February 28, 2023 • 54 mins
If you’ve ever thought, “What’s the Amazon rainforest ever done for me? Nothin, that’s what,” then you’re dead wrong, friend. It covers 1 percent of the Earth’s surface but houses perhaps 30 percent of its species and it’s invaluable to all life on Earth.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Jerome Roland. And you
put the three of us together, put some super glue
between us, hold us together for an hour and a half.
(00:24):
You've got an episode of Stuff You Should Know. I
love Olivia helped us with this. I love her title
of this one. It was titled the awe Inspiring, absolutely
Crucial Amazon. Yep. And that's what we're going to talk about.
This amazing biome about the size of the continental United
(00:45):
States that it's you want me to keep going? Yeah,
that is so big that it has I mean, how
big is it compared to the world, Like one percent
of the world of the Earth's surface, Yes, but houses
about thirty percent of the biodiversity. Yeah, the world's terrestrial species.
(01:09):
I mean, like it's it's really difficult to overstate just
how unique and important the Amazon rainforest is. It's want
to go now, Yeah, I like looking at pictures of it.
It would be cool. I'm sure it would be cool,
but it'd be one of those things where I wish
I could just teleport there and like hang out and
then teleport home. Like that's probably a big trip to
(01:31):
get into the Amazon these days, you know. Yeah, And
I'm also curious about what kind of trips are good
trips that don't disturb things in such a way, like
where you're not just some like Credi American tourists doing
the wrong thing. Right for sure, for sure. But one
of the things about the Amazon is that a lot
of people take it as this pristine, untouched natural wilderness
(01:57):
that we're trying to protect. And for a very long time,
that's what that was the consensus, not just among the
general public, but among anthropologists, archaeologists, um, a bunch of
different oologists, and that the people who had lived there
lived so lightly upon the land that they were almost
you know, they were they were almost having about the
(02:19):
same impact as some of the other like some of
the wildlife there, that it just wasn't they weren't impacting
it enough to even consider it a significant amount, And
that that Amazon was just this natural gift on Earth
m that we we had, you know, as part of
our cultural or global heritage, right, yeah, like a giant
(02:41):
international park or something exactly. So what we've come to
find is that that's absolutely not the case. That the
Amazon was actually not entirely but significant chunks of it
were engineered by humans, and that probably the best way
to preserve it is to hand as much as we
can of it over to the humans who have traditionally
(03:04):
lived there, who are the descendants of the people who
engineered it years back. Yeah, which, well, we got some
stats on that later, but I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah,
for sure, So I we should probably start further back
than humans, even because the Amazon has been around for
about the last fifteen million years, and it started out
as a giant lake, yeah, a big freshwater lake. And
(03:29):
over time, like to the tune of millions of years,
sea levels fell and eventually, you know, things are going
to change geologically speaking around it, and it became a
wetlands and then about eleven millionish years ago it finally
turned into a river system flowing east into the ocean.
(03:49):
But that wasn't all right. Things continue to change from there. Yeah,
So basically they carved the rivers flowing from the headwaters
in the Andes eastward towards the Atlanta. They carved well,
they made an impression on the continent and they also
brought sediment to the river, so soils started to grow,
(04:10):
which is really significant because tropical rainforest soil is typically
rather infertile because it's so hot and so humid that
stuff decomposes basically too quickly to create nutrients trapped in
the soil. So the fact that that there were sediments,
that there were nutrients being brought into it by the
(04:31):
river is what allowed the i Amazon basin to become
so lush, yeah, and diverse. So still, this is, you know,
like eleven millions years ago, you had savannahs, you had
big patches like Olivia called them islands of forests, and
he had all sorts of sort of smaller biomes. And
then through different ice ages ages, we'll just call them ages. Sure,
(04:57):
things were changing, things were shifting. It became wetter than
it became drier. The river system would change direction like
in its flow. And basically if you go back about
five million years is where you finally get to the
point where the Amazon kind of as we know it
speciologically speaking, I don't know that's a word, but that's
(05:22):
kind of where things started as far as what we
know lives there today. Yeah, you would if you went
back five million years, four million years, you would probably
recognize it more than you would have, you know, several
million years before that. Yeah, So for the past thirteen
thousand years at least, humans have been shaping the Amazon
(05:44):
as well. We've talked a lot about some of the
law civilizations of the Maya and other Mesoamerican groups, indigenous groups, well,
they were no strangers to the Amazon basin, and so
much the same way that we've discovered ancient Maya cities,
(06:04):
we've also discovered other ancient cultures in the Amazon as well.
We'll talk a little more about them in a second.
But one of the big marks that humans left on
the Amazon was something called terra pretta, which is black
soil in Portuguese, and black soil refers to highly fertile,
highly productive soil found in huge swaths of the Amazon
(06:28):
basin that were basically created. These soils were created a
couple of thousand years ago. They're still fertile today. They
you can still put a plant in this soil and
not fertilize it and it will grow very very well,
which again is really uncharacteristic for an Amazon rainforest. So
(06:49):
they started looking into it and they found that there
was a technique that was either purposeful or accidental. Either way,
it created this terra pretta where they would they would
create landscapes of biochart. They would do these low intensity
burns that didn't burn trees all the way down into ash,
but left huge chunks of charcoal which got subsumed into
(07:10):
the soil along with food waste and sometimes broken pottery,
and that that would hold this organic available carbon in
the soil again for thousands of years. And there I
feel like the consensus is leaning more toward this was
a purposeful thing that they did to create the soil,
because we also know that they used it for agriculture too. Yeah,
(07:32):
so the thought that it was just hunters and gatherers
for many, many tens of thousands of years is looking
like that's not true, and it was more hunters and farmers, right.
They probably did some gathering as well. Should imagine if
there was something to gather, they weren't like, I'm not
gathering anything. It's not part of the job description. We
know how to plant things, we know how to engineer
(07:54):
this great soil. But there is evidence that they were,
you know, domesticating plants back as far as like six
thousand BC. And on the same note that there's just
so much we thought we knew about the early indigenous
peoples of the Amazon that was completely wrong, as it
turns out, and one is like how many people were
(08:16):
there and how they lived and what they basically kind
of come to the conclusion now after you know, a
couple of hundred years of thinking otherwise, is when Europeans
would encounter like a sort of smallish tribe of disparate people.
It wasn't just that they were roaming around the Amazon.
(08:36):
It's that they were displaced by those very Europeans, and
that at one time there were groups in the Amazon
that numbered in the you know, two or three thousands,
and that those groups live near enough to each other
where they were larger groups of up to like a
million people that were like building roads in using sort
(08:58):
of rudimentary tools and lanting things and building six story
high complex structures. Yeah, there's one particular complex called the Launostemojos.
It's about the size of England and it housed about
a million people um in I believe the beginning of
the last millennium to about the fourteen hundreds, I think,
(09:21):
and in particular, there was the Casarabe culture um and
they did what was considered low density urbanism, cultivated a
letter in there by the way I looked it up,
that's correct though, Oh really huh, Solidia left it out. Yeah,
I believe so, all right, look at you Casarabe. Finally,
(09:41):
my addition of an extra vowe really comes in handy
because whether it's correct or not, you know, right, So,
but they did they did what you were talking about
where they built these structures. They built raised terraces that
so that their crop land wasn't affected by regional or
seasonal flooding. They connected these villages by raised causeways. They
(10:04):
did all this amazing stuff. And then because of probably
climate change like we saw in the you know what
happened to the Maya civilization episode, we did, they abandoned
these structures. And then once the Europeans showed up and
introduced smallpox, that was that was it. Like whatever civilizations
were left were wiped out, to the tune of potentially
(10:25):
ninety percent of the inhabitants of the Amazon were wiped
out by smallpox starting in the sixteenth century onward. And
then so yeah, when the Spaniards came across these you know,
wandering bands of hunter gathers. They just assumed that's what
it had always been there, who had always been there.
And it turns out that these were essentially refugees from
European conquests, smallpox and a climate change essentially, and that
(10:50):
they didn't they didn't really resemble the cultures that they
had come from at all. Yeah. And not only that,
but the Spaniards were writing about these big, interconnected roadways
that were maintained and wide and usable between these different villages,
and they would write about those and for you know,
a couple hundred years, people were just like scholars and
(11:12):
researchers were just like, yeah, they clearly mistook it, or
that just definitely wasn't going on, and now they're thinking like, oh,
those probably were roads. Yeah. I mean, it's one of
those amazing reversals of understanding that you rarely find in history,
where these stories of legendary last cities actually were true
and we're finding them now. It's pretty thrilling, actually, I
(11:35):
mean from a historians point of view, not like I
don't know, from a computer programmer's point of view. It's
so so so that gets us kind of where we
are today, which is the Amazon Rainforest is in nine
countries in South America. Most of it, sixty percent of
(11:55):
it is in Brazil, and then the rest is divided
among Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Guiana, Suriname, Ecuador, and French Guiana.
Right is that right? Yeah? Yeah, I think they just
spell it differently because they're lee francaie. Yeah. And that's
two million square miles, not acres, my friends, square miles.
(12:19):
It's so mind boggling that, like we said, has about
ten percent of all known species on planet Earth reside
there in thirty percent of terrestrial land walking species. There's
a really great stat that seems to be accurate. I
don't think it's just one of those copy paste stats.
The ants one, Yeah, that on certain bushes in the Amazon,
(12:43):
you may find more species of ants on that one
bush than you'll find in the entire British Isles. That's
how biodiverse this area is. Yeah, that's one of the reasons,
like I do want to go visit because it sounds
amazing and life changing. But then when I think of
and I'm not necessarily afraid of insects or anything, but
(13:03):
I think it's so buggy and insecty it's even someone
who's not too bothered by it can kind of be
pushed over the edge, my friend. The largest spiders in
the world are found in the Amazon, in particular, tarantulas
that are thirteen inches or about thirty three centimeters across.
(13:23):
Can you imagine seeing a tarantula coming at you that's
a foot across? I would just be like, just kill
me now. I know you can't kill me, but please
figure out a way to kill me. Tarantula. Oh, could
you know? They're not actually deadly to humans? They're what
they're not deadly to humans, they're just terrifying looking. No,
(13:44):
they're deadly in that you you die of a cardiac
arrest right when one of them sinks their fans into
you with there and looks at you with their I
don't know what they have, like two hundred eyes at least. Yeah.
So um. The life in the Amazon rainforest and in
all rainforests, really are divided up vertically, Like there's basically
different ecosystems from the tops of the trees down to
(14:07):
the forest floors. They're so radically different that just going
up and down a single tree you find all this
different kind of life, and not only different kinds of life,
different climates depending on where you are. If you're at
the top of the rainforest and the overstory or the canopy,
that's a much different world than it is down at
the shrub level. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I guess we
(14:30):
should start at what you said was the overstory or
that's also known as the emergent layer, where did Lando
Calariesian live sky City or something? Yeah, I can't remember, Okay,
that's basically that. Yeah, boy, I'm sorry Star Wars people.
I'm a Star Wars guy, but I don't remember all
that stuff. I think it was sky City or Skyville, USA,
(14:53):
something like that. Yeah, he's like, did you get your
T shirt when you've flew in? Ya? Smirnov is playing tonight.
So there are we're talking tall, tall trees, a couple
of hundred feet tall, sometimes that limbs spreading out one
hundred feet wide, blowing and dropping seeds all over the place.
(15:16):
Then under that you're gonna have your canopy. Um that
is where you have your overlapping tree branches. And this
remarkably holds sixty to ninety percent of life in the
Amazon nuts in the canopy is crazy. And also I
saw that these these branches just appear to overlap, especially
from an airplane overhead, But if you actually could walk
(15:38):
from tree to tree, you would see that they're None
of the trees touch. There's like a few feet different
between the trees in the canopy. And it's a mystery.
They have no idea exactly why the trees don't grow
touching one another. Um. They think that's probably to keep
from diseases from spreading or like you know, um, destructive
(15:59):
beetles from being able to climb from one tree to another.
But they actually don't touch, and they stay about a
foot or so a couple feet away from one another
on all sides. Isn't that fascinating? Oh? I figured they overlap,
meaning they don't touch, but they overlapped vertically. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
they'll do that, but they don't actually touch. Oh oh yeah, Okay,
(16:20):
they just go I'm not touching you to one another, right, Okay.
The canopy, like you said, is a completely different environment.
You're gonna have all kinds of fun birds and lizards
and slous and monkeys and all kinds of creatures and
plants up there. One hundred feet up. Sometimes it's much hotter.
(16:40):
You talked about the different climates, much hotter and much
dryer during the day, and it's there's a lot of
canopy out there, so the visibility is very poor, so
there's a lot of noise because they're all chirping at
one another. Yeah, and one hundred feet up at the
canopy and then you know another one hundred feet at
the over story. There's a lot more wind. It's really
being blasted by bright sunlight. And that's just again a
(17:04):
different world from underneath the canopy, on the shrub layer,
the forest floor. It's really humid, that the light is dappled,
it's very rarely direct in places, and for that reason,
you have like a much steadier kind of climate than
you have at the top. And yeah, that's where that
decomposition happens really really fast, so that forest soils can't
(17:29):
don't hold in nutrients very well. Yeah, and I don't
think we mentioned that there is a lot of life
in the overstory as well. You're gonna find monkeys up
there too. There can be a snake in a tree
just live in his life one hundred and eighty feet
up in the air, and bats insects, eagles, all kinds
of birds. Something else I found, Chuck that I thought
(17:50):
was fascinating is that the study of rainforest life is
still kind of in its infancy because it's so hard
to consistently get to these places to study this life. Yeah,
isn't that fascinating? It is apparently good in a way.
I saw that Now that drones are here, especially little
(18:13):
handheld drones, it's making it much much easier and less destructive,
to be honest. Yeah, that's true, So they'll probably advance,
but there's still a lot more to be learned in
that field. Yeah, I guess we should talk about rain
because it's a rainforest and it does rain a lot.
Compared to the most rainy state in the United States.
(18:35):
Do you know what that is, Texas? It is Mississippi, Mississippi.
Atlanta is pretty high up there too. I think Atlanta's
top five or six, I believe it. I call it
the Seattle of the South Man. Well, this is talking
about total rainfall. I think that's them. You know, if
you live in the Pacific Northwest, you understand this. But
(18:55):
if you just think, like you know, Atlanta, it rains
a lot more than in Seattle and Portland, but they
have more days of rain, more of those drizzly, sort
of dark days, whereas in Mississippi and in Atlanta in
the southeast, it's just pouring hard rain to the tune
of in Mississippi about five and a half feet a year.
In Atlanta we get about four point three feet per year.
(19:16):
In the Amazon, they get between six and ten feet
of rainfall a year, so up up to double what
the rainy t state here gets and most of it
fromes to it from December to May alone during the
rainy season. Yeah, I mean that's what packed in four
or five months. Yeah, it's rainy. Pretty impressive. But I
(19:36):
don't know if it's the time to visit or not.
But it does not rain much in August that's the
driest month, and they only get a couple of inches
in August. Yeah, So I say we take a break
and then come back and talk to more about the
Amazon rainforest. Where do you think let's do it all? Right,
(20:13):
we're back. We've talked a lot about animals. We're going
to talk more about animals and birds and insects and
all that stuff. But there's a lot of people in
the Amazon rainforest. And again, like you, I think I
sort of pictured it as uh, you know, these largely
undisturbed tribes that are still just hunting and gathering and
(20:36):
that's all. But that's not true. About thirty four million
people live within the ring of the Amazon rainforest. Yeah,
that's nuts. There's a whole city, manaus brazil Um has
a population of two million in the Amazon Um. And
then I think, out of those, um, how many people
did you say lived there, between one and a half
(21:00):
three are indigenous people who have lived there. These are
like their ancestral lands, and a good hundred of the
I think three hundred and fifty to five hundred distinct
indigenous societies in the Amazon are uncontacted, which, if you'll
remember our man in the whole episodes to both of them,
I believe. Yeah, I think we did two episodes on them.
(21:25):
They uncontacted doesn't mean like they're not aware people exist.
They don't want what they don't want to have anything
to do with outsiders, usually because of a terrible thing
that befell them and or their families. Yeah, it's their thanks,
but no thanks tribes exactly. So, I think like thirty
five percent of the Amazon right now make up indigenous territories,
which is good for the Amazon because, as we mentioned
(21:47):
at the outset, one of the things they figured out
is the best way to preserve the rainforest is to
hand control of it over to the indigenous groups. So
you can chuck up about thirty five percent of the
Amazon is safe right now. Right. If animals are something
you like to talk about, then the Amazon is a
pretty great place to be because there are a lot
(22:09):
of fauna and megafauna in the rainforest. And one of
the starts of the show is certainly the jagyar. Yeah, no,
for real, the jaguar. The jaguar. Yeah. If you're buying
a car, it's a jaguaw. Yeah, the jaguar. I don't know,
I don't know where we got the wire from, but
(22:30):
that's what we say, right, Yeah, that's how we say it.
And this is just a beautiful, beautiful beast that used
to be much more common sadly in the southwestern US,
even all the way down to South America in places
like Argentina, but about forty percent of their range has
been lost yea, in Central and South America, and not
(22:51):
over hundreds and hundreds of years. This is in the
last like thirty or forty years, and now they are
considered near threatened. And these these animals like to move
a lot, so they have huge, extensive ranges of hundreds
of kilometers, but they just don't have them in such
area anymore. Yeah. No, there's about ten thousand of them
(23:13):
in the Amazon, which is now their largest contiguous area
of habitat. But because the jaguars get so much attention,
some of the other ones get ignored unless you start
to dig beneath the surface, and when you do, you'll
find there's the jaguarundi, the ace a lot, yeah, the Margai,
the onsilla, and that last one, the onsilla is a
(23:35):
little like five pound cat with a leopard coat that
is just adorable standing on a little tree branch. They're
all very beautiful, for sure, animals, but they vary in
different sizes, shapes, coats, but a lot of them look
like like they have a housecat head on, like a
mini leopard body or something like that. It's kind of cool.
(23:57):
I'm saving my dad jokes from now one. After the
b incident, by the way, oh no, I think everybody's
been been pretty much in favor that it was definitely
worth while. Oh. I've had a couple of yeas and
a couple of nays so far. My point that I
made to one of them was like, if I wrote
that joke down and told it, it's probably pretty terrible,
but it was off the dome. Yeah, I thought it
(24:18):
was great. I still, like, I wake up laughing thinking
about it almost every morning, So I won't make jokes
about acelots and auclttles. I'm not gonna do it anymore.
I think that's a good good choice in this kid.
There's also monkeys, Oh, lots of monkeys, one hundred and
fifty plus species of monkey, everything you could imagine. I
(24:39):
love how Olivia put this one. The nightmarish looking bald.
I guess that's you a cary monkey. Yeah, you need
to look that one up. It's oh I did it
looks like the the It looks like this sounds awful
to say. It looks like a monkey who had his
face peeled off. Wow. Yeah, it does look like that
(25:01):
a lot. It's just a very bright red. It looks
like it a wound almost, Yeah, or like it has
an angry, angry sunburn on its face. Only Yeah, it's
really neat looking, it's a cool monkey. There's also squirrel monkeys,
which are basically what you would think. They're very tiny,
but they're considered large brained if you put any stock
(25:23):
in brain to body ratio, because they have large brains
considering how small they are, and they live in massive
groups of up to three hundred. And I looked up
I was looking at them and somebody asked on Google
or squirrel monkeys good pets? And the answer to that
is a thousand times no, oh really yeah, because they
have to have constant stimulation, so you have to pay
(25:45):
attention to them, basically constantly, and if you don't pay
attention to them, they will just start messing stuff up
all over the place and making your life miserable. So
my advice to you is, no, you don't want to
squirrel monkey as a pet. Ahead not looked that up
until just now, And I get white people want them
as beets. Yeah, are cute, They're very cute, and they're
I'm sure a lot of fun to hang out with,
(26:06):
but maybe just in the jungle. You know, if you
don't pay them enough attention, they'll peel their face off
and become bald ukari. So these monkeys are very valuable
to the ecosystem, though they are not just for looks
and being cute and making fun noises and like being
cheeky and stealing food off your plate. They play very
(26:27):
key roles. They they're up there chowing down on leaves
and they're gonna be pooping that stuff out. They're gonna
be spreading seed. That's gonna you know, the trees are
gonna be more productive because they're gonna be like, something's
eating me. I need to grow more, and that's gonna
you know, we always talk about the domino effect in
these ecosystems. Then there are more insects that are feeding
(26:48):
on these little leaves. That means more birds are gonna
be eating the insects, and it just goes down the
chain and it's good for everybody. Yep. They also eat
seeds or fruits and then poop the seeds out with
plants more trees, and they benefit humans by sampling dates
to find out if they're bad and poisonous. First, I
(27:08):
told you we just watched that recently and that that
scene was tough. The only solace and was that it
was a nazy monkey. Yeah, and even my daughter at
seven and a half was like, yeah, that monkey was
no good. Speaking of movies, so I saw that on
the plane on the way out, and then on the
way back saw Raiders. You watched it, Yeah, I watched
(27:28):
like the third or half or something like that. Yeah,
that's good comfort food. And then on the way back
I watched everything everywhere all at once for the first time. Yeah,
that is one of the most magnificent movies I've ever
seen in my life. Man, Oh, I hate did you
have to see it on an airplane? It was fine.
I was you know, like I had something in my
(27:48):
eye for like the last third of it, and like
it was that was gosh. Anybody who has not seen
that movie, see that movie and just make sure you're
wide open for it. Oh boy, it was great. A
sawt in the theater the Yeah, and never got used
to the hot dog fingers. I thought that was so great.
Spoiler alert they're hot dog fingers. What else did they
(28:12):
have out there? They have the pink river dolphin, the botos,
which is pretty amazing. They swim up in those flooded
forests and tributaries. Yeah. I just thought that was so cool, Chuck,
that they had um that they swam in the forests. Yeah,
that's just amazingly cool. Yeah, you got your eyes out
for the jagyar and you're like, look out for that dolphin, right,
(28:33):
the pink one coming at you. Yeah, and they're pinkish,
Like I was expecting more pink than I got when
I looked them up. But yeah, they're pinkish. And it
looks like they're they're little snouts are way way longer, right, Uh, yeah,
they do look a little they needed to burrow past
all the stumps in the flooded forests. And if you
(28:55):
want color, my friend, forget the pink river dolphins. And
because your attention on poisoned dart frogs, there's and stay
away dozen. Yeah, I don't get close. Just like at pictures,
there's dozens and dozens of species of them, and they
are so beautiful. There's just like the different colors and
how vibrant they are and like, how is that not
(29:17):
glow in the dark paint? It just it's just mind boggling.
But ironically, the m so they're called poison dart frogs
because the tribes have used their their toxins that they
naturally secrete for blow dart hunting, right, that's where they
get their name. But ironically, the least colorful of them all,
the golden poisoned dart frog, is the deadliest. They have
(29:40):
enough toxin in them to kill ten people. This tiny
little frog does, so steer clear of the golden poisoned
dart frog. If there's one lesson in this episode, it's
that we won't get too detailed. But there are all
kinds of rodents, There are all kinds of terrestrial mammals
(30:00):
roaming the ground. The birds just forget about it. I mean,
you want to go see a two can up in
a tree or a macaw, that's where you're going to
find them. And that's I think would be one of
the kind of coolest parts for me is looking up
and seeing those birds that you've seen in like cartoons
and they're real and they're just flying wild. Yeah, flying past.
(30:23):
You're going just follow my nose. You got electric eels,
you got tarantulas, you got piranhas and snakes. All kinds
of things also want to kill you. In the Amazon. Yeah.
The bullet ant, which is the insect with the most
most painful sting of any living thing in the world,
lives in the Amazon. Yeah. Thank you, and I came
(30:44):
across one more thing about animals. I came across another
word that is kind of like masked that I love brows,
just like just like you browsed through a book. Brows
is a word for the leaves and twigs of trees
and shrubs the animals eat. I like that, you got brows,
you got masked. Put it together. You got a dinner
(31:04):
for a tapier. What's a tapier? Well, go ahead and
say so. It's it looks like it's um, it looks
like a pig with a short elephant trunk, but it's
more related to horses and rhinocerii. Yeah. I think we
should do with something on Piranha at some point. Maybe
it's Shorty the movie. Well we'd have to mention it, sure,
(31:27):
but yeah, because I think Paranha misunderstood, and you know,
growing up in the seventies and eighties, probably because of
that movie. Like I think there was the notion that
it's like playground stuff that you hear, like if you
fall in a pool of Piranhas, then you know you'll
be bones in five minutes and that kind of thing.
And I don't think that's true because I always kind
(31:48):
of had that notion, and then when you would see
people in the rivers of the Amazon where there are piranha,
I would just be like, what are you doing? You're
about to be bones from the waist down, and that's
just not the case. I think the coolest creepiest thing
about the piranha is when you go to an aquarium
and you see them and they're not moving. You're used
(32:10):
to fish swimming around, and those piranha are just motionless
in water. I've never noticed that before. While yeah, it's
very unless those weren't real piranha, just wax perranha. Are
they on the string? Yep? No, I think I think
they We'll have to get into that, but I know
I've seen motionless piranha. There's one other thing to steer
clear of, and that's the candy u, which is a
(32:31):
parasitic catfish that is found in the Amazon River and
if you're not careful it, we'll swim up your urethra. Oh.
We talked about that and something we should talk about
that in every episode, just to make sure that never
happens to the stuff you should know a listener, Yeah, wow, okay, yeah,
Verona can and motionless for hours. I just had to
(32:52):
confirm that it wasn't crazy. Very nice, You're not crazy.
I could have told you that you want to take
a break. Yeah, let's take our last break and we'll
talk about well, other great things you can find there
and how humans are destroying those things. So, Chuck, we
(33:28):
talked about how biodiverse the Amazon is, and that in
and of itself is worth preserving. Just the fact that
there's that many animals and that many different animals, and
I think what four hundred billion trees was the estimate.
Just that there's all that life that lives there, it
makes it automatically worth protecting. But just within biodiversity, there's
(33:51):
there's even more reason to protect that life. Because when
you take all those different animals and all those different
trees and you put them together on this one type
of geography and topography with this these different types of climate,
you put it all together, you have a very unique
biome that produces all sorts of ecological services that humans
benefit from, like drinking water, purification, decomposition of waste, getting
(34:17):
rid of parasites and disease. All these different amazing things
that the Amazon does comes from the biodiversity. All the
interactions of all these different types of animals that have
evolved to fill these different ecological niches in this in
these ecosystems, and it produces all these benefits from us.
So there's number two, and the list just keeps going
(34:39):
from there. Yeah, I mean medicines that we use a
lot of these have come from the Amazon, and that's
what that Sean Connery movie was about, is you know,
is the cure for cancer somewhere in some jungle waiting
to be discovered. Uh, you know you've heard of ACE inhibitors.
ACE inhibitors which can help control hypertension that come from
(35:00):
studies at the venom of the fair de lance snake
led to the development of that. So that's just one
example of the many medicines that we've derived and synthesized
from the region. Did I say region? I'm getting very
fancy and other things we can learn. Olivia pointed out
another cool example of something that we haven't figured out yet,
(35:23):
but the leaf cutting ant, which I think we talked
about in the Ants episode. They avoid leaves with that
are naturally anti fungal, and so when they're harvesting this
vegetation for their fungus, farms. They know to stay away
from those. We don't quite get how they do it,
but we might could study them and learn that and
maybe even learn how to control fungal growth where we
(35:46):
need it. Yeah, it's going to be a future treatment
for athletes foot just around the corner maybe. And you'll
notice everybody like you might be waiting for us to
be like And it's the reason we can all breathe
thanks to all the oxygen. It actually is not true. Yes,
the Amazon puts out a lot of oxygen forest, that's great,
but the reason we are all here on Earth breathing
(36:08):
is because of ocean algae. Yeah, that's really who we
have to thank. That's not to downplay the role of
the Amazon rainforest. One of the things that definitely has
a huge impact on is the water cycle, and that
the Amazon actually produces its own weather and then recycles
(36:29):
it five six times and then sends it along off
to different parts of the world. And every single day,
through transpiration of all the plants in the Amazon rainforest,
twenty billion tons of water vapor are released every single day.
That's definitely significant. Yeah, it affects rain as far as
(36:50):
the Midwest of the United States. And all the way
down as south as Argentina apparently. Yeah. The big sort
of benefit and now concern of the Amazon though, which
is what has been on the radar of humans for
a while, and there's been a lot of awareness in
the past few decades around it, is that it's a
(37:12):
carbon sink, really really important carbon sink for planet Earth,
to the tune of about one hundred and twenty three
billion tons of carbon and just buried in the ground there. Yeah,
which is great and valuable. But the problem is is
what's been going on since the late nineteen seventies, which
(37:34):
is burning hundreds of thousands of square miles of the
rainforest and releasing all of that carbon into the air. Yeah,
because not only is it in the ground, it's locked
into the wood of living trees, but when those trees
aren't living anymore, and in particular when they burn, all
that carbon gets released all at once. Where like if
(37:54):
a tree falls over in the woods, whether there's somebody
there to hear it or not, doesn't matter. As it decomposed,
is it slowly releases carbon. If you burn a tree,
it releases a ton of carbon all at once. And
if you burn a huge swath of trees. That's a
big carbon release. And yes, the Amazon has been burning, burning,
burning since the seventies, largely to make way for agriculture
(38:17):
in the most for the most part, cattle grazing. They're
burning down the Amazon to make pastures for cattle for
the most part. And as a result, they're actually concerned
that if it hasn't happened already, that in the not
too distant future, the Amazon will transfer from being a
net absorber of carbon carbon sink to a carbon emitter,
(38:42):
a net emitter of carbon where it will put out
more carbon than it holds in, which is terrible. You
don't want your the world's largest carbon sink aside from
the ocean, the world's largest land based carbon sink. How
about that to turn into a net emitter. That would
be a bad And all is basically driven by fire
(39:03):
in one way or another. Yeah, but you know it's
because of climate change. Even where there haven't been these fires,
I think, like the southeastern part of the forest hasn't
been as burned down yet, but they have also become
a net emitter because trees there are dying. They're dying
(39:23):
too fast. They're dying faster than they can grow, and
a lot of it is because of the warming climate, hotter,
drier conditions on average, and then the level of rising
carbon dioxide in the air. So more CO two is
gonna make a tree grow faster, which is good in
a way, but faster growing trees die younger, and like
you said, they die, they decompose and then release that
(39:46):
carbon again. So it's the cycle where it's sort of
feeding itself almost right in the wrong direction. Yeah, it's
definitely the wrong direction. Another part of the problem too,
is that will affect that that water they and all
of the weather that it impacts, and it will also
make the Amazon less rainy because as more and more
(40:07):
portions of the forest become deforested, that rain that is
that hits the canopy and the overstory and then trickles
down slowly to the understory and the shrub layer, and
then the forest flooring gets like basically trapped in the
forest floor and becomes that nice humidity that keeps the
whole thing going and keeps the plants flourishing. That rain
(40:29):
just runs off into the river and it doesn't get
locked into the soil, so that just leads to further
and further deforestation and then the up I guess the
result of it. Nope, I'm not gonna say that the
result of all of this is that these forest lands
turn into grasslands savannahs, and that's just not nearly as
(40:49):
big of a carbon sink. That's not Again, that's not
what we want the Amazon rainforest to be. Even just
for the fact that you don't want to lose the Amazon,
that's enough to do something about this. Let alone, all
of the sub details that make the Amazon what it
isn't make it valuable for all these different reasons. Yeah.
So if you're out there and you're saying so, that's
(41:13):
what Don Henley's been going on about. That's what Don
Henley's been going on about for all these years and
a lot of other people. And when it comes to
taking action like that, I'm glad people like Don Henley
or raising awareness and literally doing like feed on the
groundwork and raising money when he's not suing people. But
the government is where it really comes into play, and
(41:36):
wealthy nations chipping in is where it comes into play.
Because for about the last twenties years or so, governments
in South America have tried to curb deforestation here and
there and have done a decent job. Some people say
it's too little, too late. It's obviously never too late
to try. But again, if we've passed that tipping point,
(41:58):
then it literally may be too late in the long run.
But Brazil, where like we said, sixty percent of the
forest is, they're going to be a big contributor one
way or the other. And it's sadly driven by politics.
So it hit a six year high deforestation just last
year in twenty twenty two, and that was the end
of a three year period where the conservative president how
(42:22):
do you pronounce his first name is that, Tyre Gayer Bolsonaro,
was saying, yeah, we need money, and the way to
do that is to cut down then burn these forests.
And before that we had a drop in deforestation in
a pretty big way under the leftist president Louise in
a great name an Assio Lula da Silva. And this
(42:45):
is from two thousand and three to two eleven, and
he's back in power now. I think he's the only
Brazilian president to be elected three times, is what I read?
Oh is that right? I thought this was just a
second but yeah, I guess he was too term. And
now this is his third term. Huh yeah, so he's
back and he's saying, hey, we got to reverse these
policies and protect these lands. If you look at charts
(43:06):
of UM deforestation under different presidents, when when Lula came in,
that's what he's affectionately called in Brazil, it just drops deforestation,
just drops off precipitously. Um I saw I was down
by like two thirds, I believe during his administration. And
so not only did he institute protection further rainforest, Brazil's
long had plenty of laws against things like illegal mining, UM,
(43:30):
illegal agriculture, protections for indigenous land that they just weren't enforcing,
and they definitely stopped enforcing when Balcinaro came into power.
UM that that all they have to do is start
enforcing some of these and that will just have enormous effects.
But in addition to that, they're also like okay, like
(43:50):
there are reasons people engage in illegal mining. There are
reasons people UM use like like forest fires to drive
indigenous people off their land because this land is valuable
for people who are in some places in times desperate
for money to feed themselves in their family. It's not
(44:11):
totally under ununderstandable, especially on a more local level when
you get into like large politics, it's all just discussed
and greed. It's the definition of greed of demolishing a
global good for personal gain. I don't believe that that
also translates to the local level where you're trying to
feed your family, right sure, but what you can't do
(44:32):
as a wealthy nation is just say you get guys,
need to change what you're doing, right without chipping in
and helping some right. Right. So there's a couple of
ways to do this, and one that I believe Brazil
is really interested in internally is figuring out how to
exploit the Amazon without her army in the Amazon, right
(44:53):
without doing exploiting it in a sustainable way. Now exploiting
like taking it's the wealth of nature from it, like
and nuts and fruits, and getting into ecotourism that isn't
actually harmful. That's a big way to kind of say, hey,
you don't have to do this illegal mining anymore. Here's
some other stuff we can do, and you're going to
(45:13):
make even more money to be able to sustain in
your family and the forest will continue to thrive. The
other way is like you said going to wealthy nations,
being like, hey, this is a global common good. You
guys think that it should be around that the biodiversity
alone means that it should be protected. Well, then chip in.
If this is like belongs to all of humanity, why
(45:34):
should we be the only ones who have to suffer
to preserve it, Because there's a lot of stuff they
could extract, like oil in the Amazon that they're saying,
pay us not to do that, Like, we could use
that and to keep up and pay off the debts
that we owe you guys, so pay us to leave
it there, and then the Amazon gets preserved and then
we don't have to we don't have to extract this
(45:56):
oil to support ourselves. Yeah, and oftentimes set payment, you know.
Kind of mentioned it is in the form of debt forgiveness,
and there's been a big push in the past, I
feel like fifteen to twenty years for wealthier countries to
forgive the debt of poorer countries. And I think Bono
is big into this cause, but I think more in Africa. Yea,
(46:19):
if I'm not mistaken, I don't remember, but I feel
like he's tried to raise awareness for that and kind
of pushed for debt forgiveness, and if some of these
people like Brazil and Ecuador and Columbia had debt forgiveness,
they may not be doing the mining and the oil drilling,
although the cynic in me says that someone would come
along and try and just exploit it for the riches
(46:39):
of it, not necessarily to pay the debts. But one
thing we have found that works, like we mentioned at
the very beginning, and we're coming full circle here, is
that what they have squarely found is that returning control
of this land to the indigenous cultures, there is seen
(47:00):
a massive, i think a two thirds decrease in deforestation
in areas where indigenous people have full ownership rights. So
there's your answer right there is give it back to
them and say how would you like to treat this land?
Probably how you always wanted it treated, right, But also
that means so that that's saying you're protecting that by
(47:23):
giving it back, by saying like this is protected area,
this is indigenous territory, you can exploit it. But that
still leaves the problem of the non indigenous people who
are trying to make a living out of it. And
again you come into the wealthier countries and say why
don't you guys chip in and actually chuck. There's been
studies of people like households in North America. Norway is
(47:45):
really big on it, and I believe the UK of
what's called willingness to pay WTP among distant beneficiaries. It's
people like you and me who are probably never going
to set foot in the Amazon, but we still want
the Amazon to be round. And I've seen as much
as Norway households are willing to pay as much as
one hundred euros per year to keep the Amazon intact
(48:10):
as it is now. In the United States, we've been
shown to be willing to pay as much as five
dollars for every percentage of forest lost avoided. So if
they can predict how much would be lost and you say,
well this is going to say fifteen percent, the average
American household be willing to pay five dollars per percent
for that fifteen percent, and that the most agreed upon
(48:32):
way of doing this is to say, how about let's
let's make this happen, and then we're just going to
make it a special tax that you pay when you
pay your income tax every year, and each household pays
fifty sixty bucks. And when you start to put that
together among all households in America and then households in
other Western nations, you suddenly have a really giant fund
to preserve the Amazon. Yeah. Pretty neat. And you know,
(48:57):
if you're looking for charities, I have not vetted all
of these, but just a cursory search. And I do
recommend anytime you're giving to charities, vet them and do
your due diligence and check them out and all that
good stuff. But just cursory search. There are a list
of you know, best charities for protecting the rainforest, like
(49:18):
the Rainforest Trust, Amazon Conservation, Cool Earth, Rainforest Foundation, Rainforest
Action Network, Amazon Watch. There are all kinds of them
out there. I don't know which one Don Henley's. Oh
here it is the Hotel California Fund. No, No, I'm kidding, Okay,
(49:39):
I got you. Yeah, I'm surprised. All right, what is
the name of his? I don't know. Okay, can we
look it up? No, as long as it's not that,
that's fine. I'm sure you can. Don Henley Amazon Fund. Yeah,
you got anything else? I got nothing else? Well, Um,
I thought this is a pretty good episode. I would
(50:01):
say it's a throwback episode to like the eighties, like
Save the Amazon, but it's pretty much been ongoing ever
since then. Huh. Yeah, Well, if you want to know
more about preserving the Amazon, just start looking around to
find out how you can help, and I'm sure you'll
find all sorts of cool ways. And god speed to
you for doing that. And since I said that, it's
time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this hot off
(50:23):
the presses another Delirian. And by the way, you know
I asked for I'm sure you'd notice in the emails.
I asked for calls for people to let me take
a ride in one or drive one. And it turns
out we have a lot of stuff you should know,
listeners that own Delirians. Yeah, who knew? Yeah, I mean
I don't know by a lot, but I feel like
we got a dozen or so emails at least from
(50:43):
people in different places say, Chuck, you're on when you
want to do it? I know it's pretty cool. So
I mean, I'm gonna save all those and then I
know those one in Boston, a couple of Canada. Are
you going to do them all? Yeah? That should do
them all. Hush, to drive all the Delirians. Yeah, just
a big road trip. No. I'm going to figure it
out though and meet up with somebody. Okay, but I'm
(51:05):
going to call this another Delirian email. Loved the Delirian EPP.
I actually owned one, learned a few fun things about
it that I thought you might be interested in. When
I was younger, my grandmother left my siblings and me
money specifically for our first cars. A serendipitous amount of
time later, I saw one for sale on the side
of the road. A collector of World War two cars
(51:27):
was thinning out his car collection, and of course I
wanted it as a sound financial investment for a pre
driver's licensed team. I was fourteen. I can't believe this first,
and bought a Delirian at fourteen. I bought a moped
at twelve months, but tails in comparison to event the
kind that you was a bicycle as well like a
(51:50):
true mop ed. Yeah. It also didn't work. Yeah, they
never do as a sound financial investment for a pre
driver's licensed team. My mother agreed to spot the rest
the sixteen thousand, five hundred as soon as we could.
We got a McFly vanity plate for it. My sister
drove us around town for a joy ride. I love
this person, pre bought a car before they could even drive. Yeah,
(52:13):
a Delirian no less. Yeah. We went through a Chick
fil A drive through and ultimately couldn't get our order
through the very tiny window, so we had to back
up and drive back in with enough allowance to fully
open the gull wings as the whole staff look through
the window at us. Nice. I would just sit in
this lazy boy level comfortable, almost horizontal seat of my
stainless steel paper weight. And here's a few fun facts.
(52:36):
There's a sign behind the seats that says this vehicle
is negative Earth hates Earth. Still have no idea what
that means? Is what Kat says. There's a one foot
by one foot by one foot ish safe that the
Delirian key opens, hidden directly behind the driver's seat. Oh wow, man,
I had no idea about any of this. Didn't know
(52:57):
this either. And there was a red button on the
center console. I don't remember what it was supposed to
do because it didn't work. It was just an unlabeled
red round push button. Wow. Just daring you too, Oh man.
I always wanted to put a little Acme Co sticker,
I'm sorry, a glass case and a tiny a tiny
hammer around it, you know, for emergencies. So that is
(53:19):
from Kat Chaffin And that's a great email. Cat. This
may be the best Delirian email we got, hands down.
I mean, everybody else's Delirian email is pretty great, but
this was no on top. This way to go, Kat,
that's an amazing story. Thanks for all the extra info
about the Delirian too. I didn't know about that safe.
I'm sure there was never cocaine in those saves. Never.
(53:42):
If you want to get in touch with this, like
Kat did, you can write us an email too. Send
it to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the IHEARTRADI you up Apple Podcasts
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Jerome Roland. And you
put the three of us together, put some super glue
between us, hold us together for an hour and a half.
(00:24):
You've got an episode of Stuff You Should Know. I
love Olivia helped us with this. I love her title
of this one. It was titled the awe Inspiring, absolutely
Crucial Amazon. Yep. And that's what we're going to talk about.
This amazing biome about the size of the continental United
(00:45):
States that it's you want me to keep going? Yeah,
that is so big that it has I mean, how
big is it compared to the world, Like one percent
of the world of the Earth's surface, Yes, but houses
about thirty percent of the biodiversity. Yeah, the world's terrestrial species.
(01:09):
I mean, like it's it's really difficult to overstate just
how unique and important the Amazon rainforest is. It's want
to go now, Yeah, I like looking at pictures of it.
It would be cool. I'm sure it would be cool,
but it'd be one of those things where I wish
I could just teleport there and like hang out and
then teleport home. Like that's probably a big trip to
(01:31):
get into the Amazon these days, you know. Yeah, And
I'm also curious about what kind of trips are good
trips that don't disturb things in such a way, like
where you're not just some like Credi American tourists doing
the wrong thing. Right for sure, for sure. But one
of the things about the Amazon is that a lot
of people take it as this pristine, untouched natural wilderness
(01:57):
that we're trying to protect. And for a very long time,
that's what that was the consensus, not just among the
general public, but among anthropologists, archaeologists, um, a bunch of
different oologists, and that the people who had lived there
lived so lightly upon the land that they were almost
you know, they were they were almost having about the
(02:19):
same impact as some of the other like some of
the wildlife there, that it just wasn't they weren't impacting
it enough to even consider it a significant amount, And
that that Amazon was just this natural gift on Earth
m that we we had, you know, as part of
our cultural or global heritage, right, yeah, like a giant
(02:41):
international park or something exactly. So what we've come to
find is that that's absolutely not the case. That the
Amazon was actually not entirely but significant chunks of it
were engineered by humans, and that probably the best way
to preserve it is to hand as much as we
can of it over to the humans who have traditionally
(03:04):
lived there, who are the descendants of the people who
engineered it years back. Yeah, which, well, we got some
stats on that later, but I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah,
for sure, So I we should probably start further back
than humans, even because the Amazon has been around for
about the last fifteen million years, and it started out
as a giant lake, yeah, a big freshwater lake. And
(03:29):
over time, like to the tune of millions of years,
sea levels fell and eventually, you know, things are going
to change geologically speaking around it, and it became a
wetlands and then about eleven millionish years ago it finally
turned into a river system flowing east into the ocean.
(03:49):
But that wasn't all right. Things continue to change from there. Yeah,
So basically they carved the rivers flowing from the headwaters
in the Andes eastward towards the Atlanta. They carved well,
they made an impression on the continent and they also
brought sediment to the river, so soils started to grow,
(04:10):
which is really significant because tropical rainforest soil is typically
rather infertile because it's so hot and so humid that
stuff decomposes basically too quickly to create nutrients trapped in
the soil. So the fact that that there were sediments,
that there were nutrients being brought into it by the
(04:31):
river is what allowed the i Amazon basin to become
so lush, yeah, and diverse. So still, this is, you know,
like eleven millions years ago, you had savannahs, you had
big patches like Olivia called them islands of forests, and
he had all sorts of sort of smaller biomes. And
then through different ice ages ages, we'll just call them ages. Sure,
(04:57):
things were changing, things were shifting. It became wetter than
it became drier. The river system would change direction like
in its flow. And basically if you go back about
five million years is where you finally get to the
point where the Amazon kind of as we know it
speciologically speaking, I don't know that's a word, but that's
(05:22):
kind of where things started as far as what we
know lives there today. Yeah, you would if you went
back five million years, four million years, you would probably
recognize it more than you would have, you know, several
million years before that. Yeah, So for the past thirteen
thousand years at least, humans have been shaping the Amazon
(05:44):
as well. We've talked a lot about some of the
law civilizations of the Maya and other Mesoamerican groups, indigenous groups, well,
they were no strangers to the Amazon basin, and so
much the same way that we've discovered ancient Maya cities,
(06:04):
we've also discovered other ancient cultures in the Amazon as well.
We'll talk a little more about them in a second.
But one of the big marks that humans left on
the Amazon was something called terra pretta, which is black
soil in Portuguese, and black soil refers to highly fertile,
highly productive soil found in huge swaths of the Amazon
(06:28):
basin that were basically created. These soils were created a
couple of thousand years ago. They're still fertile today. They
you can still put a plant in this soil and
not fertilize it and it will grow very very well,
which again is really uncharacteristic for an Amazon rainforest. So
(06:49):
they started looking into it and they found that there
was a technique that was either purposeful or accidental. Either way,
it created this terra pretta where they would they would
create landscapes of biochart. They would do these low intensity
burns that didn't burn trees all the way down into ash,
but left huge chunks of charcoal which got subsumed into
(07:10):
the soil along with food waste and sometimes broken pottery,
and that that would hold this organic available carbon in
the soil again for thousands of years. And there I
feel like the consensus is leaning more toward this was
a purposeful thing that they did to create the soil,
because we also know that they used it for agriculture too. Yeah,
(07:32):
so the thought that it was just hunters and gatherers
for many, many tens of thousands of years is looking
like that's not true, and it was more hunters and farmers, right.
They probably did some gathering as well. Should imagine if
there was something to gather, they weren't like, I'm not
gathering anything. It's not part of the job description. We
know how to plant things, we know how to engineer
(07:54):
this great soil. But there is evidence that they were,
you know, domesticating plants back as far as like six
thousand BC. And on the same note that there's just
so much we thought we knew about the early indigenous
peoples of the Amazon that was completely wrong, as it
turns out, and one is like how many people were
(08:16):
there and how they lived and what they basically kind
of come to the conclusion now after you know, a
couple of hundred years of thinking otherwise, is when Europeans
would encounter like a sort of smallish tribe of disparate people.
It wasn't just that they were roaming around the Amazon.
(08:36):
It's that they were displaced by those very Europeans, and
that at one time there were groups in the Amazon
that numbered in the you know, two or three thousands,
and that those groups live near enough to each other
where they were larger groups of up to like a
million people that were like building roads in using sort
(08:58):
of rudimentary tools and lanting things and building six story
high complex structures. Yeah, there's one particular complex called the Launostemojos.
It's about the size of England and it housed about
a million people um in I believe the beginning of
the last millennium to about the fourteen hundreds, I think,
(09:21):
and in particular, there was the Casarabe culture um and
they did what was considered low density urbanism, cultivated a
letter in there by the way I looked it up,
that's correct though, Oh really huh, Solidia left it out. Yeah,
I believe so, all right, look at you Casarabe. Finally,
(09:41):
my addition of an extra vowe really comes in handy
because whether it's correct or not, you know, right, So,
but they did they did what you were talking about
where they built these structures. They built raised terraces that
so that their crop land wasn't affected by regional or
seasonal flooding. They connected these villages by raised causeways. They
(10:04):
did all this amazing stuff. And then because of probably
climate change like we saw in the you know what
happened to the Maya civilization episode, we did, they abandoned
these structures. And then once the Europeans showed up and
introduced smallpox, that was that was it. Like whatever civilizations
were left were wiped out, to the tune of potentially
(10:25):
ninety percent of the inhabitants of the Amazon were wiped
out by smallpox starting in the sixteenth century onward. And
then so yeah, when the Spaniards came across these you know,
wandering bands of hunter gathers. They just assumed that's what
it had always been there, who had always been there.
And it turns out that these were essentially refugees from
European conquests, smallpox and a climate change essentially, and that
(10:50):
they didn't they didn't really resemble the cultures that they
had come from at all. Yeah. And not only that,
but the Spaniards were writing about these big, interconnected roadways
that were maintained and wide and usable between these different villages,
and they would write about those and for you know,
a couple hundred years, people were just like scholars and
(11:12):
researchers were just like, yeah, they clearly mistook it, or
that just definitely wasn't going on, and now they're thinking like, oh,
those probably were roads. Yeah. I mean, it's one of
those amazing reversals of understanding that you rarely find in history,
where these stories of legendary last cities actually were true
and we're finding them now. It's pretty thrilling, actually, I
(11:35):
mean from a historians point of view, not like I
don't know, from a computer programmer's point of view. It's
so so so that gets us kind of where we
are today, which is the Amazon Rainforest is in nine
countries in South America. Most of it, sixty percent of
(11:55):
it is in Brazil, and then the rest is divided
among Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Guiana, Suriname, Ecuador, and French Guiana.
Right is that right? Yeah? Yeah, I think they just
spell it differently because they're lee francaie. Yeah. And that's
two million square miles, not acres, my friends, square miles.
(12:19):
It's so mind boggling that, like we said, has about
ten percent of all known species on planet Earth reside
there in thirty percent of terrestrial land walking species. There's
a really great stat that seems to be accurate. I
don't think it's just one of those copy paste stats.
The ants one, Yeah, that on certain bushes in the Amazon,
(12:43):
you may find more species of ants on that one
bush than you'll find in the entire British Isles. That's
how biodiverse this area is. Yeah, that's one of the reasons,
like I do want to go visit because it sounds
amazing and life changing. But then when I think of
and I'm not necessarily afraid of insects or anything, but
(13:03):
I think it's so buggy and insecty it's even someone
who's not too bothered by it can kind of be
pushed over the edge, my friend. The largest spiders in
the world are found in the Amazon, in particular, tarantulas
that are thirteen inches or about thirty three centimeters across.
(13:23):
Can you imagine seeing a tarantula coming at you that's
a foot across? I would just be like, just kill
me now. I know you can't kill me, but please
figure out a way to kill me. Tarantula. Oh, could
you know? They're not actually deadly to humans? They're what
they're not deadly to humans, they're just terrifying looking. No,
(13:44):
they're deadly in that you you die of a cardiac
arrest right when one of them sinks their fans into
you with there and looks at you with their I
don't know what they have, like two hundred eyes at least. Yeah.
So um. The life in the Amazon rainforest and in
all rainforests, really are divided up vertically, Like there's basically
different ecosystems from the tops of the trees down to
(14:07):
the forest floors. They're so radically different that just going
up and down a single tree you find all this
different kind of life, and not only different kinds of life,
different climates depending on where you are. If you're at
the top of the rainforest and the overstory or the canopy,
that's a much different world than it is down at
the shrub level. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I guess we
(14:30):
should start at what you said was the overstory or
that's also known as the emergent layer, where did Lando
Calariesian live sky City or something? Yeah, I can't remember, Okay,
that's basically that. Yeah, boy, I'm sorry Star Wars people.
I'm a Star Wars guy, but I don't remember all
that stuff. I think it was sky City or Skyville, USA,
(14:53):
something like that. Yeah, he's like, did you get your
T shirt when you've flew in? Ya? Smirnov is playing tonight.
So there are we're talking tall, tall trees, a couple
of hundred feet tall, sometimes that limbs spreading out one
hundred feet wide, blowing and dropping seeds all over the place.
(15:16):
Then under that you're gonna have your canopy. Um that
is where you have your overlapping tree branches. And this
remarkably holds sixty to ninety percent of life in the
Amazon nuts in the canopy is crazy. And also I
saw that these these branches just appear to overlap, especially
from an airplane overhead, But if you actually could walk
(15:38):
from tree to tree, you would see that they're None
of the trees touch. There's like a few feet different
between the trees in the canopy. And it's a mystery.
They have no idea exactly why the trees don't grow
touching one another. Um. They think that's probably to keep
from diseases from spreading or like you know, um, destructive
(15:59):
beetles from being able to climb from one tree to another.
But they actually don't touch, and they stay about a
foot or so a couple feet away from one another
on all sides. Isn't that fascinating? Oh? I figured they overlap,
meaning they don't touch, but they overlapped vertically. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
they'll do that, but they don't actually touch. Oh oh yeah, Okay,
(16:20):
they just go I'm not touching you to one another, right, Okay.
The canopy, like you said, is a completely different environment.
You're gonna have all kinds of fun birds and lizards
and slous and monkeys and all kinds of creatures and
plants up there. One hundred feet up. Sometimes it's much hotter.
(16:40):
You talked about the different climates, much hotter and much
dryer during the day, and it's there's a lot of
canopy out there, so the visibility is very poor, so
there's a lot of noise because they're all chirping at
one another. Yeah, and one hundred feet up at the
canopy and then you know another one hundred feet at
the over story. There's a lot more wind. It's really
being blasted by bright sunlight. And that's just again a
(17:04):
different world from underneath the canopy, on the shrub layer,
the forest floor. It's really humid, that the light is dappled,
it's very rarely direct in places, and for that reason,
you have like a much steadier kind of climate than
you have at the top. And yeah, that's where that
decomposition happens really really fast, so that forest soils can't
(17:29):
don't hold in nutrients very well. Yeah, and I don't
think we mentioned that there is a lot of life
in the overstory as well. You're gonna find monkeys up
there too. There can be a snake in a tree
just live in his life one hundred and eighty feet
up in the air, and bats insects, eagles, all kinds
of birds. Something else I found, Chuck that I thought
(17:50):
was fascinating is that the study of rainforest life is
still kind of in its infancy because it's so hard
to consistently get to these places to study this life. Yeah,
isn't that fascinating? It is apparently good in a way.
I saw that Now that drones are here, especially little
(18:13):
handheld drones, it's making it much much easier and less destructive,
to be honest. Yeah, that's true, So they'll probably advance,
but there's still a lot more to be learned in
that field. Yeah, I guess we should talk about rain
because it's a rainforest and it does rain a lot.
Compared to the most rainy state in the United States.
(18:35):
Do you know what that is, Texas? It is Mississippi, Mississippi.
Atlanta is pretty high up there too. I think Atlanta's
top five or six, I believe it. I call it
the Seattle of the South Man. Well, this is talking
about total rainfall. I think that's them. You know, if
you live in the Pacific Northwest, you understand this. But
(18:55):
if you just think, like you know, Atlanta, it rains
a lot more than in Seattle and Portland, but they
have more days of rain, more of those drizzly, sort
of dark days, whereas in Mississippi and in Atlanta in
the southeast, it's just pouring hard rain to the tune
of in Mississippi about five and a half feet a year.
In Atlanta we get about four point three feet per year.
(19:16):
In the Amazon, they get between six and ten feet
of rainfall a year, so up up to double what
the rainy t state here gets and most of it
fromes to it from December to May alone during the
rainy season. Yeah, I mean that's what packed in four
or five months. Yeah, it's rainy. Pretty impressive. But I
(19:36):
don't know if it's the time to visit or not.
But it does not rain much in August that's the
driest month, and they only get a couple of inches
in August. Yeah, So I say we take a break
and then come back and talk to more about the
Amazon rainforest. Where do you think let's do it all? Right,
(20:13):
we're back. We've talked a lot about animals. We're going
to talk more about animals and birds and insects and
all that stuff. But there's a lot of people in
the Amazon rainforest. And again, like you, I think I
sort of pictured it as uh, you know, these largely
undisturbed tribes that are still just hunting and gathering and
(20:36):
that's all. But that's not true. About thirty four million
people live within the ring of the Amazon rainforest. Yeah,
that's nuts. There's a whole city, manaus brazil Um has
a population of two million in the Amazon Um. And
then I think, out of those, um, how many people
did you say lived there, between one and a half
(21:00):
three are indigenous people who have lived there. These are
like their ancestral lands, and a good hundred of the
I think three hundred and fifty to five hundred distinct
indigenous societies in the Amazon are uncontacted, which, if you'll
remember our man in the whole episodes to both of them,
I believe. Yeah, I think we did two episodes on them.
(21:25):
They uncontacted doesn't mean like they're not aware people exist.
They don't want what they don't want to have anything
to do with outsiders, usually because of a terrible thing
that befell them and or their families. Yeah, it's their thanks,
but no thanks tribes exactly. So, I think like thirty
five percent of the Amazon right now make up indigenous territories,
which is good for the Amazon because, as we mentioned
(21:47):
at the outset, one of the things they figured out
is the best way to preserve the rainforest is to
hand control of it over to the indigenous groups. So
you can chuck up about thirty five percent of the
Amazon is safe right now. Right. If animals are something
you like to talk about, then the Amazon is a
pretty great place to be because there are a lot
(22:09):
of fauna and megafauna in the rainforest. And one of
the starts of the show is certainly the jagyar. Yeah, no,
for real, the jaguar. The jaguar. Yeah. If you're buying
a car, it's a jaguaw. Yeah, the jaguar. I don't know,
I don't know where we got the wire from, but
(22:30):
that's what we say, right, Yeah, that's how we say it.
And this is just a beautiful, beautiful beast that used
to be much more common sadly in the southwestern US,
even all the way down to South America in places
like Argentina, but about forty percent of their range has
been lost yea, in Central and South America, and not
(22:51):
over hundreds and hundreds of years. This is in the
last like thirty or forty years, and now they are
considered near threatened. And these these animals like to move
a lot, so they have huge, extensive ranges of hundreds
of kilometers, but they just don't have them in such
area anymore. Yeah. No, there's about ten thousand of them
(23:13):
in the Amazon, which is now their largest contiguous area
of habitat. But because the jaguars get so much attention,
some of the other ones get ignored unless you start
to dig beneath the surface, and when you do, you'll
find there's the jaguarundi, the ace a lot, yeah, the Margai,
the onsilla, and that last one, the onsilla is a
(23:35):
little like five pound cat with a leopard coat that
is just adorable standing on a little tree branch. They're
all very beautiful, for sure, animals, but they vary in
different sizes, shapes, coats, but a lot of them look
like like they have a housecat head on, like a
mini leopard body or something like that. It's kind of cool.
(23:57):
I'm saving my dad jokes from now one. After the
b incident, by the way, oh no, I think everybody's
been been pretty much in favor that it was definitely
worth while. Oh. I've had a couple of yeas and
a couple of nays so far. My point that I
made to one of them was like, if I wrote
that joke down and told it, it's probably pretty terrible,
but it was off the dome. Yeah, I thought it
(24:18):
was great. I still, like, I wake up laughing thinking
about it almost every morning, So I won't make jokes
about acelots and auclttles. I'm not gonna do it anymore.
I think that's a good good choice in this kid.
There's also monkeys, Oh, lots of monkeys, one hundred and
fifty plus species of monkey, everything you could imagine. I
(24:39):
love how Olivia put this one. The nightmarish looking bald.
I guess that's you a cary monkey. Yeah, you need
to look that one up. It's oh I did it
looks like the the It looks like this sounds awful
to say. It looks like a monkey who had his
face peeled off. Wow. Yeah, it does look like that
(25:01):
a lot. It's just a very bright red. It looks
like it a wound almost, Yeah, or like it has
an angry, angry sunburn on its face. Only Yeah, it's
really neat looking, it's a cool monkey. There's also squirrel monkeys,
which are basically what you would think. They're very tiny,
but they're considered large brained if you put any stock
(25:23):
in brain to body ratio, because they have large brains
considering how small they are, and they live in massive
groups of up to three hundred. And I looked up
I was looking at them and somebody asked on Google
or squirrel monkeys good pets? And the answer to that
is a thousand times no, oh really yeah, because they
have to have constant stimulation, so you have to pay
(25:45):
attention to them, basically constantly, and if you don't pay
attention to them, they will just start messing stuff up
all over the place and making your life miserable. So
my advice to you is, no, you don't want to
squirrel monkey as a pet. Ahead not looked that up
until just now, And I get white people want them
as beets. Yeah, are cute, They're very cute, and they're
I'm sure a lot of fun to hang out with,
(26:06):
but maybe just in the jungle. You know, if you
don't pay them enough attention, they'll peel their face off
and become bald ukari. So these monkeys are very valuable
to the ecosystem, though they are not just for looks
and being cute and making fun noises and like being
cheeky and stealing food off your plate. They play very
(26:27):
key roles. They they're up there chowing down on leaves
and they're gonna be pooping that stuff out. They're gonna
be spreading seed. That's gonna you know, the trees are
gonna be more productive because they're gonna be like, something's
eating me. I need to grow more, and that's gonna
you know, we always talk about the domino effect in
these ecosystems. Then there are more insects that are feeding
(26:48):
on these little leaves. That means more birds are gonna
be eating the insects, and it just goes down the
chain and it's good for everybody. Yep. They also eat
seeds or fruits and then poop the seeds out with
plants more trees, and they benefit humans by sampling dates
to find out if they're bad and poisonous. First, I
(27:08):
told you we just watched that recently and that that
scene was tough. The only solace and was that it
was a nazy monkey. Yeah, and even my daughter at
seven and a half was like, yeah, that monkey was
no good. Speaking of movies, so I saw that on
the plane on the way out, and then on the
way back saw Raiders. You watched it, Yeah, I watched
(27:28):
like the third or half or something like that. Yeah,
that's good comfort food. And then on the way back
I watched everything everywhere all at once for the first time. Yeah,
that is one of the most magnificent movies I've ever
seen in my life. Man, Oh, I hate did you
have to see it on an airplane? It was fine.
I was you know, like I had something in my
(27:48):
eye for like the last third of it, and like
it was that was gosh. Anybody who has not seen
that movie, see that movie and just make sure you're
wide open for it. Oh boy, it was great. A
sawt in the theater the Yeah, and never got used
to the hot dog fingers. I thought that was so great.
Spoiler alert they're hot dog fingers. What else did they
(28:12):
have out there? They have the pink river dolphin, the botos,
which is pretty amazing. They swim up in those flooded
forests and tributaries. Yeah. I just thought that was so cool, Chuck,
that they had um that they swam in the forests. Yeah,
that's just amazingly cool. Yeah, you got your eyes out
for the jagyar and you're like, look out for that dolphin, right,
(28:33):
the pink one coming at you. Yeah, and they're pinkish,
Like I was expecting more pink than I got when
I looked them up. But yeah, they're pinkish. And it
looks like they're they're little snouts are way way longer, right, Uh, yeah,
they do look a little they needed to burrow past
all the stumps in the flooded forests. And if you
(28:55):
want color, my friend, forget the pink river dolphins. And
because your attention on poisoned dart frogs, there's and stay
away dozen. Yeah, I don't get close. Just like at pictures,
there's dozens and dozens of species of them, and they
are so beautiful. There's just like the different colors and
how vibrant they are and like, how is that not
(29:17):
glow in the dark paint? It just it's just mind boggling.
But ironically, the m so they're called poison dart frogs
because the tribes have used their their toxins that they
naturally secrete for blow dart hunting, right, that's where they
get their name. But ironically, the least colorful of them all,
the golden poisoned dart frog, is the deadliest. They have
(29:40):
enough toxin in them to kill ten people. This tiny
little frog does, so steer clear of the golden poisoned
dart frog. If there's one lesson in this episode, it's
that we won't get too detailed. But there are all
kinds of rodents, There are all kinds of terrestrial mammals
(30:00):
roaming the ground. The birds just forget about it. I mean,
you want to go see a two can up in
a tree or a macaw, that's where you're going to
find them. And that's I think would be one of
the kind of coolest parts for me is looking up
and seeing those birds that you've seen in like cartoons
and they're real and they're just flying wild. Yeah, flying past.
(30:23):
You're going just follow my nose. You got electric eels,
you got tarantulas, you got piranhas and snakes. All kinds
of things also want to kill you. In the Amazon. Yeah.
The bullet ant, which is the insect with the most
most painful sting of any living thing in the world,
lives in the Amazon. Yeah. Thank you, and I came
(30:44):
across one more thing about animals. I came across another
word that is kind of like masked that I love brows,
just like just like you browsed through a book. Brows
is a word for the leaves and twigs of trees
and shrubs the animals eat. I like that, you got brows,
you got masked. Put it together. You got a dinner
(31:04):
for a tapier. What's a tapier? Well, go ahead and
say so. It's it looks like it's um, it looks
like a pig with a short elephant trunk, but it's
more related to horses and rhinocerii. Yeah. I think we
should do with something on Piranha at some point. Maybe
it's Shorty the movie. Well we'd have to mention it, sure,
(31:27):
but yeah, because I think Paranha misunderstood, and you know,
growing up in the seventies and eighties, probably because of
that movie. Like I think there was the notion that
it's like playground stuff that you hear, like if you
fall in a pool of Piranhas, then you know you'll
be bones in five minutes and that kind of thing.
And I don't think that's true because I always kind
(31:48):
of had that notion, and then when you would see
people in the rivers of the Amazon where there are piranha,
I would just be like, what are you doing? You're
about to be bones from the waist down, and that's
just not the case. I think the coolest creepiest thing
about the piranha is when you go to an aquarium
and you see them and they're not moving. You're used
(32:10):
to fish swimming around, and those piranha are just motionless
in water. I've never noticed that before. While yeah, it's
very unless those weren't real piranha, just wax perranha. Are
they on the string? Yep? No, I think I think
they We'll have to get into that, but I know
I've seen motionless piranha. There's one other thing to steer
clear of, and that's the candy u, which is a
(32:31):
parasitic catfish that is found in the Amazon River and
if you're not careful it, we'll swim up your urethra. Oh.
We talked about that and something we should talk about
that in every episode, just to make sure that never
happens to the stuff you should know a listener, Yeah, wow, okay, yeah,
Verona can and motionless for hours. I just had to
(32:52):
confirm that it wasn't crazy. Very nice, You're not crazy.
I could have told you that you want to take
a break. Yeah, let's take our last break and we'll
talk about well, other great things you can find there
and how humans are destroying those things. So, Chuck, we
(33:28):
talked about how biodiverse the Amazon is, and that in
and of itself is worth preserving. Just the fact that
there's that many animals and that many different animals, and
I think what four hundred billion trees was the estimate.
Just that there's all that life that lives there, it
makes it automatically worth protecting. But just within biodiversity, there's
(33:51):
there's even more reason to protect that life. Because when
you take all those different animals and all those different
trees and you put them together on this one type
of geography and topography with this these different types of climate,
you put it all together, you have a very unique
biome that produces all sorts of ecological services that humans
benefit from, like drinking water, purification, decomposition of waste, getting
(34:17):
rid of parasites and disease. All these different amazing things
that the Amazon does comes from the biodiversity. All the
interactions of all these different types of animals that have
evolved to fill these different ecological niches in this in
these ecosystems, and it produces all these benefits from us.
So there's number two, and the list just keeps going
(34:39):
from there. Yeah, I mean medicines that we use a
lot of these have come from the Amazon, and that's
what that Sean Connery movie was about, is you know,
is the cure for cancer somewhere in some jungle waiting
to be discovered. Uh, you know you've heard of ACE inhibitors.
ACE inhibitors which can help control hypertension that come from
(35:00):
studies at the venom of the fair de lance snake
led to the development of that. So that's just one
example of the many medicines that we've derived and synthesized
from the region. Did I say region? I'm getting very
fancy and other things we can learn. Olivia pointed out
another cool example of something that we haven't figured out yet,
(35:23):
but the leaf cutting ant, which I think we talked
about in the Ants episode. They avoid leaves with that
are naturally anti fungal, and so when they're harvesting this
vegetation for their fungus, farms. They know to stay away
from those. We don't quite get how they do it,
but we might could study them and learn that and
maybe even learn how to control fungal growth where we
(35:46):
need it. Yeah, it's going to be a future treatment
for athletes foot just around the corner maybe. And you'll
notice everybody like you might be waiting for us to
be like And it's the reason we can all breathe
thanks to all the oxygen. It actually is not true. Yes,
the Amazon puts out a lot of oxygen forest, that's great,
but the reason we are all here on Earth breathing
(36:08):
is because of ocean algae. Yeah, that's really who we
have to thank. That's not to downplay the role of
the Amazon rainforest. One of the things that definitely has
a huge impact on is the water cycle, and that
the Amazon actually produces its own weather and then recycles
(36:29):
it five six times and then sends it along off
to different parts of the world. And every single day,
through transpiration of all the plants in the Amazon rainforest,
twenty billion tons of water vapor are released every single day.
That's definitely significant. Yeah, it affects rain as far as
(36:50):
the Midwest of the United States. And all the way
down as south as Argentina apparently. Yeah. The big sort
of benefit and now concern of the Amazon though, which
is what has been on the radar of humans for
a while, and there's been a lot of awareness in
the past few decades around it, is that it's a
(37:12):
carbon sink, really really important carbon sink for planet Earth,
to the tune of about one hundred and twenty three
billion tons of carbon and just buried in the ground there. Yeah,
which is great and valuable. But the problem is is
what's been going on since the late nineteen seventies, which
(37:34):
is burning hundreds of thousands of square miles of the
rainforest and releasing all of that carbon into the air. Yeah,
because not only is it in the ground, it's locked
into the wood of living trees, but when those trees
aren't living anymore, and in particular when they burn, all
that carbon gets released all at once. Where like if
(37:54):
a tree falls over in the woods, whether there's somebody
there to hear it or not, doesn't matter. As it decomposed,
is it slowly releases carbon. If you burn a tree,
it releases a ton of carbon all at once. And
if you burn a huge swath of trees. That's a
big carbon release. And yes, the Amazon has been burning, burning,
burning since the seventies, largely to make way for agriculture
(38:17):
in the most for the most part, cattle grazing. They're
burning down the Amazon to make pastures for cattle for
the most part. And as a result, they're actually concerned
that if it hasn't happened already, that in the not
too distant future, the Amazon will transfer from being a
net absorber of carbon carbon sink to a carbon emitter,
(38:42):
a net emitter of carbon where it will put out
more carbon than it holds in, which is terrible. You
don't want your the world's largest carbon sink aside from
the ocean, the world's largest land based carbon sink. How
about that to turn into a net emitter. That would
be a bad And all is basically driven by fire
(39:03):
in one way or another. Yeah, but you know it's
because of climate change. Even where there haven't been these fires,
I think, like the southeastern part of the forest hasn't
been as burned down yet, but they have also become
a net emitter because trees there are dying. They're dying
(39:23):
too fast. They're dying faster than they can grow, and
a lot of it is because of the warming climate, hotter,
drier conditions on average, and then the level of rising
carbon dioxide in the air. So more CO two is
gonna make a tree grow faster, which is good in
a way, but faster growing trees die younger, and like
you said, they die, they decompose and then release that
(39:46):
carbon again. So it's the cycle where it's sort of
feeding itself almost right in the wrong direction. Yeah, it's
definitely the wrong direction. Another part of the problem too,
is that will affect that that water they and all
of the weather that it impacts, and it will also
make the Amazon less rainy because as more and more
(40:07):
portions of the forest become deforested, that rain that is
that hits the canopy and the overstory and then trickles
down slowly to the understory and the shrub layer, and
then the forest flooring gets like basically trapped in the
forest floor and becomes that nice humidity that keeps the
whole thing going and keeps the plants flourishing. That rain
(40:29):
just runs off into the river and it doesn't get
locked into the soil, so that just leads to further
and further deforestation and then the up I guess the
result of it. Nope, I'm not gonna say that the
result of all of this is that these forest lands
turn into grasslands savannahs, and that's just not nearly as
(40:49):
big of a carbon sink. That's not Again, that's not
what we want the Amazon rainforest to be. Even just
for the fact that you don't want to lose the Amazon,
that's enough to do something about this. Let alone, all
of the sub details that make the Amazon what it
isn't make it valuable for all these different reasons. Yeah.
So if you're out there and you're saying so, that's
(41:13):
what Don Henley's been going on about. That's what Don
Henley's been going on about for all these years and
a lot of other people. And when it comes to
taking action like that, I'm glad people like Don Henley
or raising awareness and literally doing like feed on the
groundwork and raising money when he's not suing people. But
the government is where it really comes into play, and
(41:36):
wealthy nations chipping in is where it comes into play.
Because for about the last twenties years or so, governments
in South America have tried to curb deforestation here and
there and have done a decent job. Some people say
it's too little, too late. It's obviously never too late
to try. But again, if we've passed that tipping point,
(41:58):
then it literally may be too late in the long run.
But Brazil, where like we said, sixty percent of the
forest is, they're going to be a big contributor one
way or the other. And it's sadly driven by politics.
So it hit a six year high deforestation just last
year in twenty twenty two, and that was the end
of a three year period where the conservative president how
(42:22):
do you pronounce his first name is that, Tyre Gayer Bolsonaro,
was saying, yeah, we need money, and the way to
do that is to cut down then burn these forests.
And before that we had a drop in deforestation in
a pretty big way under the leftist president Louise in
a great name an Assio Lula da Silva. And this
(42:45):
is from two thousand and three to two eleven, and
he's back in power now. I think he's the only
Brazilian president to be elected three times, is what I read?
Oh is that right? I thought this was just a
second but yeah, I guess he was too term. And
now this is his third term. Huh yeah, so he's
back and he's saying, hey, we got to reverse these
policies and protect these lands. If you look at charts
(43:06):
of UM deforestation under different presidents, when when Lula came in,
that's what he's affectionately called in Brazil, it just drops deforestation,
just drops off precipitously. Um I saw I was down
by like two thirds, I believe during his administration. And
so not only did he institute protection further rainforest, Brazil's
long had plenty of laws against things like illegal mining, UM,
(43:30):
illegal agriculture, protections for indigenous land that they just weren't enforcing,
and they definitely stopped enforcing when Balcinaro came into power.
UM that that all they have to do is start
enforcing some of these and that will just have enormous effects.
But in addition to that, they're also like okay, like
(43:50):
there are reasons people engage in illegal mining. There are
reasons people UM use like like forest fires to drive
indigenous people off their land because this land is valuable
for people who are in some places in times desperate
for money to feed themselves in their family. It's not
(44:11):
totally under ununderstandable, especially on a more local level when
you get into like large politics, it's all just discussed
and greed. It's the definition of greed of demolishing a
global good for personal gain. I don't believe that that
also translates to the local level where you're trying to
feed your family, right sure, but what you can't do
(44:32):
as a wealthy nation is just say you get guys,
need to change what you're doing, right without chipping in
and helping some right. Right. So there's a couple of
ways to do this, and one that I believe Brazil
is really interested in internally is figuring out how to
exploit the Amazon without her army in the Amazon, right
(44:53):
without doing exploiting it in a sustainable way. Now exploiting
like taking it's the wealth of nature from it, like
and nuts and fruits, and getting into ecotourism that isn't
actually harmful. That's a big way to kind of say, hey,
you don't have to do this illegal mining anymore. Here's
some other stuff we can do, and you're going to
(45:13):
make even more money to be able to sustain in
your family and the forest will continue to thrive. The
other way is like you said going to wealthy nations,
being like, hey, this is a global common good. You
guys think that it should be around that the biodiversity
alone means that it should be protected. Well, then chip in.
If this is like belongs to all of humanity, why
(45:34):
should we be the only ones who have to suffer
to preserve it, Because there's a lot of stuff they
could extract, like oil in the Amazon that they're saying,
pay us not to do that, Like, we could use
that and to keep up and pay off the debts
that we owe you guys, so pay us to leave
it there, and then the Amazon gets preserved and then
we don't have to we don't have to extract this
(45:56):
oil to support ourselves. Yeah, and oftentimes set payment, you know.
Kind of mentioned it is in the form of debt forgiveness,
and there's been a big push in the past, I
feel like fifteen to twenty years for wealthier countries to
forgive the debt of poorer countries. And I think Bono
is big into this cause, but I think more in Africa. Yea,
(46:19):
if I'm not mistaken, I don't remember, but I feel
like he's tried to raise awareness for that and kind
of pushed for debt forgiveness, and if some of these
people like Brazil and Ecuador and Columbia had debt forgiveness,
they may not be doing the mining and the oil drilling,
although the cynic in me says that someone would come
along and try and just exploit it for the riches
(46:39):
of it, not necessarily to pay the debts. But one
thing we have found that works, like we mentioned at
the very beginning, and we're coming full circle here, is
that what they have squarely found is that returning control
of this land to the indigenous cultures, there is seen
(47:00):
a massive, i think a two thirds decrease in deforestation
in areas where indigenous people have full ownership rights. So
there's your answer right there is give it back to
them and say how would you like to treat this land?
Probably how you always wanted it treated, right, But also
that means so that that's saying you're protecting that by
(47:23):
giving it back, by saying like this is protected area,
this is indigenous territory, you can exploit it. But that
still leaves the problem of the non indigenous people who
are trying to make a living out of it. And
again you come into the wealthier countries and say why
don't you guys chip in and actually chuck. There's been
studies of people like households in North America. Norway is
(47:45):
really big on it, and I believe the UK of
what's called willingness to pay WTP among distant beneficiaries. It's
people like you and me who are probably never going
to set foot in the Amazon, but we still want
the Amazon to be round. And I've seen as much
as Norway households are willing to pay as much as
one hundred euros per year to keep the Amazon intact
(48:10):
as it is now. In the United States, we've been
shown to be willing to pay as much as five
dollars for every percentage of forest lost avoided. So if
they can predict how much would be lost and you say,
well this is going to say fifteen percent, the average
American household be willing to pay five dollars per percent
for that fifteen percent, and that the most agreed upon
(48:32):
way of doing this is to say, how about let's
let's make this happen, and then we're just going to
make it a special tax that you pay when you
pay your income tax every year, and each household pays
fifty sixty bucks. And when you start to put that
together among all households in America and then households in
other Western nations, you suddenly have a really giant fund
to preserve the Amazon. Yeah. Pretty neat. And you know,
(48:57):
if you're looking for charities, I have not vetted all
of these, but just a cursory search. And I do
recommend anytime you're giving to charities, vet them and do
your due diligence and check them out and all that
good stuff. But just cursory search. There are a list
of you know, best charities for protecting the rainforest, like
(49:18):
the Rainforest Trust, Amazon Conservation, Cool Earth, Rainforest Foundation, Rainforest
Action Network, Amazon Watch. There are all kinds of them
out there. I don't know which one Don Henley's. Oh
here it is the Hotel California Fund. No, No, I'm kidding, Okay,
(49:39):
I got you. Yeah, I'm surprised. All right, what is
the name of his? I don't know. Okay, can we
look it up? No, as long as it's not that,
that's fine. I'm sure you can. Don Henley Amazon Fund. Yeah,
you got anything else? I got nothing else? Well, Um,
I thought this is a pretty good episode. I would
(50:01):
say it's a throwback episode to like the eighties, like
Save the Amazon, but it's pretty much been ongoing ever
since then. Huh. Yeah, Well, if you want to know
more about preserving the Amazon, just start looking around to
find out how you can help, and I'm sure you'll
find all sorts of cool ways. And god speed to
you for doing that. And since I said that, it's
time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this hot off
(50:23):
the presses another Delirian. And by the way, you know
I asked for I'm sure you'd notice in the emails.
I asked for calls for people to let me take
a ride in one or drive one. And it turns
out we have a lot of stuff you should know,
listeners that own Delirians. Yeah, who knew? Yeah, I mean
I don't know by a lot, but I feel like
we got a dozen or so emails at least from
(50:43):
people in different places say, Chuck, you're on when you
want to do it? I know it's pretty cool. So
I mean, I'm gonna save all those and then I
know those one in Boston, a couple of Canada. Are
you going to do them all? Yeah? That should do
them all. Hush, to drive all the Delirians. Yeah, just
a big road trip. No. I'm going to figure it
out though and meet up with somebody. Okay, but I'm
(51:05):
going to call this another Delirian email. Loved the Delirian EPP.
I actually owned one, learned a few fun things about
it that I thought you might be interested in. When
I was younger, my grandmother left my siblings and me
money specifically for our first cars. A serendipitous amount of
time later, I saw one for sale on the side
of the road. A collector of World War two cars
(51:27):
was thinning out his car collection, and of course I
wanted it as a sound financial investment for a pre
driver's licensed team. I was fourteen. I can't believe this first,
and bought a Delirian at fourteen. I bought a moped
at twelve months, but tails in comparison to event the
kind that you was a bicycle as well like a
(51:50):
true mop ed. Yeah. It also didn't work. Yeah, they
never do as a sound financial investment for a pre
driver's licensed team. My mother agreed to spot the rest
the sixteen thousand, five hundred as soon as we could.
We got a McFly vanity plate for it. My sister
drove us around town for a joy ride. I love
this person, pre bought a car before they could even drive. Yeah,
(52:13):
a Delirian no less. Yeah. We went through a Chick
fil A drive through and ultimately couldn't get our order
through the very tiny window, so we had to back
up and drive back in with enough allowance to fully
open the gull wings as the whole staff look through
the window at us. Nice. I would just sit in
this lazy boy level comfortable, almost horizontal seat of my
stainless steel paper weight. And here's a few fun facts.
(52:36):
There's a sign behind the seats that says this vehicle
is negative Earth hates Earth. Still have no idea what
that means? Is what Kat says. There's a one foot
by one foot by one foot ish safe that the
Delirian key opens, hidden directly behind the driver's seat. Oh wow, man,
I had no idea about any of this. Didn't know
(52:57):
this either. And there was a red button on the
center console. I don't remember what it was supposed to
do because it didn't work. It was just an unlabeled
red round push button. Wow. Just daring you too, Oh man.
I always wanted to put a little Acme Co sticker,
I'm sorry, a glass case and a tiny a tiny
hammer around it, you know, for emergencies. So that is
(53:19):
from Kat Chaffin And that's a great email. Cat. This
may be the best Delirian email we got, hands down.
I mean, everybody else's Delirian email is pretty great, but
this was no on top. This way to go, Kat,
that's an amazing story. Thanks for all the extra info
about the Delirian too. I didn't know about that safe.
I'm sure there was never cocaine in those saves. Never.
(53:42):
If you want to get in touch with this, like
Kat did, you can write us an email too. Send
it to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the IHEARTRADI you up Apple Podcasts
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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