_
The wilds of planet Earth are spectacular.
Yet one species is always framed out of the picture--
us.
I'm Dr. M. Sanjayan.
As a scientist and conservationist,
I've dedicated the past 25 years of my life
to studying...
Oh!
...and protecting the wildlife I love.
Hold on, buddy!
Now my mission is to tell you an untold story.
What we think of as wild has actually over centuries
been shaped by humans.
We can be destructive.
But by changing our perspective,
we can learn to restore nature
back to health in the most surprising ways.
Forests are home to more variety of wildlife
than anywhere else on terrestrial Earth.
The challenge is how to live alongside them
without cutting them down.
I am discovering new ways of understanding
and valuing forests whilst they're still standing.
All part of a new kind of wild.
Sync and corrections by n17t01 www.addic7ed.com
Original Air Date: February 11th, 2015
_
In the far western reaches of the Amazon rainforest
lies one of the remotest places on Earth.
It's many days by boat just to get here.
A place simply known as the Intangible Zone.
It really is a perfect name, the Intangible Zone,
'cause you look at that forest.
And it just looks unknowable.
And it contains millions and millions of life forms.
You can't help but feel very, very small
in a place that looks very, very big.
You can't just walk straight in to the Intangible Zone
because even out here with over 100 miles of rainforest
between us and the nearest town,
there are people.
Gatekeepers to this forest
who will fiercely protect it.
People have been killed here for venturing
into the Intangible Zone.
My guide, Ryan Killackey, assures me that we are invited.
He's spent years getting to know this forest
and earning the trust of the Waorani people who live here.
But you never know how something like this
is actually going to go.
Just the forest for hours and hours of endless green,
and then all of a sudden, people, humans just out of the forest.
Oh, my God.
- Is it okay to go up? - Yeah.
It turns out to be about the warmest welcome I could ever imagine.
So this Otobo's wife and his son.
This is Otobo's mother.
And this is Otobo.
This is Otobo's family.
Yeah, this is Otobo.
Yeah, this is Otobo and this is his family.
The Waorani people get everything they need from this forest
and I'm here to learn from them.
I want to understand an astonishing theory
that suggests we humans may have lived here
in the Amazon not just in small communities
like Otobo's community, but in much larger numbers.
Bigger than anyone previously thought.
And it's what my journey is really all about.
Exploring wild forests that include humans.
Because the research at these frontiers
is reinventing the value of forests for all of us.
Exploring this forest with Otobo is really about just keeping up.
If I turn my eyes for even a minute, I'll lose them in the forest.
And I did this once before.
I just looked back and I looked forward
and they were gone.
And so I got to keep an eye on them
because these guys just vanish like that.
Otobo and his uncles can read every detail of this place.
4:00.
He said 4:00 yesterday, a bunch of animals came by here
and rubbed against this.
And he can tell that from the smell.
The fact that he can time it, I wouldn't believe him
but I've seen these guys in the forest,
and it's just... this is absolutely incredible.
So I'm very much inclined to believe what they're telling me.
_
I have asked Otobo for a quick tour of his forest.
And he takes me to a very special place.
This muddy clearing attracts animals from miles around.
By licking the minerals in the soil,
the animals get a vital hit of nutrients.
Spider monkeys feed on toxic leaves
and need the minerals here to neutralize those toxins.
As a biologist, I see a forest dripping with life.
It's exceptionally hot and wet
in this region of the Amazon,
optimum conditions for the generation of life.
Species are thought to have survived here
through the Ice Age
while in other parts of the Amazon, they perished.
This explains why the Intangible Zone
is thought to be the most biologically diverse place on Earth.
And today, a team of scientists from three continents
are coming here to test the claim.
Ryan Killackey is leading the team.
He's organized the expedition 'cause he fears the fate of
the Waorani's home hangs in the balance
because on the fringes of the Intangible Zone,
there's another expedition underway.
Oil prospectors are approaching.
They value this forest for the natural resources beneath it.
The researchers are the first to catalog life here.
For Ryan, it's much more than that.
For him, it's a race to confirm the scientific value
of this place with hard data.
We really know so little about it.
And right now, it is labeled as possibly the single
most biologically diverse location in the world.
You know, we have over 150 species and amphibians.
Over 200 species of reptiles.
200 species of mammals.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of plant species
and hundreds of thousands of insects.
Nobody has really ever been in here before,
so what I do need to do is bring people in here
that can give us that hard scientific data.
The Waorani's understanding of this forest makes them
the best field guides a scientist could ever hope for.
Dr. Cecilia Puertas is after fish.
And Otobo's grandmother, Mnemo, has a pretty neat trick.
Pounded tree roots release toxins into the water
that starve the fish of oxygen.
Then they can simply be tickled up to the surface.
Mnemo is clearly a pro.
_
For Cecilia, each of these fish is a priceless bit of data.
_
Wow, this is great.
Sometimes I have to spend hours and hours
trying with a net just to get one fish.
And here in less than 10 minutes, right?
We already have like four or five different species.
Amazing.
The scientists are only halfway through their expedition
and the specimen count is already off the scale.
Frogs that look like leaves.
Birds that mimic trees.
Spiders that look more like flies.
I'm going to see for myself what all these discoveries finally add up to.
And I will be traveling to the frontiers
of where the world of the Waorani
meets the world of the oil prospector.
But before that, there's another lead to follow,
a discovery from the past that is changing our perception
about how many people can live in and around a forest.
Across human history, our relationship
with the forests has often been about clearing them
for things like firewood and agriculture.
I think the general opinion in the Amazon has always been that,
just like the Waorani, the only way people can live
in forests is in these small nomadic hunter-gatherer
communities with a pretty limited impact
on the surrounding forest.
But new evidence coming out of the Amazon, quite ironically
as it's being deforested suggests that, in the past,
it might have supported vastly larger human communities.
This evidence emerged from what we'd previously thought was virgin rainforest.
It reveals something unexpected and mysterious.
Let's take a look at these
and see what they really look like.
Look at that.
It's just no doubt that these were human made.
I mean, those lines are perfectly straight.
I mean, it is a perfect square.
Archaeologists have dated some of these shapes
at 2,000 years old.
It's thought that they might have been ceremonial structures
although what's important here is not their purpose,
but their scale.
I mean, look at the size of these.
When you realize that these are big tall tropical trees,
then you realize how actually big these trenches,
these earthworks, are.
To build on a scale like this takes planning,
organization and a lot of people.
You know, scientists are estimating that maybe
like 60,000 people must have been around
in these areas to be able to excavate things this big.
More and more of these earthworks are emerging.
Now 300 and counting.
They date from before Christopher Columbus,
and they suggest that communities tens of thousands strong
may have lived around these structures.
Perhaps there were even small cities.
That's astonishing because the Amazon soil is so poor and thin.
Not what you need to support large numbers of people.
Research into this soil has shown that ancient people
found a simple solution to feed so many.
They slowly burnt their domestic waste in pits amongst intact forests.
Over time, this created a super fertile man-made soil
known as terra preta, or dark earth.
Ancient communities could reap the benefits of this mosaic
of orchards interspersed in the heart of the jungle.
And it turns out that 10% of what we often think
of as pristine wilderness is actually growing in man-made soil.
All this shows that there are ways to coexist
with forests without destroying them.
Even ways to make them more vibrant.
And if you think that this could only happen in the past, you'd be wrong.
5,000 miles away, there's a remarkable story
of how humans and forests can coexist.
Man's impact here makes this place more diverse
than if there were no people here at all.
In Southern Europe, it's the start of the cork harvest season.
For centuries, these trees have provided cork
for wine bottles.
Harvesting it is a tradition handed down from father to son.
_
These tiradors, or cork harvesters,
have to use absolute precision to cut the bark
without damaging the trees.
And the harvesting is good for the tree.
Just like cutting grass, the bark eventually
grows back better.
The cork is the tree's natural defense against forest fires.
It's so effective that it's even been used as
a heat shield in spacecraft.
The cork harvest is part of a multimillion dollar industry.
And because the cork trees are so valuable,
the other agricultural activities have to fit around them.
It creates a patchwork of small clearings
that scientists call a mosaic ecosystem.
Farmers graze pigs between the cork trees.
They eat the acorns and naturally reseed the forest.
And having bits of small scale agriculture interwoven
with healthy forests is what makes it so good for wildlife.
It's the last stronghold for the endangered Iberian lynx.
They use the trees for camouflage
and the clearings for hunting.
60,000 Eurasian cranes end their long migration here,
stocking up on cork oak acorns.
Cranes need the man-made clearings to dance
and reaffirm their lifelong bonds.
This region is also home to more wild plants
than the rest of Europe combined.
It's why it's been called the Amazon of Europe.
What's so fantastic about these cork forests
is that these forests really need people to maintain all that life,
to function the way they do.
You take people out of the equation,
without a doubt these forests are gone.
For me, that's kind of really special, right?
I mean, here are these forests where people are
the ones who are maintaining it,
who are keeping it, in some ways, wild.
Humans have played a key role in creating this forest ecosystem.
But in the 1950s, we inadvertently upset the natural balance.
Rabbits had become a pest.
So we introduced a disease, myxomatosis,
to control their numbers.
But it got out of control,
and in some areas wiped out 90% of them.
And it was here that the rabbits of Europe first evolved
and became an integral part of this ecosystem.
Carlos Pacheco is a scientist who's trying to pick up the pieces
because the loss of rabbits has had this knock-on effect
on all the key predators that feed on them
like the Iberian lynx.
And the Spanish imperial eagle.
These hunters are both at extreme risk.
Carlos and others are working to restore
the predator-prey balance.
But Carlos's help goes much further than rabbits.
For the Spanish imperial eagle,
he's even building nests for them to return to.
Today, with a team of researchers,
he's watching a nest containing
a precious eagle chick that is yet to fly
and the researchers need to give it a full health checkup.
But getting an eagle chick down from the top of a tree,
that ain't easy.
I do get very excited about doing this.
Although I try not to show it because I'm a professional.
But, yeah, my heart is beating much faster than it normally does.
The mother will aggressively defend her nest
with her razor sharp talons.
As soon as she leaves, the scientists have
a 30-minute window to get the chick down
and back up again.
Even a youngster is a handful.
Blood samples can track its genetic history
while physical tags allow researchers to follow a bird from afar.
Wow, this is a unique moment.
It's something that makes your hands shiver.
I really get very excited when this job is done
and we see these chicks flying.
Man's intervention here has restored eagle numbers
from almost 40 pairs to nearly 400.
Managing the predators is an extension
of our timeless involvement in these forests.
An age-old industry functions with
an understanding of the wild animals that live alongside.
But living next to forests doesn't always play out quite so easily.
In some parts of the world,
if you really want to live next door to nature,
live side by side with wild creatures,
then you have to start thinking pretty radically.
In the jungles of Sumatra, the wildlife of the forest
is much more difficult to get along with.
Elephants are bursting out of the forests
and crossing the threshold into our world.
The reason is that Sumatra has some of
the fastest disappearing rainforests on Earth,
cleared for huge plantations and farmland.
More and more people are now living closer to elephants
and, unfortunately, elephants find our crops irresistible.
When they come raiding, lives are at stake.
Farmers feel they have to fight back,
sometimes with rockets and firecrackers,
because getting a five-ton elephant back into the forest is hard.
In less than 10 years, human-elephant conflict has killed 42 people
and over 100 elephants here.
These animals can devastate farmlands,
obliterate years of work in just minutes.
However much the people try to protect their livelihoods
by scaring them off,
the reality is they don't stay away for long.
_
You might think life here for people would be easier
if they just got rid of elephants.
But it turns out these animals are deeply connected
to the health of the rainforest.
And in turn, to all of us.
Unless we can get elephants back into the forests, we all suffer.
And, again, just like with the cork forests,
it's our ability to manage the wild that provides the solution.
Because there is a plan.
It's called the Elephant Flying Squad.
The trainers, or mahouts, have an intimate bond
with domesticated elephants.
Using skills handed down across millennia,
they can turn these animals into allies
and use them to push their wild cousins back into the jungle.
At Flying Squad headquarters, they wait for reports
to come back in from watchtowers
that are spread across the forest.
And then, it's about making their strategy work on the front line.
Here, they're patrolling the Tesso Nilo district.
And once again, there are problems.
The Flying Squad have got to respond quickly
because things here can get out of hand rapidly.
With elephants and people working together,
there is a solution for pushing the wild elephants back into the forest.
And the Flying Squad are succeeding.
Flying Squad efforts in some places
have reduced crop damage by over 90%.
This is good news for the people and the forest.
Because elephants are ecosystem engineers.
They create clearings for new growth...
and disperse seeds.
Even their footprints create breeding grounds
for insects that all contribute to forest health.
By gardening the forest, elephants are contributing
to a tropical network that supports us by supplying
and regulating billions of gallons of water every day.
But there's another equally important band of forests
that, for years, has been overlooked.
Great forests encircle the entire
northern hemisphere of our planet.
For six months of the year, they're frozen.
They appear lifeless.
But when this place thaws, it exhales a giant breath,
flooding the planet with oxygen.
This is the Earth breathing.
No other forest, not even the Amazon,
regulates our atmosphere on this scale.
I've come to Canada's Great Bear Rainforest
because researchers helped us understand this place
and value it in a whole new way.
This new understanding has led to a historic agreement
between loggers, indigenous people
and conservationists to protect it.
It's all based on an incredible chain of events
that starts in spring.
The forest is awakening
and the stage is set for one of nature's
most spectacular events.
Animals, lean after a long winter,
are on the move to the coast.
And that includes us.
The First Nation's people living here are combining
the latest science with an ancestral understanding
to reveal a whole new way of looking at this forest.
They've helped expose a link between the life in the ocean
and life in the deepest parts of this forest.
Because here a small fish helps support one of
the biggest stretches of forest on Earth.
There she goes, that beautiful tree.
That beautiful tree.
All the animals here seem to instinctively know what's coming.
The Pacific herring run.
Shoals of herring, tens of million strong.
Coming right into the shore
to where the ocean meets the Great Bear Rainforest.
Their arrival provides a banquet.
It is chock full of life.
These forests sometimes look so empty then you get into these little spots
and everyone is here.
Look at these guys, look at this!
Look at this!
Wow!
There's a huge humpback whale over there.
He's just cruising up and down through this channel just feeding.
The male herring that do manage to make it
head into the shallows to release their sperm.
Then the females follow.
They scramble for any surface they can
on this boundary with the forest
like seaweed and fallen trees.
They release their eggs in the hope that they will be fertilized.
Each tiny egg is part of a vast fabric clinging to this shoreline.
Millions per square yard.
This immense spawn connects ocean
and forest along hundreds of miles of coast.
A connection that, in time,
will be transported deep into the forest.
I mean, usually, these animals will be found
deep in the forest hunting deer.
But at this time of the year,
they're out here looking for herring.
This footage is extremely rare.
An iconic carnivore turning its attention to fish
is not something you see every day.
And other animals are just as keen on the herring
as the wolves.
From eagles
to black bears
to one other animal...
us.
Hoowa!
That is like 100 pounds!
There's 100 pounds of caviar!
Mm, it's good.
It's the mildest flavored caviar with just a little bit of pine.
I mean, it really, really tastes great.
And really tastes of the ocean and the forest.
There's nothing like it.
The Heiltsuk are a First Nation's community
who have lived alongside this forest for millennia
and they've come to know its most intimate details.
At this time of the year, they're all out harvesting on the water.
This is a really good flavor.
We have a big family.
All these guys that were over here are my uncles.
So when we get in, all of the eggs that they harvested
and all of this are gonna go onto one table
and all of our family will come and take what they need for the winter.
William Housty is a leader of the Heiltsuk people.
Ancestral knowledge has taught the Heiltsuk that,
when the crescent moon is waning,
the herring are on their way
and that's the time to sink the trees.
If you ever watch the moon leading up to this time of year,
our people used to know that it was time to go and get your trees ready.
Because when the moon tipped, all the herring came spilling out of the moon.
And that they're starting to spawn.
Even though the Heiltsuk are fishermen,
they know the forest is crucial to the herring run.
Trees anchor soil and prevent silt from running into the water.
The spawning just wouldn't happen like it does
if the water was cloudy with silt.
But the Heiltsuk know that there's a much more
complex connection between the ocean and the forest.
Scientists working with the Heiltsuk have analyzed
the chemical composition of the trees inland
and they've made an astonishing discovery.
That the nutrients essential to the growth of the trees
even miles inland comes from the ocean.
The herring start the process.
Salmon feed on those herring.
Then they swarm up the rivers carrying the pulse
of nutrients deep into the forest
where bears are waiting.
All along the animal trails here, you find remains
of half-eaten ocean-going fish.
Up to two tons in a single acre.
It's these that decompose and then feed the trees.
It turns out that up to a staggering 75% of the nitrogen
that fuels the growth of these trees comes from the ocean.
There are millions upon millions of herring
and salmon that spawn up and down these coastlines.
And animals bring that nutrient up into these trees.
I mean, to me, that is just absolutely mindboggling.
That the ocean which is that far away from me
really manages to reach right up into these forests
all the way to the very tips of these trees.
We used to value this wilderness only
for its worth as raw materials,
making everything from plywood to toilet paper.
Now, we're starting to appreciate these trees
whilst they're still alive and part of a bigger system.
If the forest was gone, it would bring soil erosion,
destroy salmon and herring runs
and eliminate a multimillion dollar fishery.
The reality of these discoveries
linking forests, oceans and us
has meant that five million acres
have been made off-limits to logging.
We can now appreciate what our forests are really worth.
Something that's coming back into sharp focus
where my journey began.
Back in Ecuador's Intangible Zone,
the value of this forest is suddenly
a lot more significant since Ryan Killackey's team got here.
There are more tree species in just a couple of acres
than in all of North America.
More variety of insects than anywhere else on the planet.
No doubt, more studies will be needed,
but even after just a couple of weeks,
Ryan and his team believe that this might be
the most biodiverse place on terrestrial Earth.
It's the sort of place where giant river otters
swim right up to you.
But another expedition has revealed that underneath
this forest lies several billion dollars worth of oil,
fuel for our world
and the source of much-needed cash for this country.
There's one man in the Waorani community
who's experienced this collision of values like no one else has.
The Jaguar Shaman.
As a biologist, I usually focus on natural history.
But the shaman reminds me of the human story
that is also threatened by development in this forest.
When he came across outsiders prospecting for oil,
it didn't go well.
_
As far as he is concerned,
he was defending his people from invasion.
And certainly drives home the challenges
that could be coming the way of this forest.
He leads us towards the edge of his land
and then leaves us to journey out of the Intangible Zone.
Oil drilling is already happening at the edges.
But permits are now being considered for drilling further into the forest.
Surveys have revealed vast deposits.
It all raises the question of what the most
biologically diverse forest on Earth is actually worth to us.
Wow, flaming trees, huh?
It's kind of beautiful, you know, in a way.
Like we all are kind of hypnotized by fire.
You know, we're all a part of it.
We're all a part of it.
And they say the quantity of oil is only enough
for the world population to actually function for about eight days.
Just eight days of oil?
Just eight days of oil.
But eight days of oil for the planet is still a great deal of money.
The roads and massive development
that comes with oil extraction does make this
a pretty destructive way to put a dollar value on this forest.
But there is a new way to put a cash value on forests,
one that capitalizes on scientific data like Ryan's.
And promisingly, it's emerging right here in the Amazon
where they're facing the big threats like oil and logging head on.
It's easy, it seems, to calculate the value
of a forest when it's your home.
Life, life. The forest is the life.
Chief Almir is the leader of Brazil's Surui tribe,
and he's been quick to realize that he needs to quantify
the value of his home to the rest of the world.
The Surui lead a traditional life.
But now they're using modern technology to help them
quantify the value of their home
and broadcast that to the rest of the world.
We looked at how we wanted to preserve the standing forests
and we came up with the idea of the Surui Carbon Project.
The Surui take simple measurements
like the height and growth rate of trees
and an algorithm translates that into the weight
of carbon drawn from the atmosphere.
Almost a million dollars worth of carbon credits
have already been sold to offset carbon use.
The Surui are the first indigenous group to ever
protect forests in this way.
But this is just a small part of a bigger plan.
A massive data entry exercise is now underway,
uploading the inventories of forests' life via satellite.
With this monitoring, we can map the biodiversity
of Surui territory.
By getting hold of this sort of data,
businesses are basing patents on forests' life.
It's thought that one-quarter of all our prescribed medicines
are based on rainforest plants.
And yet fewer than one percent of tropical species
have really been examined.
When the data of this forest is uploaded,
it clearly has a dollar value.
The Surui are smart.
They know the forest adds up to more than just money,
but if this helps them protect their home,
then they'll take that, too.
This new kind of assessment of even the wildest forests
is spreading right across the planet.
Economists call it natural capital.
This is the forest not just as trees and wildlife.
It's really a way of putting a figure on every service
this ecosystem can provide.
From hydroelectric power to water filtration.
From medicine banks
to global weather control to tourism.
The way of valuing forests is changing.
In the modern world, we can quantify
the forest's services to us.
And new evidence shows how we can keep them productive,
living amongst them in large numbers,
and sometimes even making them more diverse.
Today, it's all about how to value forests
while they're still standing.
Next time on Earth A New Wild...
Our planet's last wild frontier,
the ocean,
a place threatened by a man-made invasion.
But we can turn back the tide.
And the key is a new understanding of
the ocean's predators.
I cannot believe what I'm seeing!
Allowing us and the wildest oceans to thrive.
To learn more about this program,
visit pbs.org/earthanewwild
Earth, A New Wild is available
on Blu-Ray and DVD.
To order, visit shoppbs.org
or call 1-800-play-pbs
Sync and corrections by n17t01 www.addic7ed.com