The Amazon is Breathing

Here's the thing about the Amazon basin. There's a number scientists use when they talk about it — the number of species living there that we haven't discovered yet. And here's what's strange about that number: we don't know what it is. We can't know what it is. We only know it's enormous. That somewhere in that forest right now, there are creatures going about their lives, doing whatever it is they do — and not a single human being on earth knows their name. Think about that for a second. We are losing something we have never even met. The Amazon produces its own weather. It talks to the ocean. Indigenous peoples have lived inside it, and with it, for thousands of years — and they will tell you, if you ask them, that the forest is worth more standing than cut. That it is not a resource waiting to be used. That it is the resource. That it is the economy — if only we could learn to see it that way. We think we know the Amazon. We've seen the pictures. We've heard the statistics. But we don't know it. Not really. Today on the show — what happens when a forest reaches a tipping point. What wildlife monitoring and illegal human activity in one of the most remote places on earth are actually telling us. And what a shift toward a bio-economy might mean for the future of a place that is, in some ways, the future of everything. I'm Tate Chamberlin. My guests today are Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri and Paola de Almeida. Stay with us.