- 17 hours ago
The Amazon rainforest and basin using statistics, data points, expert interviews, and infographics to explain the scale and history of the region. The Amazon River discharges approximately 184,000 cubic meters of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean per second, accounting for one-fifth of the total global freshwater discharge into the oceans.
该片主要探讨了亚马逊雨林的自然奥秘及其作为全球最大雨林的地位..
该片主要探讨了亚马逊雨林的自然奥秘及其作为全球最大雨林的地位..
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00The first thing I think of when you say Amazon is blue tape and too much bubble wrap.
00:06You say Amazon, I think crime.
00:08All beautiful women, then Jeff Bezos, then the forest.
00:12Long before Jeff Bezos, bubble wrap, and porch pirates, there was and is another Amazon.
00:19The real Amazon.
00:21The Amazon is a place of statistics that are so extraordinary that they're scarcely believable.
00:26There are obviously other rainforests, but this is by far the largest.
00:31It's larger than the next two rainforests combined.
00:36There are something like 400 billion trees there.
00:40It's also a place of legendary riches.
00:43It's about finding the golden city, the golden king.
00:46And innumerable dangers.
00:48It's just millions of years of evolution where everything either wants to be a predator or doesn't want to be
00:55prey.
00:56For centuries, it has attracted fortune seekers and adventurers from all over the world.
01:01From gold-hungry Spanish conquerors, to audacious ex-presidents, to wine-guzzling long-distance swimmers.
01:09This is the extraordinary story of the Amazon, revealed through numbers.
01:14How we've used it, how we've abused it, and 200 billion reasons why we have to save it.
01:20Understanding the Amazon is key to understanding our survival as a species.
01:47It's nearly impossible to exaggerate the sheer size of the Amazon rainforest.
01:53You can fly over it hour after hour and see nothing but rainforest from the horizon on.
02:00It's just stunning.
02:02The Amazon is the greatest expanse of tropical forest on the planet.
02:07It's a universe unto itself.
02:09But the forest isn't the only number one around.
02:12It also happens to have the world's most powerful river running through it.
02:16It's the second largest river in the world, second only to the Nile.
02:21And in terms of volume, it's the largest.
02:25The mighty Amazon River is more than 4,000 miles long and channels 20% of the world's total fresh
02:31water, starting from the Andes Mountains and ending in the Atlantic Ocean.
02:35Wowza!
02:35The surrounding Amazon rainforest is a whopping 3.2 million square miles.
02:41It's this immense physical space in which you could put pretty much all of the United States.
02:46If the Amazon River began in California, it would come out in New York.
02:52It's that big.
02:54But for all its size and strength, the Amazon is shrinking fast.
03:00In the last 50 years, we've lost about 18% of the Amazon to deforestation.
03:08An area larger than France.
03:12In 2020 alone, some 5 million acres were cut down.
03:16That's an area the size of Israel.
03:20As we see accelerating deforestation in the Amazon, that's a huge loss for the ecology of the planet.
03:26If you clear too much forest, you can get an ecological collapse.
03:31And we're closer to that tipping point than we would like.
03:40How did the Amazon become so important?
03:42Let's start with the powerhouse Amazon River, fed by more than 1,100 tributaries.
03:49Every second, the river blasts more than 700,000 cubic feet of water into the Atlantic Ocean.
03:54That's over 3 million gallons every minute, or the equivalent of 5,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
04:02That's a lot of laps.
04:05The amount of water that flows into the Atlantic every second would allow about 500 people to have a bath
04:11a week for 325 million years.
04:13The immense outflow blossoms into the Amazon plume, a massive expanse of the Atlantic dominated by the river's freshwater discharge.
04:22Water flowing into the Atlantic from the mouth of the Amazon can be drunk 150 kilometers offshore.
04:30The Amazon rainforest has been around for about 10 million years.
04:35The forest straddles the equator.
04:37Here, the sun hits the earth from directly above at a 90-degree angle.
04:41The intense solar energy evaporates moisture trapped in the lush jungle growth, which falls again as rain, as much as
04:4910 feet per year.
04:52The native soil in the Amazon isn't all that fertile.
04:56The soil in rainforest actually tends to be fairly poor.
04:59It's a very thin soil.
05:01Most of the nutrients are leaching out of it continuously from the movements of water.
05:05But the forest has a secret weapon.
05:09Each year, Atlantic winds blow 182 million tons of dust from here, the Sahara Desert, towards South America.
05:1927.7 million tons of it settle over the Amazon, enough to fill 2 million dump trucks.
05:26The dust delivers 22,000 tons of fertilizing phosphorus to the Amazon soil.
05:32And the result is an explosion of life unlike anywhere else on earth.
05:40There's just a thousand shades of green, a kind of infinitude of form, shape and texture.
05:4610% of the over 1.7 million known species live here, making it the most biodiverse region on earth.
05:55It's almost as if you have to close your eyes and just listen to the hum of biological activity.
06:02The wonder of the Amazon wasn't lost on its first inhabitants, who tagged an eight-mile stretch of cliffs in
06:09Colombia depicting the rich life around them.
06:13A little more red.
06:16The cliff murals date back from about 12,500 BCE.
06:20We're able to date this rock art because of what's being depicted in it.
06:24We see paintings of mastodons and giant sloths, species that went extinct before the end of the Pleistocene.
06:33It's an astonishing history of the prehistoric Amazon in red pigment.
06:37This area of cliffs has been called the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon.
06:41I've never heard of this Michelangelo.
06:45Today, in the Brazilian Amazon alone, scientists discover about one new species every other day.
06:53The diversity of plant, animal, insect, fungi, and birds is what is so extraordinary.
07:01There's been expedition after expedition to try to document stuff, but it remains still a place of enigmas and ciphers.
07:10Insects are the undisputed kings here, making up 90% of all species in the Amazon.
07:16Just one square mile can have more than 50,000 insect species.
07:21It's estimated the Amazon region is home to around 2.5 million in total, although only around 8,000 have
07:28been identified.
07:29You lie down on the floor and your body practically is lifted up and carried away by ants.
07:34Are you saying that I could lay down in the Amazon and not have to walk?
07:38Because that's not bad.
07:39With the ant thing?
07:40Oh.
07:41The thoughts of being covered in bugs, unless I'm winning $50,000 on fear factor, it makes absolutely no sense
07:47to me.
07:47The Amazon River is also brimming with life.
07:51Some of it can give people nightmares.
07:54The black caiman can grow to as big as 16.5 feet long.
07:58From 2000 to 2016, 23 fatal attacks by the black caiman were recorded in the Amazon.
08:05The electric eel can generate a pulse of 860 volts, enough to cause cardiac arrest in humans.
08:12The toothy, red-bellied piranha packs a powerful bite, strong enough to cut through a human finger bone like a
08:19pair of bolt cutters.
08:21And then there's the candiru.
08:25It's one of only two species on Earth that survives solely on blood, the other being the vampire bat.
08:31Usually what it does is it swims through the gill chamber of a fish, gets what it needs, and then
08:36it swims on out.
08:38On rare occasions, it can swim inside of a human.
08:42It goes into any orifice.
08:45Uh, what?
08:50In 1897, Georges Boulanger, a Belgian zoologist, presents a candiru to the Zoological Society of London.
08:57Here you go.
08:58Oh, what a cute little fish are you.
09:00He also describes the extreme lengths some Amazon men will go to rid themselves of a candiru.
09:07They believe that the only way to stop it from reaching the bladder, where it causes inflammation and ultimately death,
09:13is to immediately amputate the penis.
09:17Not my willy.
09:19Did you just tell me a fish can fly on someone's peel?
09:24Would I go swimming in the Amazon River?
09:26Hell no.
09:28There's piranhas, weird things, you can't see the bottom.
09:31No.
09:32That stuff only twirls white people.
09:33Why am I inside a piranhas living room?
09:42The Amazon River is filled with scary creatures.
09:45But that doesn't stop people from swimming.
09:49In 2007, one man decides to swim the whole thing.
09:52His name is Martin Strel, an eccentric Slovenian swimmer who rose to fame after completing massive distances on some of
10:01the world's longest rivers.
10:04In 2000, Strel swam the Danube in Central Europe.
10:08Two years later, he conquered the much longer Mississippi.
10:13Two years after that, he upped the ante once again by swimming the Yangtze River in China.
10:19Ooh, that's a lot of swimming.
10:21But the Amazon is unlike anything Strel has attempted before.
10:26I'm going to guess Martin Strel is the kind of person that once he sets his mind to something, he
10:30cannot be dissuaded.
10:32Because there are many, many reasons why he should not have attempted to swim the entire Amazon.
10:37Besides things like sharks and piranha, there's a whole universe of microbial life that can enter the body and do
10:44serious harm.
10:45Oh my God, he's crazy!
10:46To protect himself, Strel wears a wetsuit coated with lanolin and gasoline.
10:52Look me up, fellas.
10:54On February 1st, 2007, 52-year-old Strel plunges into the Amazon's headwaters in Peru and begins front-crawling his
11:02way towards the Atlantic.
11:06He had his teammates pouring blood on other sides of the river to try to lure away piranhas.
11:13Here, fishy fishy.
11:14And it still ended up getting bit.
11:15The gasoline, it does nothing.
11:19Strel swims an exhausting 10 hours a day, burning 10,000 to 12,000 calories in that time.
11:26The average man burns 2,500 daily.
11:30Alcohol is not generally considered a performance enhancer.
11:33But Strel says that he was drinking his local Slovenian wine, and that was a magic elixir for him.
11:40Bottoms up.
11:41Up to two bottles a day to help him going forward.
11:44Despite the extra fortification, he ends up sick and delirious from the microbes he also swallows.
11:5266 days and 3,273 miles later, Martin Strel enters the Atlantic Ocean.
11:59He's conquered the Amazon, but at a heavy price.
12:02When the time Strel reached the finish line, he was not in good condition.
12:06I'm so tired.
12:07He was dehydrated and famished.
12:10He was bitten up.
12:11He was infected with parasites.
12:13He needed to go to the hospital.
12:15Thankfully, he does recover.
12:19Martin Strel had a rough ride through the Amazon.
12:22Compared to others, though, he got off easy.
12:25Case in point, Teddy Roosevelt.
12:27Bison hunter.
12:29War hero.
12:31The 26th president of the United States who took a bullet in the chest and lived to tell the tale.
12:38December 1913.
12:40Roosevelt has just lost the 1912 presidential election.
12:43So like any 55-year-old in a midlife crisis, he decides to do something really, really reckless.
12:51Theodore Roosevelt had a pattern in his life.
12:53So again and again, when he would face tragedy or loss, he would throw himself into these very, very difficult
12:59and dangerous situations.
13:02Accompanied by his 23-year-old son, Kermit, and a veteran Brazilian explorer named Colonel Candido Rondon,
13:09Roosevelt sets out to map a newly discovered Amazon tributary and name it after himself.
13:15Easy enough, right?
13:17Well, the problems start with their dugout canoes.
13:21They're going down, basically, Class 4 rapids in these hauled-out tree trunks.
13:29Oh, my God!
13:30Help!
13:32These canoes suck.
13:34They would get to points where it was impossible to get them through,
13:38and so then they would have to haul them through the rainforest.
13:42It's really heavy.
13:43The delays put a huge strain on their supplies.
13:46My, my, that's a big gun.
13:48And force them to hunt and forage for food.
13:51I'll take mine medium rare.
13:53But this is just a taste of what's to come.
13:55One night, as they're clearing a spot on the riverbank to camp,
13:59Roosevelt comes face-to-face or toe-to-toe with one of the deadliest creatures in the Amazon.
14:05The steps on a coral snake that reaches out and bites him.
14:10And there was no cure for a bite from a coral snake.
14:14If someone were poisoned by one, they would just wait for them to die, and it was a really terrible
14:19death.
14:20Roosevelt was very, very lucky because he was wearing thick leather boots,
14:24and the venom went into the heel of the boot instead of into him.
14:29As they continue downriver, Roosevelt and his team are pursued by the Sintalarga,
14:34a local indigenous tribe.
14:36Anyone get the feeling we're being watched?
14:38At one point, Rondon and his dog were walking ahead.
14:43Come on, boy.
14:44And Rondon's dog went in front of him, and they killed the dog.
14:49And Rondon realized that it could have been him.
14:51The Sintalarga had every reason to kill them.
14:55They were obviously a potential threat.
14:57And if they had decided to attack, it's very, very, very likely that Roosevelt and all of his men,
15:03everyone on the expedition, would have been killed.
15:06As the expedition inches its way toward the finish line,
15:10Teddy Roosevelt is nearly at death's door.
15:13One day, Roosevelt cuts his leg on a rock, this gash, and you're in the Amazon.
15:19There are all kinds of ways it can get infected, and it did.
15:23And he got horribly, horribly sick, and he was delirious, and he was mumbling.
15:29Roosevelt had brought a lethal dose of morphine just in case,
15:33and he decides it's time to take it.
15:35He doesn't want to be a danger to other men on the trip.
15:38The only reason he didn't take that lethal dose of morphine was because his son was with him,
15:44and he realized that the best way to save his son was to let his son save him,
15:50let his son find a way to get him, Theodore Roosevelt, out of the Amazon alive.
15:56Let's go home, boy.
15:59On April 26th, 1914, the battered expedition finally emerges from the jungle.
16:05Of the 22 men who started the journey, 19 survive, including Teddy Roosevelt.
16:11But the Amazon isn't finished with him yet.
16:14By the time Roosevelt emerged from the Amazon rainforest,
16:18he was just a shell of his former self.
16:21He had lost 50 pounds, and he was incredibly weak,
16:25and he never would fully recover, and he lived only another five years.
16:31But hey, at least he got his river.
16:36Roosevelt wasn't the first outsider to slap a name tag on an unmarked river.
16:41Let's rewind the tape four centuries and see how the Amazon got its name.
16:47The man responsible?
16:48Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana.
16:51We'll just call him Frank.
16:53He was actually a cousin of Pizarro, who was a conqueror of Peru,
16:58and the Pizarro family were frantic conquistadors, bloodthirsty and goldthirsty.
17:06In 1541, he leads a massive expedition to find and conquer the mythical city of gold, El Dorado.
17:13De Orellana didn't go into the Amazon with the intention of having any positive interactions with local peoples.
17:20He was there to extract resources.
17:23The 243-man expedition doesn't exactly pack light.
17:28They take over 200 horses, over 2,000 pigs, 2,000 dogs, and more than 4,000 indigenous people as
17:39porters and servants.
17:41Along the way, Frank stumbles upon indigenous villages.
17:45They are not made of gold, but he is not picky.
17:49A conquistador's got to conquer, apparently.
17:52The locals have other ideas.
17:56In a particular conflict with local villagers, he came across some female warriors who were particularly ferocious and understandably didn't
18:08want him there.
18:10Outmatched, Frank calls a retreat.
18:12They left enough of a mark on him to remind him of the Amazonian warriors of Greek mythology.
18:20Hmm.
18:21And he named the area after them.
18:23That's how the Amazon got its name.
18:26But as bizarre as the Amazon women must have looked to Frank, imagine how weird he looked to them.
18:34Seeing people in armor probably made them think that these strange people look kind of like insects.
18:44Big Frank scuttles away, heading east along the newly christened Amazon River.
18:49It's the beginning of a 3,100-mile odyssey that will carry him through the heart of an ancient rainforest
18:56civilization.
19:01What they describe is an inhabited world.
19:05You didn't see a sort of forest primeval.
19:07It was very heavily populated.
19:10Massive cities along the riverbank stretching as far as 15 miles.
19:15Inhabited areas that take a full two days and two nights to pass through.
19:19We have an idea that the Amazon is this pristine jungle and that there's very few human touches to it.
19:26But that's not accurate at all.
19:28There's been a million plus people living in the area for thousands of years.
19:33When Frank passes through, there are anywhere between 6 and 20 million indigenous people living in the region.
19:39Incredibly, more than 100 of these ancient cultures still exist today, pretty much unchanged for hundreds of years.
19:47The Amazon is one of just two places on earth where there are still groups of people who have had
19:52no contact with the outside world.
19:55I think it's actually cool that there are people in the Amazon who have never used Amazon.
19:59I can't go a day without my cell phone.
20:02It'd be such a bummer to be cut off from the outside world.
20:05And then it's like, hey, we're happy to meet you.
20:08We're burning the plant to the ground.
20:10You got 10 years left.
20:11The vast cultural gulf with outsiders often makes contact more than a little awkward.
20:17In 1955, five American missionaries set out to spread Christianity to the Guarani people of the jungles of Ecuador.
20:28This story, in its essence, it's repeated so many times.
20:33Essentially, it involves evangelicals who see an indigenous group want to save them from the hell they feel like they
20:40would inevitably face.
20:46So they set up camp near Guarani territory and start airdropping gifts for them.
20:50Who wants presents?
20:52They fly around in tight circles with the gifts in a canvas bucket at the end of a 1,500
20:57-foot rope.
20:58The first drop contains a kettle, some buttons, and rock salt.
21:03They drop this stuff down.
21:05The indigenous population takes it and, you know, doesn't seem to be particularly aggressive.
21:11Then they start expecting to have gifts given back to them, and they think it's a good sign when other
21:16things are left in exchange.
21:18They like us. Praise the Lord.
21:20The missionaries want to meet the Guarani face to face and come up with a plan that they think will
21:26ease everybody into it.
21:27Got to get my good side.
21:30They drop 8 by 10 glossy photos of themselves, hoping the Guarani people will recognize them in person and go,
21:38Ah, these must be the nice guys that are sending us the presents.
21:42But it doesn't go as planned.
21:45Two Guarani, a young man and a young woman, pluck up the courage to visit the missionaries.
21:50They try to be friendly.
21:52They take the young man on an airplane ride to show him his village from above.
21:57That's where you live.
21:58It's also a bit of showing off, I imagine.
22:02And they hope that this is going to put them on a positive standing to make further contact with the
22:08community.
22:09What the missionaries don't know is that the young woman's family is furious she visited them.
22:15To deflect attention, the young man claims the missionaries had attacked them.
22:20Two days later, a pair of Guarani women appear near the missionary camp.
22:25The evangelicals think, wow, it's so great.
22:27They're coming out.
22:28They're going to talk to us.
22:30And then someone says, hello.
22:32It's so nice to see you.
22:33That's when the Guarani spring their trap and spear the five men to death.
22:39It may seem like the missionaries are the victims here because they're the ones that ended up murdered.
22:43But we have to question why they were there in the first place.
22:46They went into this community to try to convert them and to say that your religious experience is wrong.
22:52Let us show you the right way.
22:54Historically, indigenous people have had by far the most to fear from contact with outsiders.
23:00Today, the Amazon region is home to more than 30 million people.
23:04But only about 9% or 2.7 million of the population is indigenous.
23:09It's important to realize that the interaction between white people and indigenous populations
23:14has a deep history of not only loss of life but loss of worlds.
23:20The Spanish and Portuguese first arrived in the region around the year 1500.
23:25Land ho!
23:26They brought guns and other weapons used to kill many indigenous people.
23:31But they brought something even more dangerous.
23:34The disease was much more deadly.
23:37Largely smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, they certainly died in vast numbers over a period of years.
23:44Less than 100 years after Europeans arrived, the Amazon's indigenous population was reduced by 90%.
23:52Many of these dangers still exist today.
24:02Almer Sururi is chief of the Peter Sururi tribe, who have traditionally occupied a 957 square mile tract of Amazonian
24:11rainforest in western Brazil.
24:31Losing indigenous lives also means losing the incredible cultures and innovations they have refined over millennia.
24:43Most of us think of the Amazon jungle as wild and overgrown, the opposite of farmland.
24:49But recent studies have found that that's not the case.
24:54What's interesting in the Amazon, we've actually discovered areas that have very good fertile soil.
25:00And that's unusual in a rainforest.
25:02And we now recognize that this was intentional human terraforming.
25:06They were actively managing the soil there to make it better for agriculture.
25:11It turns out that about 12% of the Amazon's dry forests have been farmed by indigenous communities for 5
25:18,000 years.
25:18Well, that's a long time.
25:21And their approach to agriculture is radically different from what most of the world practices today.
25:26Modern agriculture is a monocultural agriculture.
25:30You basically take this complex world and reduce it to a couple of species.
25:35Indigenous agriculture is rooted in polyculture and agroforestry.
25:40So you don't just have one of your trees growing and one of your root crops,
25:46but that you have both the mixture of the wild and the tame.
25:51In the human life, there are only two paths.
25:54Good and bad things.
25:57And the most easy thing is bad things.
26:00And the most difficult things are good things.
26:05Conventional agriculture plants crops that are harvested every one to three years
26:09and requires huge swaths of forest to be cut down.
26:12Look, that's bad, right?
26:13Indigenous Amazonians plant crops that can keep producing for 20 years
26:18and grow in harmony with the forest.
26:22A gente tenta mostrar que é possível fazer desenvolvimento econômico
26:26sem agredir muito ao meio ambiente.
26:30But over the years, outsiders have been more than happy to tear the Amazon apart to make big bucks.
26:40The Amazon is incredibly rich in natural resources.
26:43Which has been both a blessing and a curse.
26:48There's just an unbelievable variety, but wherever there's an opportunity, it's immediately exploited.
26:56One of the first resources to attract greedy outsiders?
27:00Number 79 on the periodic table of elements.
27:04Gold.
27:05Ooh, shiny.
27:07Myths about gold in the Amazon have been around for as long as we've had contact with people in the
27:13Amazon.
27:15The Amazon gold rush is the longest in history.
27:18It lasts two centuries from the late 1600s to the late 1800s.
27:22In Brazil, you have one of the largest extractions of gold that occurs until the late 20th century.
27:32Today, demand for Amazon gold is on the rebound and has been rising steadily since the early 2000s.
27:38The result?
27:39Some 500,000 small, mostly illegal mining operations.
27:45They are responsible for up to 10% of deforestation in the region.
27:50It's terrible for the local environment and people.
27:54This environmental exploitation is not something in the past.
27:57It's happening right now.
27:59The idea that we're doing this for gold, what do we do with gold?
28:04We take gold out of the ground to smelt it into blocks that we then put back into the ground
28:09and bank falls.
28:10That's something Indigenous people just do not understand.
28:15Gold isn't the only resource to ignite a global frenzy for a piece of the Amazon.
28:19For one of the most coveted of all, look no further than these trees.
28:25There are three species of trees that yield a white latex that became the source of calcio, of rubber.
28:33Rubber is kind of an amazing material.
28:35Though it's something that we get from plants, it's elastic, it's flexible, you can do so many things with it.
28:43So when rubber as a compound was discovered in the Amazon, it was very high value.
28:49The arrival of the automobile sends the Amazon rubber industry into overdrive.
28:56In 1908, Henry Ford would be making the first of 15 million Model Ts and every one of them needed
29:03rubber.
29:03And the only source was in the Amazon.
29:07By 1910, rubber makes up over 40% of all Brazil's exports.
29:13Harvesting it is a massive undertaking.
29:15In order to get to the trees worth tapping, you had to mobilize labor by the thousands.
29:21The vast majority of those tappers are the Indigenous people who know where the best trees are.
29:26Over here!
29:27The horrific, barbaric treatment of rubber tappers unleashed by barons defies imagining.
29:37A priest once said that the best that could be said of a white man is he didn't kill his
29:42Indians for sport.
29:44By the end of the boom, for every ton of rubber produced, 10 Indigenous people would die.
29:50To speed up production, Amazon rubber barons start growing trees and plantations.
29:55But the seeds of the boom's destruction have already been sown.
29:59Let's wind the clock back to the 1870s.
30:02The Brazilian government worked very hard to maintain control over the supply chain of rubber.
30:09But the British worked quite hard to get control of it.
30:13They've been trying to get seeds out of Brazil forever, but the rubber seed has a lot of oil and
30:20it rots very quickly.
30:22That all changes in 1876 when a man named Henry Wickham pulls off the heist of the century.
30:29Wickham was able to actually smuggle rubber seeds out of Brazil.
30:34The Brazilian government had an embargo on exporting them, but he found a way to sneak some of these out
30:42of the country quick enough for the seeds to survive.
30:45Wickham smuggles 70,000 seeds from Brazil to the UK.
30:49They get planted inside the hothouses of Kew Gardens where 2,700 of them sprout.
30:55Once the seedlings were established, they were shipped destined for Singapore.
31:01Because of this act of industrial espionage, Britain was able to become a huge player in the world rubber market.
31:09It's a devastating blow to Brazilian producers, whose fate is all but sealed in 1933 when the Amazon's rubber plantations
31:19are consumed by a leaf blight.
31:20It was as if God had a blow torch. The South American leaf blight just ravaged the entire investment.
31:28By 1940, 95% of the world's rubber supply is being grown in British owned plantations in Southeast Asia.
31:35But in 1941, one seismic event will bounce the rubber industry right back into the Amazon course.
31:44On December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and within six weeks, the Japanese had taken control of
31:5497% of the world's rubber supply.
31:58It was the biggest crisis of World War II.
32:02A single Sherman tank requires a half ton of rubber. A heavy bomber, a full ton.
32:11Some warships contain as many as 20,000 rubber parts.
32:15Don't want any leaks.
32:17It was an extraordinary crisis upon us. The entire fate of the Allied cause, and indeed the fate of civilization,
32:24literally hinged.
32:26The Allies desperately need rubber. They have no choice but to turn to the original source.
32:31Hey guys, no hard feelings?
32:33The U.S. offers Brazil $100 per tapper in return for restarting the Amazon's rubber industry.
32:39Brazil quickly recruits more than 55,000 people to tap rubber trees deep in the jungle.
32:44They become known as the rubber soldiers.
32:48We see a lot of child labor at this time, children as young as five being sent into the forest
32:53to gather rubber.
32:56The average tapper's work day starts before dawn.
32:59They are given only a kerosene lamp for the gloom and a machete for bushwhacking.
33:05Lucky recruits get a rifle for protection.
33:09The rubber tappers would be working for the Allied in the war effort.
33:15And it was seen not as the oppression of young men, but rather about young patriotic men saving the country
33:23through their labors in the tropical forest.
33:26The day to day was not nearly as illustrious.
33:30Tappers spend their mornings scouring the forest for rubber trees to tap.
33:34There's one.
33:34In the afternoon, they retrace their steps to collect the sap and haul it back to camp in the dark.
33:41Even then, the fun is only getting started.
33:44Back at the camp, they have to cure the day's rubber haul on a paddle over a smoky fire.
33:49Once that's done, it's finally time to eat.
33:51I'm so hungry.
33:53However, the Brazilian government isn't serving up any rations, so dinner is whatever they manage to bag in between tapping
34:00trees.
34:01No matter how unappetizing.
34:05People were worked so hard and in dangerous conditions that they were heavily exploited.
34:1225,000 Brazilian troops serve on the front lines in the Second World War.
34:18457 lose their lives.
34:20But vastly more Brazilians die on the home front thanks to the demand for rubber.
34:2530,000 rubber soldiers make the supreme sacrifice, a staggering 55% of those recruited.
34:35The Amazon rainforest helped save the free world from fascism in the 1940s.
34:40Now we need it again to save the entire human race from extinction by means of a 200 gigaton secret
34:48locked in its leaves.
34:55Is the Amazon dangerous?
34:57Yes.
34:57So, so dangerous.
34:58Yes.
34:59Everything.
34:59Everything is dangerous.
35:01Anywhere where there is something that is trying to eat me is immediately a problem.
35:05It's no secret that the Amazon has many ways to kill us.
35:09What's less known is that it may have infinitely more ways to save us.
35:13It's a story that starts with the Amazon's most dangerous creature.
35:17The most dangerous creature in the Amazon.
35:20There are so many options to choose from.
35:23Well, aside from the penis fish, maybe an anaconda.
35:26There's probably some mushroom that you accidentally step on and then you just explode.
35:32Or your skin falls off.
35:34Or both.
35:36There's lots of scary and dangerous animals in the Amazon, but probably the most deadly is the mosquito.
35:42You want a piece of me?
35:44How dangerous is the mosquito?
35:46Well, sharks kill around six people every year.
35:49Venomous snakes?
35:50They kill an estimated 50,000.
35:53But even they are nothing compared to the deadly mosquito.
35:57According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, there were 229 million cases of malaria worldwide, resulting in 409,000
36:07deaths.
36:09Malaria is a parasite carried inside mosquitoes and it's still one of the major causes of death in the world
36:15today.
36:16Most of the mortality occurs in children. So control of this is very important. It's also preventable and treatable.
36:24Where did the first malaria treatment come from? The Amazon, of course.
36:30The story goes that in 1631, the Spanish Countess of Sinchona, who was married to the Viceroy of Peru, got
36:37sick with terrible chills.
36:39Oh, so cold.
36:40And a dangerously high fever. Textbook malaria symptoms.
36:45The Count turns to his doctors, who are Jesuit priests, for help.
36:49What are we going to do?
36:50The Jesuits acted as if they just had some brilliant inside information.
36:55Don't worry. We've got just the thing.
36:59Jesuits, in general, were very interested in medicine.
37:02They kept medicinal gardens in Europe.
37:05The Jesuits rush off and get a cinnamon-colored bark, which they grind up into a fine powder.
37:10That'll do just fine.
37:12They mix that into a drink and then hurry back to the Countess.
37:15Down the hatch.
37:16It was a very bitter, disgusting thing to drink.
37:20But it does the trick. The Countess is cured of malaria.
37:24Well, that's a relief.
37:25And the Jesuits look like geniuses, except it might not have happened that way.
37:29What they didn't reveal was where they got that information, which rather unsurprisingly came from local indigenous people who have
37:36known for hundreds of years how to treat malaria.
37:41Today, the tree that grows that miraculous bark is known as the Sinchona tree, after the Countess.
37:47Sinchona is in the Rubiaceae family, the Coffey family, and the bark yields quinine, which is a naturally occurring anti
37:55-malarial agent.
37:56By the 1640s, the Jesuits are exporting Sinchona from Peru back to Europe, where it becomes known as Jesuits powder,
38:03the wonder cure for malaria.
38:05Step right up. Step right up. Get your malaria cure here.
38:08But the Jesuits knew where it really came from. It's the first recorded treatment for the deadly illness, and its
38:15importance can't be overstated.
38:18Quinine was one of the major medical discoveries. You can kind of think of it as equal to the discovery
38:25of penicillin in that it really handled a global scourge extremely well when nothing else seemed to work.
38:32The Amazon is the largest natural pharmacy, and much of the flora has yielded some of our more important drugs.
38:41In the 1940s, one man's efforts will unlock the Amazon's enormous curative potential.
38:47Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes. In fact, it's the World War II rubber crisis that lands Schultes a ticket to
38:55the jungle.
38:57Schultes was sent into the Amazon to find a way to break the Asian monopoly, to find a way to
39:03grow rubber in plantations in the Americas.
39:06While looking for disease-resistant rubber trees, Schultes collects and catalogues as many different plant species as he can find.
39:14I'll take one of those and one of those. Oh, this one is good too.
39:18But of course, he doesn't do it on his own.
39:21Schultes comes to these societies who have never seen an outsider coming to them humbly, not as a master, but
39:29as a student, revering them as the teacher.
39:33He was the first to draw attention to the extraordinary knowledge of those who know the forest best, the indigenous
39:41people.
39:42He showed that they were true natural philosophers.
39:47Guided by indigenous people, Schultes then puts his own extraordinary skills to work.
39:52Most of us, when we see a tropical forest, we see a series of shades of green.
39:58But Schultes could detect diversity just by holding a blossom to the light.
40:05Schultes collected roughly 30,000 individual collections.
40:09That's also a lot.
40:11But with each collection, there could have been as many as 100 individual specimens, each thought to be a new
40:17species.
40:18During his 12 years in the Amazon, Schultes collects 2,000 plants, which later turn out to have previously unknown
40:25medicinal properties.
40:28Today, 25% of all medicinal drugs are derived from rain porous plants.
40:34The U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified about 3,000 plants with anti-cancer properties.
40:4170% of them are found in the rainforest.
40:45But a growing worldwide obsession with one animal threatens to destroy this vital resource.
40:51The cow, or more specifically, its meat.
40:56The world loves beef.
40:58Each year, we produce about 67 million tons of it.
41:01But all that tasty meat comes at a steep environmental cost.
41:06If you look at the carbon footprint of cattle, it's one of the worst things you could grow.
41:11It requires so much forest to be cut down in order to produce so little beef.
41:18Brazil is the number two beef producing nation in the world, raising about 215 million head of cattle per year.
41:25And that production has hit the Amazon hard.
41:29You might assume it's logging, but actually 80% of deforestation in the Amazon is because of cattle production.
41:35To increase the amount of grazing land, they have to burn down the Amazon forest to create space.
41:43By some estimates, 200 square feet of rainforest is destroyed for every pound of beef produced.
41:50That's the size of an extra large parking space.
41:53The average head of cattle produces 490 pounds of beef.
41:58Holy cow!
42:00That's about one Manhattan block per cow.
42:05By burning down these trees, you're immediately introducing carbon dioxide into the environment.
42:11And then the cattle moving in are a major contributor to methane production.
42:14So we're seeing multiple greenhouse gases being produced through cattle raising.
42:19Remember the miracle cure for malaria?
42:22Our insatiable appetite for beef is robbing us of an untold number of future medicines.
42:27Maybe I'll stick with tofu.
42:30Every time you destroy an acre of forest, the level of biological knowledge that is put at risk, it's like
42:37burning down a library.
42:40It's not just that we're transforming this priceless treasure of nature.
42:46We cut it down to create meat.
42:49Do we really need more meat?
42:52Stop eating beef.
42:53Find a cure for cancer?
42:54I would stop. It'd be hard.
42:56I love meat.
42:56I really like steak.
42:58Can we like figure out the whole cancer cure thing and then go back to steak or is it one
43:03or the other?
43:05If that isn't enough, the rainforest contains 200 billion other reasons to stop cutting it down now.
43:11The Amazon represents about 54% of the total rainforest on Earth.
43:16And it plays a vital role in maintaining a stable climate.
43:19The Amazon is often described as the lungs of the planet.
43:24So as we see accelerating deforestation in the Amazon, that's fewer trees to uptake carbon dioxide.
43:31In its trees and soils, the Amazon stores the equivalent of four to five years' worth of human-made carbon
43:37emissions.
43:38Up to 200 gigatons or 200 billion tons of carbon.
43:42That sure is a whole lot of zeros.
43:55The Amazon is the unique product of millions of years of Earth's evolution and it's irreplaceable.
44:02It's something that's absolutely unique to our world.
44:06And the idea that we would just let it burn up or dismiss it in any way is just a
44:14tragedy.
44:15If we can't figure out how to save the Amazon, we don't have much hope for the future of humanity.
44:22But there's still time for us to flip the script.
44:26I think it's easy to get really discouraged about the future of the Amazon, but there also are positive stories
44:33too.
44:33There are a number of species that were on the brink of extinction that through active interventions have been saved.
44:39Like the golden lion tamarins for instance.
44:42Mercifully, the Amazon remains a big place.
44:45We have an initiative right now called the Path of the Anaconda where we're trying to create a single protected
44:52area that will go from the Andes to the Atlantic across the entire northern reaches of the Amazon.
45:20There are reasons to be hopeful. We just really need to be actively involved in protecting this part of the
45:26world.
45:32I honestly didn't realize that the Amazon was so important to our planet, but if it goes, I'm guessing we're
45:39going to be next.
45:40I'm pretty positive we'll be screwed.
45:42Completely screwed.
45:43It's not even like a question. We would die without the Amazon. And so now I'm getting super nervous.
45:49It's the end of the movie. Credits are rolling. We're all going home to our maker.
45:52We don't want that. Give a damn.
Comments