Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from My Heart Radio. One of the ways people
Speaker 1: learn to care about our planet is by seeing the
Speaker 1: natural world up close. My guests today have dedicated their
Speaker 1: lives to taking their audiences to remote areas and telling
Speaker 1: the stories of the people and the animals who lived there.
Speaker 1: The animal Kingdom couldn't ask for a better ambassador than
Speaker 1: Philippe Deondrade. The award winning filmmaker is the host of
Speaker 1: the series Untamed on nat Geo Wilde. His boundless enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for all animals and the lengths he's willing to go
Speaker 1: to to capture their everyday majesty have made Philippe Deondrode
Speaker 1: a rising star in the world of wildlife filmmaking. But first,
Speaker 1: I'm talking to Glenn Shephard, an ethnobotanist and medical anthropologist
Speaker 1: who spent decades studying indigenous people in the Amazon. He
Speaker 1: holds a doctorate in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley,
Speaker 1: and his work has been featured in National Geographic and
Speaker 1: The New Yorker. Glenn speaks eleven languages, and his ease
Speaker 1: at learning them played a big role in deciding his career.
Speaker 1: My dad's a doctor, and I was supposed to follow
Speaker 1: the family tradition to become a doctor, obviously, and so
Speaker 1: I was all trained, you know, premy I was going
Speaker 1: to do premed at Princeton, and you know, straight a
Speaker 1: student and all that. But almost by accident, I just
Speaker 1: discovered that I was really good at languages. I mean
Speaker 1: there's nothing in the families. I just sort of I
Speaker 1: did French in high school. I spent like a summer
Speaker 1: exchange program friends, and like in three weeks I was
Speaker 1: speaking French like perfectly, I mean not perfectly, but very well.
Speaker 1: And I just sort of had this I wish I
Speaker 1: had that knack for like electric guitar or something, but
Speaker 1: I just have this inborn talent. I don't know where
Speaker 1: it came from. I'm just very good at learning, picking
Speaker 1: up and speaking them more more spoken than written. And
Speaker 1: so I get to I get to college, and I
Speaker 1: just started learning all the languages I could. I took
Speaker 1: I took Arabic, I took German. I tried out Chinese
Speaker 1: for a bit, but I ended up sticking with Arabic
Speaker 1: and German. And I love traveling, and so I was thinking,
Speaker 1: how can I, you know, medicine languages, where do they meet?
Speaker 1: And I discovered, sort of by accident, the field of ethnobotany,
Speaker 1: which is the traditional uses of plants by different peoples
Speaker 1: around the world, indigenous people's, ancient people's as well. And
Speaker 1: so I remember in an undergraduate class, I took some
Speaker 1: archaeology classes and one of the student papers I had
Speaker 1: to write was about trepid nation. Trepid nation is this
Speaker 1: ancient practice in Peru in other places where they would
Speaker 1: do surgery on the skull, they would literally cut open
Speaker 1: the skull. They find these skulls in the Peruvian desert,
Speaker 1: asked us with holes open in them, and they can
Speaker 1: tell by the growth of the bone that the person
Speaker 1: survived the treatment, and they weren't. Most of the yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It doesn't seem to have been to treat
Speaker 1: like a brain injury. They seem to be healthy people.
Speaker 1: And they think that they opened up to open channels
Speaker 1: of communication with the spirits. That's one of the theories.
Speaker 1: And you know, they used coca leaf as an an aesthetic.
Speaker 1: They use these obsidian knives, so they performed brain surgery
Speaker 1: in ancient Peru, and that sort of fascinatility, brain surgery,
Speaker 1: coca anesthetics, and so I sort of got interested in
Speaker 1: this interface between archaeology, anthropology, medicine, languages and discovered this
Speaker 1: field of ethnobotany and started reading up on it. Ethnobotany
Speaker 1: isn't really taught as a discipline often in anthropology. You
Speaker 1: sort of have to find your way, and I actually
Speaker 1: wound up. I was taking Arabic, and my Arabic teaching
Speaker 1: assistant he was doing his PhD on the poetry of
Speaker 1: Jordanian Bedouins, like these these ancient medieval poems that were
Speaker 1: recited by heart by these ancient medieval these ancient poems
Speaker 1: that are survived today. He was doing his PhD on that,
Speaker 1: and I said, well, that sounds really fascinating. Do they
Speaker 1: use plants? Oh? Yeah, they use these different medicinal plants.
Speaker 1: And so I went around the university and I got
Speaker 1: money to spend the summer after my sophomore year summer,
Speaker 1: and so I'm gonna go to Jordan's and live with
Speaker 1: these better when learn their medicinal plants. And so I
Speaker 1: showed up on the border of it's literally the border,
Speaker 1: it's called H four Province. So I show up on
Speaker 1: the border of Iraq. It's like it's this panhandle of Jordan.
Speaker 1: It goes, it goes between Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabian.
Speaker 1: There's this little panhandle out there where these Bedouin live.
Speaker 1: And you don't think there'd be any medicinal plants in
Speaker 1: the desert, but there are it rains and these things grow,
Speaker 1: and they had all these interesting plants. They had this
Speaker 1: one plant. It's called handle. There's an Arabic expression moral handel.
Speaker 1: It means as bitter as this bitter goard. And the
Speaker 1: someone who's really nasty, like a nasty person you called mound,
Speaker 1: is a bitter person. And it's this little it's like
Speaker 1: a watermelon, same family's watermelon, this size, and you cut
Speaker 1: it in half. It's very bitter. And to treat diabetes,
Speaker 1: you sit in a hot house like sweathouse. You cut
Speaker 1: it in half and you put it on your heel
Speaker 1: of your foot and you just sit there in the
Speaker 1: sweat house until you taste the bitterness on your tongue.
Speaker 1: That's how it's absorbed by your feet. And when you
Speaker 1: can taste the bitters on tongue, you stop because it's toxic.
Speaker 1: And they treat in the Arabic. It's incredible. So I
Speaker 1: was fascinated by this. You know, this medicinal plant, this knowledge,
Speaker 1: all these medicinal plants in the desert. And so this
Speaker 1: friend of mine Yon spent the fall semester of his
Speaker 1: senior year in Peru and wrote me these amazing letters.
Speaker 1: Were going down the Andes mountains, the cloud force, the
Speaker 1: howler monkeys are singing, and there's these Indians who come
Speaker 1: every couple of weeks to bring bananas. They're called the
Speaker 1: Macha Indians. I was like, m So I looked them up,
Speaker 1: went to the library, found a little vocabulary book written
Speaker 1: in four read everything that was written about them. And
Speaker 1: when they get back, I go to Turborg, John Turborg,
Speaker 1: and I say, hey, I just got back from Jordan.
Speaker 1: I'm good at languages, I'm interested in the botany. If
Speaker 1: I can find the money, will you take me to
Speaker 1: Peru to do my seniors? And said sure. Once I
Speaker 1: set foot in those pruning villages, it felt like I
Speaker 1: was coming home. I mean, I really Jordan was amazing,
Speaker 1: but it was very far and very strange. It was
Speaker 1: a very strange, exotic experience. And and when I stepped
Speaker 1: foot and Prue was like it was like being in Virginia.
Speaker 1: We grew up on the chest Peak Bay, hunting, fishing, crabbing, boating.
Speaker 1: I feel like I was reliving my child just and
Speaker 1: so I just you know, I just felt at home
Speaker 1: and I said, this is it, this is what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do. I felt like I was at home in
Speaker 1: your lifetime, in the time that you went to Princeton,
Speaker 1: and there was no place that necessarily was studying on
Speaker 1: the deeper level ethnobotany. Whereas ethnobotany being studied now. Do
Speaker 1: they have programs now or it still remains, It still
Speaker 1: remains sort of like me, It's sort of doesn't really
Speaker 1: fit in any existing container, so it always falls between
Speaker 1: the crack. So the you know, the great ethnobotanist of
Speaker 1: the Amazon, Richard Schulte, is that the wonderful film Embrace
Speaker 1: of the Serpent, the Columbian film that won the Oscar
Speaker 1: a couple of years back, was sort of loosely based
Speaker 1: on his life. Richard Schults was an ethnobotanist at Harvard
Speaker 1: and he was the greatest ethnobotanist of all time. Really,
Speaker 1: certainly the twentieth century we spent I think twelve years
Speaker 1: living in the Amazon searching the origins of the cure
Speaker 1: are poison that they use for surgery muscle, you know,
Speaker 1: heart surgery. Ayahuasca this mysterious plant. Back then, it was
Speaker 1: a mysterious plant. Looking at the botanical identification of ahuasca.
Speaker 1: He helped identify the magic mushroom in Mexico. He was
Speaker 1: this peyote. He was involved in all these ethno botanical discoveries.
Speaker 1: And yet when he retired, Harvard simply never replaced his
Speaker 1: position as ethnobotanist, because it's not it's not real botany.
Speaker 1: It's sort of this ethnobotany. It's this thing that's sort
Speaker 1: of between it. The anthropologists don't consider it to be anthropology.
Speaker 1: Botanists don't consider it to be botany, and it falls
Speaker 1: prey to these these sort of rigid disciplinary boundaries and
Speaker 1: reneg Yeah, it's renegade botany and renegade anthropology, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't fit into the mold. And so so you have
Speaker 1: people like me, or you know, people who are interested
Speaker 1: in this, who create a program here, create a program there.
Speaker 1: University of Georgia had an important ethnobotany program for all
Speaker 1: My professor Berlin was there, but then he retired in Athens, Georgia.
Speaker 1: He was at Berkeley when I was at Berkeley, and
Speaker 1: then he moved to Georgia, and then and then when
Speaker 1: he retired, it wasn't really no one really kept it going.
Speaker 1: And so it's an unfortunate result of the disciplinary boundaries
Speaker 1: that these very fascinating and important fields. I mean, all
Speaker 1: of this work on malaria that's been coming out using
Speaker 1: these Chinese medicines treat malaria, so ethnobotany still produces results.
Speaker 1: My son, my youngest son, Glen Gabriel, when he was
Speaker 1: a year and a half old, he was diagnosed with
Speaker 1: this extremely rare it's not exactly a cancer. It's an
Speaker 1: immune system disease that used to be considered a kind
Speaker 1: of limp foam. It's called histocytosis, and it basically causes
Speaker 1: the white blood cells to attack the body. And he
Speaker 1: had these huge holes in his skull, He lost one
Speaker 1: of his vertebra from this immune system just attacks the
Speaker 1: bones and and he was treated this wonderful clinic and
Speaker 1: we thought he had brain cancer and was gonna be
Speaker 1: dead in six months, but it turned out to be
Speaker 1: this other very rare disease like one in a million histocytosis.
Speaker 1: And among the treatments that he was given is a
Speaker 1: drug called in blasting, which is used treating cancer and
Speaker 1: it comes from the rosy periwinkle originally from Madagascar, which
Speaker 1: was a traditional medicine by African people's in the Caribbean
Speaker 1: brought it and it sort of went wild in the Caribbean.
Speaker 1: It's used an Afro Caribbean traditional medicine and it turns
Speaker 1: out to be very effective against cancer and other kinds
Speaker 1: of tumors. So he had his first shot and he
Speaker 1: had to slump the size of an olive besides behind
Speaker 1: his right ears. Here was it. Now, that's when we
Speaker 1: first noticed it. And after one shot that lump just vanished.
Speaker 1: And so there is this tremendous potential for ethnobotany to
Speaker 1: contribute to human welfare and it could also contribute to
Speaker 1: sustainable livelihoods for indigenous peoples. But it just the discipline
Speaker 1: doesn't have a home because it's it's interdisciplinary. Everyone talks
Speaker 1: about interdisciplinary at universities. When it comes down to like
Speaker 1: who we're gonna hire, where's the funding going, It falls
Speaker 1: between the cracks for someone on the ground and someone
Speaker 1: doing the work you're doing. When people in this country
Speaker 1: who are and I don't judge them because it's it's
Speaker 1: it's just the state of things in America, and they're
Speaker 1: completely ignorant about the condition of the rainforest in South
Speaker 1: America and particularly in Brazil, with the preponderance of it
Speaker 1: is in Brazil because of the size of Brazil. What's
Speaker 1: you live in the United States and all you hear
Speaker 1: all the time is like they're losing you know whatever,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, five thousand acres an hour or whatever
Speaker 1: the eth it is that's coming on down there. What's
Speaker 1: going on? Is it really that threatened or is that
Speaker 1: is that exaggerated? Well, you know, I've worked in the
Speaker 1: Amazon for thirty five years and I've lived in Brazil,
Speaker 1: in the Brazilian Amazon for twenty years, and the Amazon
Speaker 1: has always been under threat. Indigenous people have always been
Speaker 1: under threat. Gold rushes in different times, the Bell of
Speaker 1: Manchy Damn that was that was being proposed in the
Speaker 1: ninety nineties, which was blocked initially, deforestation, drug trafficking, These
Speaker 1: things were always there. Beef cattle, beef cattle, cattle, ranching,
Speaker 1: palm oil plantations, industrial agriculture, mine traction, mining, mining, oil drilling,
Speaker 1: oil contamination, gas wells. Can we say a gas pipeline
Speaker 1: and run in Ecuador, mobile in Peru. So these threats
Speaker 1: have always been there, but these past two years in Brazil,
Speaker 1: what we've seen under the Mostonato administration, I've seen nothing
Speaker 1: like this in my twenty years, where in a sense,
Speaker 1: you know, there's Brazil has a constitution, there's there's a
Speaker 1: whole article about indigenous people's rights, much better rights than
Speaker 1: in the American case, you know, with what they have,
Speaker 1: like rights to their traditional lands, height land titling the
Speaker 1: ninth because it was under a military dictatorship from nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four, and the nineteen constitution includes all these provisions
Speaker 1: for indigenous people's rights. And so people like me and
Speaker 1: you know, perhaps others, I guess we were sort of
Speaker 1: lulled into complacency. And then suddenly Bosonato gets elected and
Speaker 1: all of these you know, constitutionally enshrined rights and protections
Speaker 1: just went down the drain. And you know, those forces
Speaker 1: were there, the miners were there, the agrab business was there,
Speaker 1: the cattle ranchers were there. But there was a pretense,
Speaker 1: at least on behalf of the Brazilian government debate these laws,
Speaker 1: we have these norms, you know, suddenly Bosonata comes in
Speaker 1: and gives people just a blank check, like we don't
Speaker 1: have to obey these laws. He's the son his father
Speaker 1: was a wildcat miner at happy at Halata. Was this
Speaker 1: mine that sebast Salgado, those wonderful photographs of this it
Speaker 1: looks like hell, it's just this looks like something out
Speaker 1: of Dante, this pit with people carrying pit. Yeah, with
Speaker 1: people carrying all these this mud and landslides. And Bostanta's
Speaker 1: father was there. So people talk about the Amazon. They're
Speaker 1: not interested in the Indians or the fin trees. They
Speaker 1: want the minerals. And so he's been very pro mining
Speaker 1: and basically said, you guys got a blank check. And
Speaker 1: so there was illegal mining before, but nothing like I
Speaker 1: mean basically they're like, well, the president's behind us, we're
Speaker 1: going in and so how much would you say it's
Speaker 1: a taking and people are just going in the government's
Speaker 1: just going in and saying get out and we're gonna
Speaker 1: take it. Or how much are they going to these
Speaker 1: people and exploiting their needs and offering them money? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the latter for sure. I mean both things but I
Speaker 1: mean mostly it's saying, you want some money that, get
Speaker 1: the hell out of here. We're gonna we're gonna raise
Speaker 1: cattle here. Yeah, And you know, he may even think
Speaker 1: of himself. He certainly portrays himself as being a friend
Speaker 1: of indigenous people's Like, they're living on all these minerals,
Speaker 1: why can't they exploit them, you know, to a certain
Speaker 1: category pres inside that makes sense. Well, they you know
Speaker 1: this idea, they're very poor, they live on this land
Speaker 1: with all this gold. Why can't they exploit it? Why not?
Speaker 1: The Brazilian constitution doesn't prohibit mining on indigenous lands. It
Speaker 1: says that there needs to be specific laws that regulate
Speaker 1: that so that indigenous peoples can benefit from it. And
Speaker 1: those laws haven't been passed yet, and and he's desperately
Speaker 1: trying to pass them. But the problem is mining creates
Speaker 1: this fever that can't be controlled. And you can see
Speaker 1: it going on now with the Yo, mommy, with cool,
Speaker 1: with the Cayapo. These miners just come in and the
Speaker 1: level of devastation mining is just the worst possible kind
Speaker 1: of devastation. There was a there's a village that I
Speaker 1: worked in, you know, five years ago, and when you
Speaker 1: fly over it, you just you fly for like forty
Speaker 1: five minutes and you just see this this river that's
Speaker 1: just been completely devastated. It's not even in its course anymore,
Speaker 1: has been totally turned over, you know, hundreds of square
Speaker 1: kilometers of devastation. And because gold mining is completely out
Speaker 1: of control, illegal mining, and they just theysical gold, gold
Speaker 1: diamonds as well, but mostly gold, but not resources for
Speaker 1: these technological things like chips and so forth. There. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's this amazing place in Brazil and the upper to
Speaker 1: your Negro. It's this meteor that landed on Earth and
Speaker 1: it's got the largest reserves of I think niobium, were
Speaker 1: these rare metals for cell phones anywhere in South America.
Speaker 1: It's in a protected area. It can't be exploited right now,
Speaker 1: but you could imagine ways in which these medals could
Speaker 1: be exploited sustainably and ways that would benefit local people.
Speaker 1: But right now it's just the worst possile. It's like
Speaker 1: the Yukon Valley, just the worst possible gold rush. And
Speaker 1: but you know, there's all of these misconceptions about Amazonian
Speaker 1: indigenous peoples and and the Amazon rainforest. There's this idea
Speaker 1: that the Amazon is being destroyed by this clash between
Speaker 1: civilization and nature. But it's not really a clash between
Speaker 1: civilization nature. It's it's a clash between two different kinds
Speaker 1: of civilization. The indigenous peoples of Amazon have a civilization,
Speaker 1: and they have lived in the Amazon for thousand years
Speaker 1: and before the conquest, before they were wiped out by diseases,
Speaker 1: there were these large cities in the Amazon, on the
Speaker 1: scale of the city states in ancient Egypt. There were
Speaker 1: large cities with that large populations. There were sort of
Speaker 1: these garden cities where I wouldn't say people lived in
Speaker 1: harmony with nature, but they discovered ways of harnessing natural
Speaker 1: processes for producing food without cutting it down and just
Speaker 1: planting monocrop you know, planting barley or rice or or
Speaker 1: or wheat or or cattle or something like that, like
Speaker 1: the Americans. And this is even even scientists, even archaeologists
Speaker 1: through the twentieth century assumed that indigenous peoples in the
Speaker 1: ancient Amazon were much like the indigenous people that they
Speaker 1: were seeing the nineteen fifties, these very small groups, nomadic people,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of primitive people's and then you know,
Speaker 1: in the two thousands, we started having these major archaeological
Speaker 1: discovers like Michael Heckenberger at University of Florida discovered garden
Speaker 1: cities in the Shingle with these huge earthworks with dikes
Speaker 1: and roads connecting, like there was major indianerit that requires
Speaker 1: thousands of people to create these causeways and roads and
Speaker 1: fish ponds, and so there were these civilizations in the
Speaker 1: Amazon that rather than everywhere else in the world, you
Speaker 1: had about eleven thousand years ago, you had people discover
Speaker 1: domestication of plants and animals everywhere in the world happened
Speaker 1: about the same time. Eleven tho years ago. In Egypt
Speaker 1: it was barley, and China was rice. In Anatolia it
Speaker 1: was horses and and you know, wheat and so on.
Speaker 1: Eleven thou years ago, the people in Egypt were hunting
Speaker 1: their hunter gathers, hunting gazelles. They started domesticating barley. Three
Speaker 1: four thousand years later you have pyramids and dynasties. It
Speaker 1: was the same thing all over the world, and the
Speaker 1: archaeologists and culture historians have just assumed this is a
Speaker 1: universal process in human history. You you get crops, you
Speaker 1: domesticate animals, and five thousands and in the Amazon. It
Speaker 1: doesn't fit the mold because people in Amazon domesticated crops
Speaker 1: eleven thousand years ago, but they didn't take crop domestication
Speaker 1: to agricultural fields and monocultures the way every whelse and
Speaker 1: what they planted crops. They continued to hunt and fish,
Speaker 1: and they discovered ways of domesticating the forests without having
Speaker 1: to cut it all down. And so brazil nuts. I
Speaker 1: remember when I was a kid, you'd only get brazil
Speaker 1: nuts at Christmas time and your Christmas stocking. You couldn't
Speaker 1: get it any other time year. So these wonderful, amazing
Speaker 1: brazil nuts, these delicious nuts, they come from this huge tree,
Speaker 1: fifty feet tall tree from the Amazon lives five hundred years.
Speaker 1: The assumption was who in the world would plant a
Speaker 1: tree that takes eight hundred years to grow. It's a
Speaker 1: natural tree. But research that I did with some geneticists
Speaker 1: in the early two thousands, we discovered that the Brazilian
Speaker 1: Amazon and Bolivia are filled with these groves that have
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty fifty d Brasilia trees. And then you go
Speaker 1: for hundreds of kilometers there's no brasionas and there's another
Speaker 1: little grove of Brasilas, and so we were able to
Speaker 1: show using genetics that there is very strong genetic evidence
Speaker 1: and historical evidence that these are actually there aren't exactly plantations,
Speaker 1: but they're often associate with archaeological site. It was a system.
Speaker 1: It was a system for producing food using the forest
Speaker 1: without having to cut it down. And Brazila is one example.
Speaker 1: We have Assai palm, which is a big thing. Now
Speaker 1: you have all these palm trees. There's a whole system
Speaker 1: of what's called agro forestry. Agra forestry means you you
Speaker 1: use the forest like a garden. You don't cut it down,
Speaker 1: You introduce things, protect things, you take away weeds and montvines,
Speaker 1: and you turn the forest into this productive system. And
Speaker 1: so that induce amazons. People's perfected this way of harvesting
Speaker 1: the force without having to cut it all down. And
Speaker 1: so when Europeans are especially after you know, there was
Speaker 1: a huge population in the Amazon before four two and
Speaker 1: was wiped out by smallpox, measles, warfare, diseases, and so
Speaker 1: there was this idea that all that the indigenous people's
Speaker 1: Amazon of today, of the nineteen fifties, or the way
Speaker 1: they always have been, No, these are the refugees from
Speaker 1: this genocide. If you look at the ancient pottery from
Speaker 1: the Amazon, you have in in the Tapajos River in Brazil,
Speaker 1: there's a pottery tradition called Sothday. I would say it's
Speaker 1: as sophisticated as my empoties. These incredibly elaborate basis, with
Speaker 1: these figures of humans transforming into jaguars and snakes. It's
Speaker 1: this beautiful ceramic pottery. And in the archaeologists up until
Speaker 1: mid nineties they said, oh, that that came down from
Speaker 1: the Andes. There's no way that these primitive people could
Speaker 1: have had such sophisticated ceramic trigians. They must have learned
Speaker 1: it from the Andes. And so there's this idea that
Speaker 1: the Amazon is this primitive place. The indigenous people's lives
Speaker 1: sort of on the verge of starvation, and they have
Speaker 1: they have a very low level of culture, not like
Speaker 1: the Incas and the Aztecs Mayas a very low level
Speaker 1: of culture, and the Amazon is this big, wild, pristine place.
Speaker 1: What we're discovering recently in the past twenty years is
Speaker 1: that the Amazon has been farmed in garden by indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples for thousands of years in ways that don't destroy it.
Speaker 1: And this is what we need to learn from Ravan.
Speaker 1: Cutting down all the trees for planting soybeans or bringing
Speaker 1: cattle are destroying it with gold mines. We need to
Speaker 1: learn from these people how to make it productive for
Speaker 1: food crops and Assai palm and medicinal plants, and it
Speaker 1: can be done ethnobotanist Glenn Shepherd. If you like conversations
Speaker 1: with passionate conservationists, check out my interview with biologists Charles Mutton.
Speaker 1: It was his love of birds that originally drew him
Speaker 1: to the Amazon. If you're interested in birds and working
Speaker 1: in the Amazon is the one of the most amazing
Speaker 1: things you can do if you're a bird scientist, because
Speaker 1: the bird diversity there is much higher than than anywhere else.
Speaker 1: In the wor role. You'll have five species of birds
Speaker 1: in just a few square miles. So there's one park
Speaker 1: about the size of Massachusetts has has ten percent of
Speaker 1: all the bird species in the world. So once you're
Speaker 1: working there, you become spoiled. If you're an ornithologist or
Speaker 1: bird scientists, you really want to continue working in such
Speaker 1: a station of birds. Pretty much. Here more of my
Speaker 1: conversation with Charles Mutton that Here's the Thing dot Org.
Speaker 1: After the break, Glenn Shepherd talks about his work with
Speaker 1: the Cayepo people of northern Brazil to update a thirty
Speaker 1: year old exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: In his decades in the Amazon, Glenn Shepherd has worked
Speaker 1: closely with indigenous people, particularly the much A Gengga of
Speaker 1: Manu in southeastern Peru where the Amazon begins, and the
Speaker 1: coy Epo near the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil.
Speaker 1: Glenn Shepherd is a researcher at the Emilio Gueldy Museum
Speaker 1: in Bellum, Brazil, one of the oldest and most important
Speaker 1: research institutes in the Amazon. He's lived in northern Brazil
Speaker 1: for two decades. But that wasn't always the plan. My
Speaker 1: plan was sort of the more the traditional, you know,
Speaker 1: do a PhD, get a university job in the States,
Speaker 1: god teach, do teach, do summers. But I married a
Speaker 1: Brazilian and moved to Brazil. Met her at Berkeley. She's
Speaker 1: a biologist at Berkeley, and she was returning home to Brazil,
Speaker 1: and so I got married and we had three kids,
Speaker 1: and I just sort of stayed. It was it wasn't
Speaker 1: the plan to stay, but you know, it opens doors
Speaker 1: when you're there, like not not just in Brazil, but
Speaker 1: I'm in the Brazilian Amazon, so people coming through and
Speaker 1: you just you just have these opportunities. I mean, for example,
Speaker 1: I worked with the Cayapo and I just got a
Speaker 1: job in the Gueldy Museum. It's sort of like the
Speaker 1: Smithsony of the Amazon Sis. It's this second oldest museum
Speaker 1: in Brazil in Malaying on the Brazilian Amazon where you
Speaker 1: are nor northern region, and it's sort of like a
Speaker 1: natural history museum, you know, with them anthropology, archaeology, animals, baleontology.
Speaker 1: And I just moved there. They didn't stay. To me
Speaker 1: as a curator of the ethnographic collections, and these Cayapo
Speaker 1: Indians come to town and they were they were visiting
Speaker 1: the collections and they were looking at collections of objects
Speaker 1: from their culture, war clubs and feather crowns from the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, and they say, we really like this.
Speaker 1: We want to come back and do more of this.
Speaker 1: Can you find us some money to bring us back
Speaker 1: to do this I said, sure, I'll try, And then
Speaker 1: he said, and but make sure you buy cameras because
Speaker 1: we want to learn how to make films so we
Speaker 1: can film these objects in the museum and show them
Speaker 1: back home. But we make these things still. We don't
Speaker 1: want you to think that we we've forgotten all this
Speaker 1: stuff here. We know how to make all this stuff.
Speaker 1: So we want to make films in the village to
Speaker 1: show you the rituals and how we make these things.
Speaker 1: Oh you know, by the way, we're we're going to
Speaker 1: do an initiation ritual in a month and a half.
Speaker 1: You want to come and film it? And I was
Speaker 1: like yeah, So they just came. Normally the anthropologist shows
Speaker 1: up in the village with the strange idea. I want
Speaker 1: to say, this is the Cayapo, the anthropos thea where
Speaker 1: are they in relation to where you were in there
Speaker 1: there in the north as well, they're in They're in
Speaker 1: southern Parta, so I'm in I'm in the northern part
Speaker 1: of Pata on the Amazon River. They're in the headwaters
Speaker 1: of the Shingu River. That's the name that you hear
Speaker 1: a lot, so they're impacted by it's sill northern Brazil.
Speaker 1: But it's the southern part. And these are states or provinces,
Speaker 1: what are they call another I mean, Amazon is really huge.
Speaker 1: If it weren't for its vastness, it would have been
Speaker 1: gone long ago. It's huge. I mean, if you the
Speaker 1: Amazon basin itself is bigger than all of Europe. The
Speaker 1: country of Brazil is bigger than the United States without Alaska.
Speaker 1: People don't the way the maps are done, countries around
Speaker 1: the equator looks smaller, and Brazil is bigger than the
Speaker 1: United States without Alaska. And the Amazon is bigger than
Speaker 1: all of Europe. Amazon is huge, and and it is
Speaker 1: being cut down at a tremendous rate. But because there's
Speaker 1: just so much of it, there is still some left.
Speaker 1: If it were anywhere else, it would have been gone
Speaker 1: long ago. Now, you had an exhibit planned last year
Speaker 1: the American Museum of Natural History about the Kayapo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thirty years ago. Robert Carnaro, who was the curator of
Speaker 1: South American Mythology from almost fifty years. He recently passed away.
Speaker 1: He passed away just early last year. He put up
Speaker 1: an exhibit at the American Museum in the late nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful exhibit. You've probably seen it. It shows
Speaker 1: indigenous peoples as they were at the moment of contact.
Speaker 1: So it shows these wonderful mannequins, lifelike mannequins, indigenous peoples
Speaker 1: of different Amazonian cultures, wearing their traditional clothes and performing
Speaker 1: different traditional activities. He's sort of conceived of the exhibit
Speaker 1: is like themes and variations. So there's shamanism, what are
Speaker 1: the different kinds of shamanism? Houses, what are the different
Speaker 1: kinds of houses that Amazon and people build? How's warfare
Speaker 1: work in the Amazon agriculture, hunting, and so it's it's
Speaker 1: an exhibit that shows people as they were at the time,
Speaker 1: like in the nineteen fifties. And among those exhibits there
Speaker 1: is an image it's probably the most powerful figure in exhibit.
Speaker 1: It's a Kayapo warrior all covered in face paint, body paint,
Speaker 1: with this feather crown and this huge war club and
Speaker 1: this big lip plug like Rowney the leader with his
Speaker 1: big lip plug. And it's just and it's in the
Speaker 1: section on war fan. It's just a very impressive object.
Speaker 1: And it just so happened that in the Kayapo leaders
Speaker 1: were in New York with Terence Turner. Famous are anthropologists
Speaker 1: from Chicago who passed away also recently, and he brought
Speaker 1: these Kayapo activists. They were they were going to the
Speaker 1: World Bank and visiting New York and he's thought by
Speaker 1: the museum and visited and so they looked at this
Speaker 1: kayapol warrior and Robert Cornero said, what do you think
Speaker 1: is it? He was afraid that they would they wouldn't
Speaker 1: like the sabbathe, you know, presentation as a savage with oh,
Speaker 1: this is great, we love it. This is the way
Speaker 1: where we're very warlike. We love this thing. But you're
Speaker 1: missing a head dress, and he needs body paint and
Speaker 1: you should put on a necklace. And so they took
Speaker 1: their own body adornants and put them onto this mannequin,
Speaker 1: a head dress, a necklace, I think, arm bands, and
Speaker 1: they painted it. So the paint that's on that mannequin,
Speaker 1: the Kaiapo actually put on it. And so then I
Speaker 1: came up to the American Museum last year January, and
Speaker 1: the idea was to do an exhibit, a new exhibit
Speaker 1: about the Yapo that reflected on this visit of the
Speaker 1: Kayapo thirty years ago to the museum and how they've
Speaker 1: changed in the meantime. The idea was to create that
Speaker 1: shows the Kaipo warrior holding this war club. What we did,
Speaker 1: there's a big photograph of a Kayapo warrior holding rather
Speaker 1: than a war club, he's holding a camera, video camera,
Speaker 1: looking at us. Because the Kayapo, they see the camera
Speaker 1: as a kind of weapon. In the old days of warfare,
Speaker 1: the Cayapo, when they would raid each other, they had
Speaker 1: like these the war raids, and they were interested in
Speaker 1: capturing trophies. They would capture weapons, war clubs, songs, body ornaments.
Speaker 1: They would capture guns from their enemies. So the idea
Speaker 1: isn't so that the warfare isn't about conquering your your
Speaker 1: enemies land and taking over the land. It's about conquering
Speaker 1: the trappings of their civilization and incorporating them into your civilization.
Speaker 1: And so for them, they think of the video camera
Speaker 1: and they say this literally, the video camera is a weapon.
Speaker 1: It's like bowl and arrows. We capture the weapon, this
Speaker 1: camera from the white people. They call them coubing white people,
Speaker 1: non indigenous people's and then we use that as a
Speaker 1: weapon to defend our culture. And so the exhibit is
Speaker 1: all about how they use cameras. They want to give
Speaker 1: their own narrative about what's going on rather than the
Speaker 1: official Brazilian areta. There's two things I want to finish
Speaker 1: with one thing, I believe that the pandemic was the
Speaker 1: dress rehearsal for what's going to happen in terms of
Speaker 1: global warming. In this society, people have been asked to
Speaker 1: make sacrifices and to understand certain limitations and to understand
Speaker 1: their own personal responsibility and participating in a program is
Speaker 1: going to help us to manage some of these problems.
Speaker 1: And we've come out with a very poor score, and
Speaker 1: that the global warming is going to come and going
Speaker 1: to create a whole other menu of edicts we have
Speaker 1: to live by, uh, in terms of sacrifices and and
Speaker 1: and a big part of that that has to do with food.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna be able to eat whatever you want
Speaker 1: whenever you're You're gonna have to eat less speef because
Speaker 1: the production is very toxifying and so forth. What is
Speaker 1: your opinion about that? Are you seeing any signs of
Speaker 1: global warming down where you are? Absolutely the rainfall patterns
Speaker 1: are completely different. Now. Indigenous people talk about this, they say,
Speaker 1: you know it used to it used to be you
Speaker 1: could count on it raining in such and such a
Speaker 1: time and not raining, so you could plant your crops
Speaker 1: and now it will be a drought and then the
Speaker 1: rains come and you know, villages have been washed away
Speaker 1: and other places you know they plant. The climate has
Speaker 1: gone completely crazy. And the Amazon is this huge pump.
Speaker 1: It pumps water from northern Brazil to southern Brazil. It's
Speaker 1: this gigantic like suction pump that sends water to the
Speaker 1: farmers in southern Brazil who are funding Bolsonado and the destruction.
Speaker 1: And it's going to come back, and it could turn
Speaker 1: southern Brazilian too. If you look all around the globe
Speaker 1: at the latitude of where southern Brasili is, it's the
Speaker 1: Gobi Desert, it's the it's the Kalahari, It's that same
Speaker 1: latitude these productive farmlands in Brazil. Everywhere else in the
Speaker 1: world is a desert. And the only reason it's not
Speaker 1: a desert and Brazil is because of the Amazon. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the things you see in the work you do,
Speaker 1: the unifying idea behind all this kind of work is
Speaker 1: that we've lived in a country that has gone around
Speaker 1: the world and told everybody what we can teach them,
Speaker 1: and global warming is going to teach us what those
Speaker 1: people can teach us, what can the indigenous people's and
Speaker 1: even historically, what can they teach us. It's gonna help
Speaker 1: us to at least address not solved, but at least
Speaker 1: address the climate change problem that's going to come pouring
Speaker 1: down on top of us in some horrible way. Well,
Speaker 1: there's an interesting statistic. If you take all of the
Speaker 1: fruits of these edible fruits that indigenous people's manage in
Speaker 1: the Amazon rap Ice Brazilias i e. Dozens and dozens
Speaker 1: of fruits, they produce something like forty times the protein
Speaker 1: of all the cattle that's produced in the Amazon. So
Speaker 1: it's there's no lack of food in the Amazon. It's
Speaker 1: the model. We're not getting it wrong across the board,
Speaker 1: but pretty close, pretty close. Ethnobotanist Glenn Shepherd. Philippe Deondrade
Speaker 1: has a singular mission to help everyone care about wild animals,
Speaker 1: and he'll go to any lengths to do it. De
Speaker 1: Andrade envisioned his career from the time he got his
Speaker 1: first camera. His big break came in two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: when he won a national geographic film competition. He made
Speaker 1: a short film called adapt It's an apt title for
Speaker 1: both nature and Philippe's own story. De Andrade grew up
Speaker 1: extremely poor, first in Brazil and then as an undocumented
Speaker 1: immigrant in Cleveland. I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Speaker 1: And what that allowed me to have at such an
Speaker 1: early age, which was an injection of wild life into
Speaker 1: the system. And what I mean by that is my
Speaker 1: mom would take me to the Amazon, she would take
Speaker 1: me floating down rivers. We would go camping for months
Speaker 1: at a time. I would go swimming in the ocean,
Speaker 1: I would go tree climbing. This was my introduction to
Speaker 1: life and it wasn't until about six when we moved
Speaker 1: to Cleveland, and so I had that kind of taken
Speaker 1: away from me, that zestin and surrounding of nature, and
Speaker 1: it never truly left the system. If anything, it just
Speaker 1: kind of made me hungry for more wildlife, for more adventure.
Speaker 1: That's basically what set me on this path to doing
Speaker 1: what I do today, which is trying to reintegrate myself
Speaker 1: into nature as as often as I can in my
Speaker 1: line of work as a National Geographic explorer. But at
Speaker 1: an early age I had an interesting relationship with my
Speaker 1: biological father he was a very abusive person. He was
Speaker 1: on drugs, and he was uh not the nicest person
Speaker 1: to my mom. So family life wasn't necessarily the best
Speaker 1: as I was growing up, and that simultaneously with that
Speaker 1: passion for nature also created an escape for me. It
Speaker 1: allowed me to connect with nature, sure into wild animals
Speaker 1: because a lot of people say animals don't have a voice,
Speaker 1: and I believe it's rather that people aren't listening. You know,
Speaker 1: communication is a is a major element across every single species,
Speaker 1: not just the human. So animals are talking to us,
Speaker 1: it's just that we're not necessarily listening. And as an
Speaker 1: immigrant raised by a single mother in poverty and illegal immigrant,
Speaker 1: at that I felt like I had a voice in
Speaker 1: people weren't listening. So it was this affinity passion. Animals
Speaker 1: make my heart sing and then you a company that
Speaker 1: with this escapism that I found at an early age,
Speaker 1: and because animals in a way saved me, it became
Speaker 1: my life's mission to save them. So you're in Rio,
Speaker 1: but your mother would take you to the countryside, you
Speaker 1: go out to the country absolutely. So we actually got
Speaker 1: displaced because of a flood, and that's what took us
Speaker 1: to real I was born in the real hospital, but
Speaker 1: then was raised on the countryside. But because of a flood,
Speaker 1: we went back to Rio DIGIONEI on the favelas. Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was always about getting back to the roots, getting
Speaker 1: back to home. I mean, my mom had not pet monkeys,
Speaker 1: but she had monkeys at the house. Growing up. She
Speaker 1: had anacondas. You know, they saw jaguars on the red
Speaker 1: So this was something that she grew up with and
Speaker 1: kind of try to instill in us well as for
Speaker 1: people who don't know about what a favela is. And
Speaker 1: some of the cities of of Brazil and beyond the
Speaker 1: favelas that I saw were people picking through garbage dumps
Speaker 1: and um, you know, like some of the fiercest poverty
Speaker 1: I've ever seen in my life. Is that was that
Speaker 1: how you grew up. That's actually exactly how we grew up.
Speaker 1: As you could imagine whenever we we think about like
Speaker 1: immigrating in the sense of moving from one country to another,
Speaker 1: but when you're raised in a developing nation, you can
Speaker 1: immigrate even within your own country and find that it's
Speaker 1: a complete culture shock. Right. So, growing up in the countryside,
Speaker 1: we were poor, but we didn't know, we were poor.
Speaker 1: We had every thing that we needed. You know, we
Speaker 1: were poor financially, but we had food every day, we
Speaker 1: had experiences, we had clean water, there was no violence,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden we go to Rio
Speaker 1: de Janeiro and we're like, we're poor. You know, it
Speaker 1: was it was weird that somebody you knew didn't die
Speaker 1: that week. Um, and that's what I think led my
Speaker 1: father down this path of just violence and rage and
Speaker 1: drugs and ultimately the reason why my mom wanted to
Speaker 1: get us out of there. You know. So yeah, when
Speaker 1: you picture like flavellas or slums or you know, the
Speaker 1: kind of bottom of the barrel um in terms of
Speaker 1: quality of life, that's what we were. That's what we
Speaker 1: had in Reo Dejaneiro. So anything was better. Now when
Speaker 1: you go from Brazil to Cleveland, Ohio, was there a
Speaker 1: job waiting for your father or your mother there? So
Speaker 1: it was interesting. We we came to the States, my mom,
Speaker 1: my sister, and I because my dad had worked here.
Speaker 1: But then when we came here, he was just kind
Speaker 1: of out of control and he went back to Brazil
Speaker 1: and he took all of our documents. So this is
Speaker 1: something that a lot of people think with immigrants is like,
Speaker 1: you know, they're always looking for a way out. That
Speaker 1: couldn't be further from the truth. We were actually pretty
Speaker 1: much stranded in the States because we had no way
Speaker 1: of going back. We didn't have passports, any documentation, anything
Speaker 1: like that. So I think my mom just looked up,
Speaker 1: you know, cost of living and was like, Oh, this
Speaker 1: place is cheap enough, it's developing enough. It looks like
Speaker 1: there's a small Brazilian population. You know why we didn't
Speaker 1: go to Boston and said, I don't know where there's
Speaker 1: a healthier and bigger Brazilian population, but we chose Cleveland. Interesting,
Speaker 1: so the boy from the favela who goes to Cleveland
Speaker 1: ends up at the University of Florida. Where were you
Speaker 1: in Gainesville or where I was in Gainesville, Florida. How
Speaker 1: did you pay for it? Well? I worked my ass off.
Speaker 1: I literally worked three jobs full time, and I did everything.
Speaker 1: I washed dishes, I photographed Bob mitzvuzz I worked at
Speaker 1: the TV and radio station. And I don't even want
Speaker 1: to say it was like a difficulty because there was
Speaker 1: no other option. I just watched my mom do whatever
Speaker 1: she had to do to make it, no questions asked,
Speaker 1: just work her ass off and get it done. And
Speaker 1: so I went into university with that same mindset. I
Speaker 1: realized that I was lucky to have a higher education.
Speaker 1: I was going to make something of it. And so
Speaker 1: college for me probably looked a lot different than most people,
Speaker 1: because I never thought I was going to go to college.
Speaker 1: You know, I was illegal for almost fifteen years, so
Speaker 1: university was very, very very far off in the distance.
Speaker 1: So when I actually had the opportunity, I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pick my dream school. I'm gonna do whatever
Speaker 1: I have to to make it happen. I'm gonna double major,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna work my ass off and absolutely make
Speaker 1: something of myself. And so I worked throughout university, like
Speaker 1: I said, double major, and I was as active as
Speaker 1: a college student could possibly be, every single week and
Speaker 1: making films every single weekend, you know, volunteering doing internships,
Speaker 1: catching alligators, catching snakes, tagging sharks. I was involved in
Speaker 1: biology and in film, and I also saw an opportunity
Speaker 1: alec because there was no track for wildlife filmmakers or
Speaker 1: for you know, budding national geographic photographers are explorers, so
Speaker 1: I had to go and do that myself. If I
Speaker 1: were going to make it happen, this is the thing
Speaker 1: you had your site some from the beginning, you were
Speaker 1: going to become a wildlife documentary filmmaker. For me, it's
Speaker 1: kind of always been a plan A type of thing,
Speaker 1: and when you come out of the background that you
Speaker 1: know I talked about earlier, there's only an upside. So
Speaker 1: I've always had it wedged in my mentality that if
Speaker 1: I got the opportunity, or if I was going to
Speaker 1: become legal in this country, there is no plan B.
Speaker 1: Plan A for me has always been to work for
Speaker 1: National Geographic to become an explorer, to make wildlife films,
Speaker 1: to tell conservation stories, and to spend a wildlife to
Speaker 1: spend cent of my time in nature, infused in a
Speaker 1: setting surrounded by wild characters. So I would say the
Speaker 1: first decision I made that set me up for for
Speaker 1: my career was going to the University of Florida, paying
Speaker 1: out of state tuition, you know, truly living on my own.
Speaker 1: And the second decision was before I even graduated, I
Speaker 1: decided to hike the Appleasian Trail. So I spent six
Speaker 1: months living in the woods, going from Georgia to Maine,
Speaker 1: and I mean, you know, when you make a decision
Speaker 1: like that, you're all in. And I'll never forget this
Speaker 1: instance that I had on the app Latian Trail. The
Speaker 1: most critical conversation I've ever had with a human being
Speaker 1: was an eighties something, your old man at a Dollar
Speaker 1: General in Franklin, North Carolina. And when you look at
Speaker 1: the map on the app Lastian Trail, you know, if
Speaker 1: it's like this, like if it's a foot. I was
Speaker 1: not even an inch, like I barely started with this thing.
Speaker 1: And there was this eighties something year old guy at
Speaker 1: the dollar General and he looks at me up and
Speaker 1: down because I smell like bigfootstoe jam and regret, you know,
Speaker 1: just had gotten off the woods and just buying a
Speaker 1: pack of Rama noodles. And he's like, are you homeless
Speaker 1: or what's going on here? And I was like, I'm
Speaker 1: hiking the apples and Trail and he's like, wow, you're
Speaker 1: you're actually doing it. And I was like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: something that I convinced myself I was gonna do. And
Speaker 1: you know, I I started in Georgia about a month ago.
Speaker 1: And he's like, I've always wanted to do something like that.
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to take a big adventure in my life.
Speaker 1: But what about the odds of failing, what about getting
Speaker 1: hungry or hypothermia, or you know, just simply not reaching
Speaker 1: your end mark. Aren't you worried about failing? And I
Speaker 1: told him, I said, out of all the people that
Speaker 1: wish they had taken one step on the Applachian Trail
Speaker 1: and hadn't, and about two thousand people a year hyped
Speaker 1: this thing, the single fact that I had started already
Speaker 1: makes me a success. When I finished this, I would
Speaker 1: have been a success six months ago, not because of
Speaker 1: the destination, but because of the mentality that pushed me
Speaker 1: onto the mountain in the first place. And I could
Speaker 1: see this guy breaking down in front of me, this
Speaker 1: eighties something year old, you know, gentleman, speaking to me
Speaker 1: about this, and he just told me, never ever ever
Speaker 1: live with regret, keep that mentality and don't allow failing
Speaker 1: something to keep you from doing it, because that's what
Speaker 1: kept me from going after my dreams. And it was
Speaker 1: at a Dollar General and Fink Glenn, North Carolina, where
Speaker 1: I was like, Okay, I'm not just literally on the
Speaker 1: right path with this hiking thing. I'm metaphorically on the
Speaker 1: right path with this mentality of just go after it start. Now.
Speaker 1: Some people have suggested that you're the next Steve Irwin
Speaker 1: in some case, but we all know how he ended up.
Speaker 1: Describe a couple occasions where you bit off more than
Speaker 1: you could chew. Where you thought you were in trouble,
Speaker 1: you thought you were in danger. Well, my first night
Speaker 1: in New York City after having never been there before.
Speaker 1: You're on the subway. Humans scared the ship out of me. Significt.
Speaker 1: I will take a jaguar, I will take a shark.
Speaker 1: I will take a snake any day over a human being.
Speaker 1: I got bit by an individual my first train ride
Speaker 1: in New York City, and I had just got done
Speaker 1: on the App York. Yeah, I had seventeen cents to
Speaker 1: my name, and I was so exhausted that I put
Speaker 1: my giant backpack next to me fell asleep on the train,
Speaker 1: and I guess this gentleman next to me was like
Speaker 1: shaking me to get off of him, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: quite responding, and so I just literally had something bit
Speaker 1: me and woke up to this guy on a train
Speaker 1: yelling at me, like, get the f off me. Man, like,
Speaker 1: where do you think you're at? And I was just
Speaker 1: like wow. So the scaredest I've ever been when it
Speaker 1: comes to a wild animal is getting bit by somebody
Speaker 1: I didn't know on the New York City. So other
Speaker 1: than you're the subway in New York, where in the
Speaker 1: wild encountering an animal, have you ever been really in danger?
Speaker 1: I've never been in danger from an animal. The one
Speaker 1: instance where I will say I truly had my heart
Speaker 1: jump out of my chest is my first documentary for
Speaker 1: National Geographic was Jaguar Beach, where we were documenting jaguars
Speaker 1: eating sea turtles in Costa Rica. And I waited twenty
Speaker 1: one days inside of a camera hide. Twenty one days
Speaker 1: inside of a hide in the dry forest feels like
Speaker 1: you're inside of a dragon's womb. I mean, there's no
Speaker 1: other way around it. It's so many mosquitoes that you
Speaker 1: think you're gonna get lifted off the ground. You've got
Speaker 1: one bucket for your water, you've got another bucket to
Speaker 1: go to the bathroom in and you can't confuse the two.
Speaker 1: And it's it's miserable, to say the least. And I
Speaker 1: had this jaguar out of twenty one days I had
Speaker 1: a ten minute experience with the jaguar, and she was pregnant,
Speaker 1: and she got a bit curious. We were filming with
Speaker 1: infrared lights, which means that she couldn't they weren't white lights,
Speaker 1: so she couldn't see the light emitting from our lights
Speaker 1: because they were red, and their eyes don't pick up
Speaker 1: on that sensor. And so she just kept coming closer, closer, closer,
Speaker 1: and closer. And I was in the middle of the
Speaker 1: dry forest by myself. You know, I didn't know how
Speaker 1: far away I was from the next human being, with
Speaker 1: a wild, hungry jaguar literally breathing down my neck on
Speaker 1: the other side of this camera hide, which was made
Speaker 1: out of you know, nylon tent material. And in that moment,
Speaker 1: I was like, what the hell did I get myself into?
Speaker 1: But I kept my composure. I just stayed there. I
Speaker 1: didn't make a single noise, and I knew that she
Speaker 1: could feel me because the whiskers of a cat work
Speaker 1: similarly to the set three organs of a shark, where
Speaker 1: they can just pick up on environmental changes, you know,
Speaker 1: things like change in wind direction, smell density. Jaguars just
Speaker 1: have a knack of picking up like something's different without
Speaker 1: even seeing it, and so she knew that I was
Speaker 1: there even though she couldn't see me. And in that moment,
Speaker 1: I literally had the most powerful presence I've ever been
Speaker 1: presented with right in front of me. And the crazy
Speaker 1: thing about that jaguar is two months after we left,
Speaker 1: she had those cubs and the scientists let me name them,
Speaker 1: and so I named one Jane, after my idol, Jane Goodall,
Speaker 1: and I said, you guys get to name the next one,
Speaker 1: and they said, we're gonna name it Philippe. So now
Speaker 1: there's a Jane Goodall and there's a Philip jaguar cub
Speaker 1: running around the beaches of Costa Rica causing terror. And
Speaker 1: even though nothing happened, and I can't say that something
Speaker 1: would have happened if I behave differently, just being presented
Speaker 1: in that kind of situation was enough to make you
Speaker 1: realize how small you are in nature. When you go
Speaker 1: on these trips and you're going to be shooting, how
Speaker 1: many people do you bring with you? So in in
Speaker 1: this line of work, less is more. Typically, anytime I'm scouting, researching,
Speaker 1: like you know, trying to figure something out, it's me
Speaker 1: and a biologist or me and a ranger, or me
Speaker 1: and a poacher or somebody that understands the animal in
Speaker 1: the area. That's typically it. So two people I like
Speaker 1: to keep it to when I'm working and we're filming,
Speaker 1: a team of three or four is absolutely perfect. Are
Speaker 1: you ever armed? Never armed? Is anybody armed? Absolutely not?
Speaker 1: And I will say that's not to say that in
Speaker 1: certain situations you shouldn't. But for anybody listening to this,
Speaker 1: you know, and and this is a critical element of
Speaker 1: what I do. If you're kind of looking to get
Speaker 1: into this, you know, preparation is absolutely key. Preparation is
Speaker 1: absolutely name of the game. And so the only instance,
Speaker 1: which is kind of funny, where I've ever been armed
Speaker 1: was my first assignment with National Geographic was in Botswana,
Speaker 1: which is Jurassic Park, the oka Ana Delta. It's just
Speaker 1: everything you could ever hope for. Everybody should visit there
Speaker 1: and they would lock onto why we need to save
Speaker 1: this planet. But we were documenting lions eating elephants, and
Speaker 1: so we spent twenty four hours a day for the
Speaker 1: first month and a half that I was there, side
Speaker 1: by side with the elephants. But this is what I
Speaker 1: mean when it comes to preparation. You hear of all
Speaker 1: these accidents lions ripping tourists out of vehicles, or you know,
Speaker 1: person sticking out their hand and getting their hand bitten
Speaker 1: off by a line when they're trying to take a photo.
Speaker 1: That's because either a they're not understanding the animal, or
Speaker 1: be they're not listening to what the guide is telling them.
Speaker 1: When we film lions in Africa, we keep all of
Speaker 1: our body parts inside the vehicle. We don't have windshields,
Speaker 1: we don't have doors, we don't have windows. It's three
Speaker 1: sixty degree view and the car is entirely open. I've
Speaker 1: had leopards, lions, hyenas stick their heads inside of a vehicle.
Speaker 1: I've woken up to a snouted cobra on the steering wheel,
Speaker 1: which is infamously the snake that killed Cleopatra. You know,
Speaker 1: I was truly excited about that, my first snouted cobra,
Speaker 1: something I've always wanted to see because I had an
Speaker 1: obsession with Cleopatra when I was younger. So anyways, what
Speaker 1: I mean by that is the animals sees the vehicle
Speaker 1: as a single unit, as long as you don't break
Speaker 1: the unit by sticking your arm out, sticking your head
Speaker 1: out getting out of the vehicle. They don't distinguish you
Speaker 1: from that unit. So it's just about knowing the situation
Speaker 1: that you're getting yourself into and abiding by the rules
Speaker 1: because in nature, animals make the rules. So when you
Speaker 1: break those rules, that's when you have accidents. It's no
Speaker 1: different than when it's you know, diving with the shark.
Speaker 1: Sharks will speak to you when she doesn't want you
Speaker 1: in the area anymore. She'll lower her pectoral fins and
Speaker 1: show arch her back and just kind of change the
Speaker 1: body language that she's giving you. And when that happens,
Speaker 1: trust me, you want to listen to her. So it's
Speaker 1: about reading the situation, understanding what you're getting yourself into,
Speaker 1: and being able to speak animal. And I guarantee you
Speaker 1: if you can do that, accidents are very, very very
Speaker 1: very minimal in my line of work. The host of
Speaker 1: nat Geo Wilde's Untamed series, Philippe Deondrode, if you're enjoying
Speaker 1: this conversation, don't keep it to yourself, Tell a friend
Speaker 1: and follow here's the thing on the I Heart radio app,
Speaker 1: Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Speaker 1: Philippe Deondrode talks about his introduction to wildlife killing contests.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. Earlier
Speaker 1: this year, Philippe de Andrade released a film in collaboration
Speaker 1: with Project Coyote to bring awareness to wildlife killing contests.
Speaker 1: It's basically a hunting tournament where the goal is to
Speaker 1: kill as many animals as possible, and they target important
Speaker 1: and critical predators like foxes, wolves, bobcats, pumas in coyotes.
Speaker 1: And to give you an idea of what this looks
Speaker 1: like is it's purely animal genocide. I went to one
Speaker 1: tournament in Texas in two thousand and twenty called the
Speaker 1: West Texas Big Bobcat Tournament. In one tournament in one state,
Speaker 1: in one weekend, seven hundred and eighteen teams signed up
Speaker 1: and one team killed a hundred in sixteen animals. And
Speaker 1: it's happening in over forty states. Where did you first
Speaker 1: encounter this? Okay, so I'm about to tell this for
Speaker 1: the first time publicly. I found out about these killing
Speaker 1: contests because I was doing a documentary with my great
Speaker 1: friend Ben Masters about Trump's physical law as it relates
Speaker 1: to wildlife. Because it was something that nobody was talking about.
Speaker 1: So we said, what if we do the entire Rio
Speaker 1: grand along the border between Texas and Mexico by horse
Speaker 1: back riding, mountain biking, and canoeing as to do in
Speaker 1: ecological survey of how a physical barrier would obstruct nature.
Speaker 1: And one day we ended up on this guy's property
Speaker 1: that he was managing on the Texas side and we
Speaker 1: got held up. And so the next day at breakfast,
Speaker 1: we were a day late, and he goes, hey, you're
Speaker 1: the cat guy, right, And that week I was National
Speaker 1: and Geographics two thousand eighteen Big Cat Ambassador, so I
Speaker 1: was doing all these commercials and social media campaign to
Speaker 1: cause uproar, you know, a donation based incentive to keep
Speaker 1: cats around on our planet. So this guy recognized me
Speaker 1: from that and was like, I got you guys, beers.
Speaker 1: I got you guys breakfast, Come and sit down, enjoy
Speaker 1: a warm hot meal. So we're sitting there eating a
Speaker 1: breakfast burrito and he goes, hey, cat guy, how do
Speaker 1: you like your breakfast? And I was like, man, it's
Speaker 1: the first warm thing we've had in a week, Like,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. He goes into his truck and
Speaker 1: he comes back with a dead bobcat, just the head
Speaker 1: and the skin just hanging there, lifeless, and he walks
Speaker 1: over to me and he says, if you're gonna stand
Speaker 1: me up for breakfast, then I'm gonna feed you cat,
Speaker 1: and he just throws the bobcat at me. And I
Speaker 1: just tried to break this down psychologically, and I was mad.
Speaker 1: I was hurt, I was sad. I was all these
Speaker 1: crop pots of human emotion, but more than anything, I
Speaker 1: was confused. And I was like, you just shot a
Speaker 1: bobcat and fed it to us as a prank, Like
Speaker 1: is that your version of funny? And he goes, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it's fine. I call him in every weekend. And I
Speaker 1: was like, what do you mean call him in? And
Speaker 1: he's like, I do these predator killing contests and I
Speaker 1: was like, what are those? And he starts to show
Speaker 1: me photos and he is a competitor in these wildlife
Speaker 1: killing contests. So the way I got exposed to this
Speaker 1: niche community that is growing was by being fed one
Speaker 1: of my favorite animals the same week that I was
Speaker 1: running a campaign with National Geographic to protect wild cats.
Speaker 1: So that was the universe giving me a call, and
Speaker 1: I was just lucky enough to answer the call and
Speaker 1: to say, Okay, I have to learn more about this,
Speaker 1: I have to investigate this, and I have to see
Speaker 1: what's going on here. And when I did, and I
Speaker 1: started to pull back that band aid, it was the
Speaker 1: ugliest cut that I had seen in American culture when
Speaker 1: it comes to our relationship with wildlife, because it's not
Speaker 1: people killing to survive, it's not people killing to feed
Speaker 1: their family. It's people killing for sport. It's people killing
Speaker 1: because it shows how far we've lost ourselves as a culture,
Speaker 1: as a species, as as a race when it comes
Speaker 1: to our relationship with nature, and that we think that,
Speaker 1: you know, for a belt buckle or for a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred bucks, that validates calling in a wild animal,
Speaker 1: shooting it, showing up to a way in and then
Speaker 1: throwing in a pit as if it were garbage, or
Speaker 1: throwing it in a pit with other animals and setting
Speaker 1: that on fire. Because that is literally what's happening at
Speaker 1: these tournaments. It's not for wildlife management because indiscriminate killing
Speaker 1: doesn't work. It's not helping farmers. It's just simply to kill.
Speaker 1: It's sport killing. And that to me is the indifference
Speaker 1: of good men. It's killing to kill What was what
Speaker 1: was something you said that was glorious? So I'll give
Speaker 1: you as a quick story right now of the positive note.
Speaker 1: And when I was in the Osa Peninsula, which is
Speaker 1: two point five percent of the Earth's biodiversity. It's the
Speaker 1: most ecologically intense hotspot in the world according to National
Speaker 1: Geographic and Osa Peninsula is on the border of Costa
Speaker 1: Rica in Panama. I went down there. We took out
Speaker 1: thirty school kids on a boat and took them to
Speaker 1: Kanye Island, which is the only place, one of the
Speaker 1: only one of few places in the world where the
Speaker 1: northern and Southern humpback whales aggregate to give birth. And
Speaker 1: we showed them whales and dolphins for the first time,
Speaker 1: and they absolutely like their minds exploded. They saw dolphins
Speaker 1: bow riding in front of and behind the boat, jumping
Speaker 1: around the boat. They saw whales breaching, they saw whale babies.
Speaker 1: And then we made them pick pieces of plastic out
Speaker 1: of the ocean because we said here's these animals. We
Speaker 1: could see them falling in love with it immediately. And
Speaker 1: then we wanted to educate them about the destruction that
Speaker 1: human beings are having on their habitat the next time
Speaker 1: I went down to the Osa, I was at a
Speaker 1: wedding and a mom came up to me super upset
Speaker 1: and was like, because of you, I can't buy Natella
Speaker 1: because it has palm oil in it, and my daughter
Speaker 1: tells me that it's cutting down the rainforest of the jaguar.
Speaker 1: And we can't buy plastic because it's my daughter told
Speaker 1: me that it ends up inside of the whale. And
Speaker 1: just this lightbulb went off and I was like, wow, Like,
Speaker 1: this is how you influence parents. This is how you
Speaker 1: influence you know, the generation of voters and of people
Speaker 1: with money as you reach their kids. And so I
Speaker 1: wrote an environmental education curriculum through National Geographic We got
Speaker 1: it funded working with the Ministry of of Education, Environment
Speaker 1: and Tourism down in Costa Rica, and we're implementing environmental
Speaker 1: education into the entire public school system of Costa Rica,
Speaker 1: making it the first country in the world where kids
Speaker 1: are going to be learning about conservation. And why I
Speaker 1: deemed this a major upside is because kids have this
Speaker 1: unspoiled interpretation of truth and so when you give them
Speaker 1: the truth and they can see it making sense in
Speaker 1: front of them. They make responsible decisions and they can
Speaker 1: also influence their parents to make responsible decisions. So when
Speaker 1: everybody says kids are the future, I don't believe that
Speaker 1: kids are the absolute right now, someone that wants to
Speaker 1: follow in your footsteps, what is your recommendation to them
Speaker 1: as should they start? Well, it's it's funny because Darwin
Speaker 1: said it wasn't the smartest, it wasn't the strongest, It
Speaker 1: wasn't the fastest species. It was the species most adaptable.
Speaker 1: Which is why I name my my film adapt Um
Speaker 1: to somebody that wants to get involved, whatever age, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be somebody young, because I believe
Speaker 1: it or not. I get more of this question from
Speaker 1: people looking for a second or third career change or
Speaker 1: a parent than anything, you know, because they see the
Speaker 1: signs all around them, and they love their kids and
Speaker 1: they don't want their kids to grow up in a
Speaker 1: world that's burning down around them, so they I get
Speaker 1: questions from parents all the time, what can I do?
Speaker 1: How can I get involved? And what I always am
Speaker 1: a big preacher of is honesty. Be honest with yourself.
Speaker 1: What type of person are you? What makes your heart sing?
Speaker 1: What is the least friction that you could introduce into
Speaker 1: your life where you will translate the message that you
Speaker 1: have in your heart about wild life, about conservation, about
Speaker 1: the planet streamlined. If you're somebody that's a photographer, use
Speaker 1: your camera as an excuse, as a vessel to share
Speaker 1: your stories. So find out who you are, find what
Speaker 1: makes your heart sing, and get into it in a
Speaker 1: way that invigorates your passion and add your voice to conservation. Listen,
Speaker 1: my thanks to be safe and we'll see you down
Speaker 1: the road. Okay, stay wild, alec my thanks to Glenn
Speaker 1: Shephard and Philippe de Andrade. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Speaker 1: carried Donna Hu and Zach McNeice. Our engineers Frank impureal
Speaker 1: hi'm at like Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to
Speaker 1: you by iHeart Radio.