me. The first 10 years was zero. I don’t think people understood that living out of a backpack in the Amazon Rainforest getting rained on, I wasn’t getting paid. I was just getting new tropical diseases and scars from [caimans]. Then [after] around 15 years, it was Dax [Dasilva] came in and we had set up Junglekeepers, but even then, it still looked like we were going to fail.

It’s only just been in the last couple of years, right at the 20-year mark, where I can say, ‘OK, now we’ve done something special, we are going to do something even more special.’ We’re doing innovative conservation work. We do have to have an answer when kids come and say, ‘Hey, I want to have your job, what should I do?’ I say, ‘Read the book. Don’t do what I did.’ I’m like, ‘Go find someone who’s doing really good work that can mentor you. Put your own mask on before you try to help others.’

I think a lot of people go out and they’re like, ‘I want to help the world.’ It’s like, ‘Cool, but you’re 17 and you have no way of providing for yourself.’ The only reason I care about this is because that line, either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, so many people start out in conservation start out trying to save the world. Then, as they become old, poor, desperate, hungry, bitter — all of a sudden, they become the bad guys.

In conservation, there’s a lot of people where the difficulty of working in remote places away from support on your own and trying to do something impossible can break people. Once you break people, it turns them into something else. It’s like, I want to see kids doing it in a productive way, not the way I did it. Don’t go on solos. Don’t do that.

Mongabay: You’ve done interviews with all sorts. I’m curious, do you change your message? How do you communicate with people, especially with people who may not be as interested or invested in environmental issues at first? Do you have a strategy for that?

Paul Rosolie: I do. Really, I do. I do change my message depending on the room, but the core never changes. My core is, I can prove to you that ocean fisheries are in danger. I can prove to you that we’ve lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet since 1970. I can prove to you that rainforests are being destroyed because I went there and I’ve seen it myself. Anybody that I’m having the conversation with, I can usually outrank them in terms of veracity.

Now, if I’m in a room full of people that I know care a whole lot about the environment, they, chances are, are carbon people. I’m going to tell them about how much carbon the rainforest [stores] and how [it is important for] global climatic stabilization. Now, if I’m with a bunch of people that subscribe to Field & Stream and own dogs and probably are voting red, I’m going to talk to them about how this is real vital wilderness. This is where our clean water comes from.

They have different windows of looking at the same thing. For me, I’m always just like, ‘Look, I have to be a voice for the animals that don’t have a voice because now we’re protecting millions of animal heartbeats. Whoever you are, if you care about animals in any capacity, the most effective way to protect the most of them and a real authentic endangered species is to protect the old-growth Amazonian forests.’

Yes, I curate it a little bit. I’ll talk more about the animals or more about the climatic environmental benefits. I think the beauty of this issue is that both sides care about it.

When I go on interview shows, I go on MSNBC, Fox, I’ll go wherever. Every now and then, they’ll try to get me in a hole now where they’ll go, ‘So what do you think about President Trump?’ I go, ‘Listen. I’m here to talk for the monkeys. I’m here to save one river. That’s the only reason I’m here. I got nothing else to say. All I care about is that we protect our environment. I have no other message.’

Mongabay: Is that difficult to be completely apolitical in a situation where you’re…

Paul Rosolie: No, it’s awesome, dude. You know the term FOMO? I have JOMO, the joy of missing out. Every time people start going, ‘Blah, blah, blah. Do you know what so-and-so said about so-and-so?’ I leave the room. I go, ‘You know what kinkajous do at night? They drink out of balsa wood flowers.’

Civilizations rise and fall. This is what people don’t get. You think of a 1,000-year-old tree. It’s been growing when they were painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel, World War I, World War II. Today, nobody cares in the jungle. What politics? Whatever.

If we break these [ecological] systems, all the things that come standard with life on Earth, like fresh air and clean water and all this good stuff, goes away. Then we’re cursing all the future generations with our negligence. I actually take it as a personal insult when people try to get me in on political conversations because I literally don’t care. I’m just trying to protect the forest. I think that we’re the last generation in history that’s going to have a chance to do so.

Mongabay: You have a certain notoriety now. You’re Internet famous. Is it difficult having to constantly make new content?

Paul Rosolie: Well, two things. One, I think that because my passion is sharing, look, naturally, I would go on solos and then write about it, and then I’d want to share it. I started sharing with my cousins, and they were like, ‘You should write a book.’ Then Instagram started because I was like, ‘Hey, I want people to see this really cool frog. I want my friends to see it, and then it would grow.’ Like, ‘Whoa, these anacondas, I think they’re amazing, so I want to show them.’

I’m naturally a person that shares. I probably take 100 pictures on my phone every day just because I’m sending a picture of this to some friend, a picture of that to some friend. I want my sister to see them. For me, it comes very, very naturally to want to share all the incredible things in the rainforest with everybody.

Somehow I have found myself in this position as the founder of Junglekeepers that I am able to lead the charge. If we can rally even more of that attention, the more of that attention we get, the more donors we get, the more people [can become involved].

I don’t mind it. It is hard. I don’t always like traveling. I prefer to be in the jungle. I think that Jane [Goodall] was a really good mentor on this because the same thing happened to her. She, at some point, became more valuable as the voice of the forest than actually being in the forest, which is scary because I don’t ever want to do what she did and travel 300 days a year for five decades.

I’d like to find a balance. No, I don’t mind it whatsoever. The people that come up to me, if I get recognized, I do, I get recognized now in the airport and stuff. It’s always people being like, ‘Yo, man, how’s the toucan?’ ‘Hey, man, we saved the ancient forest. That’s so inspiring.’ People are full of enthusiasm, and that’s really cool. Also, it shows you how many people care about this.

I feel like if you just let the news cycle play, it’s basketball, football, baseball and politics. It’s like, ‘Man, we are living through one of the most exciting things that has ever taken place. Is the crown jewel of our natural world going to continue to exist, yes or no? Can we improve the lives of Indigenous people so the next generation are stewards of their environment?’

This is a case study in the ingenuity of our species and whether or not we can find equilibrium with the ecology around us — that should have everybody riveted. The stakes are high because we’re not talking about if we lose, it might get damaged. We’re talking about complete annihilation. It will be burned to the ground and forgotten from history. I think it crosses all partisan lines and political boundaries and everything else.

I’m very, very happy to be the spokesperson for that. If you had asked me back when we did our first interview, [at] that point, I so badly wanted to save a tree. I said, ‘I hate seeing it cut down.’ I looked up to these people so much, like Alan Rabinowitz and all these people who had made entire national parks and had saved thousands and tens and millions of animal heartbeats. I said, ‘Man, I just wish I could do something like that.’ I think, at this point, we’re not only doing that, we’re protecting 136,000 acres [55,000 hectares] and we’re going to protect 300,000 when we’re done, but we’re also doing it and we’re giving people hope because we’re involving them, which I think is great because I was that kid.

Mongabay: What advice would you give a young conservationist?

Paul Rosolie: Definitely put your own mask on before you help others, like the airplane analogy. Don’t go out with no plan and just risk it all because the stakes are too high and the odds are too thick. The other thing is, where you can be most valuable is helping someone who’s already doing work. If you look at my story, I showed up and JJ had already started this incredible research station and he said, ‘I need help. I want to protect this river, but right now, I just need help getting people to come to this research station.’ I said, ‘Well, I know the gringos. This place is incredible. I can do that.’

I started giving talks in the basement of the REI outdoor store in Manhattan, where six people would come. We literally started it in the smallest way possible. It was like I just started helping this Indigenous guy who I thought was amazing. There are people all over the world doing incredible work.

The other thing is the exclusionary thing. Right now, conservation, everyone is so scared to collaborate and it’s very, very cliquey. When I was coming up, nobody collaborated with us. Nobody reached out. It’s just a very exclusionary thing. It’s like we have our funders, our donors, our supporters, our way of doing things. It’s like you just see this cattiness between the organizations, and without naming names, it’s like one organization believes you should never touch animals and another organization loves picking up animals and showing them to people.

[But] the people doing the roads, the bridges, the oil drilling — they’re going to keep winning because they all collaborate.

Banner image: Rosolie documenting the destruction of the Amazon for social media. Image by Stephane Thomas.

Credits

Morgan Erickson-Davis Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.