How do we bring wildlife back from the brink? What does it actually take to rewild a landscape? And where on Earth can you witness nature’s greatest comebacks in real time? Rewildology host Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and Jackson Wild finalist, travels the globe—both virtually and in person—to amplify the voices of scientists, storytellers, and conservationists restoring and rewilding our planet. Join the journey.
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The New Economy: Making the Amazon Forest Worth More Standing
Saison 3 · Épisode 224
mardi 2 juin 2026 • Durée 36:56
What does it take to make the Amazon worth more standing than gone? Not in theory—but in practice, on the ground, with real communities, real businesses, and real money. This episode of Rewilding Amazonia follows three people who have built economic models that answer that question from completely different angles.
Eduardo Nycander founded Rainforest Expeditions in Peru's Tambopata region in 1989—a community ecotourism joint venture with the Ese'eja people that has proven a healthy forest is worth more per hectare than any alternative land use.
Drago Bozovich's company manages 183,000 hectares of FSC-certified forest in Madre de Dios, harvesting less than one tree per hectare every twenty years while running Brazil nut operations that provide year-round employment—and his company’s forests now have jaguar densities higher than Manu National Park.
Isabel Felandro of Cool Earth is tackling a different problem: the communities with no product to sell and no income stable enough to resist the pressure to destroy what they have. Her answer is unconditional cash transfers—and the first conservation basic income pilot in the Peruvian Amazon is already showing results.
The economic case for the standing forest isn't idealism. It's evidence. If this episode changed how you think about conservation, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.
TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Introduction: Dawn on the river 1:44 Eduardo Nycander: 35 years in the Amazon 3:53 Rainforest Expeditions: Building the business 6:02 Partnership with the Ese'Eja community of Infierno 8:41 Spreading the economic benefit 9:57 The macaw nesting crisis 12:39 Eduardo's legacy & training the wider region 14:08 Drago Bozovich: Three generations of Amazon forestry 15:43 FSC-certified sustainable harvesting explained 17:56 20 years later: The forest comes back 19:55 Brazil nuts & year-round employment 21:03 Jaguars denser than national parks 22:18 Isabel Felandro: From Cambridge to the field 25:05 Cool Earth's model: Direct cash to communities 26:22 The climate finance gap 28:09 Conservation basic income pilot 30:33 Early results: Less stress, more conservation 33:24 Economic stability & indigenous land defenders 35:20 Advocacy & the shift in climate finance 37:01 Conclusion: The economic case for the standing forest
What does it cost to defend the Amazon? Not in dollars or hectares—but years spent in exile, family members taken in the night, court rulings that win on paper and go unenforced for nearly two decades. This episode of Rewilding Amazonia follows five people who have dedicated their lives to defending the Amazon.
Daniel Aristizábal, PIACI Process Director at the Amazon Conservation Team, works to protect indigenous communities that have chosen isolation from the outside world—and explains how they are now sitting on top of some of the most coveted mineral deposits on the continent.
Cristina Vollmer Burelli, founder of SOSOrinoco, documents Venezuela's state-sponsored illegal mining from exile—exposing how a government became the architect of its own people's destruction.
Hugo Jabini, Goldman Prize-winning Saamaka-Maroon leader from Suriname, tells the story of how his people fled slavery in 1690, built 74 communities across 1.4 million hectares of tropical forest, won a landmark ruling in the 2000s after years of legal battles—and are still waiting for full compliance 19 years later.
Cesar Carrasco, Ese'eja lodge manager at Rainforest Expeditions in the Peruvian Amazon, survived the gold mines at 17 and spent three decades helping his community build an economic foundation that didn’t depend on extraction.
The episode closes with Rosa Espinoza—the chemical biologist and science communicator who grew up steeped in traditional ecological knowledge—and her belief that the deepest form of conservation is learning to live beautifully alongside nature.
If this story moved you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who cares about the Amazon.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Support and Content Warning 00:42 Papaya Farm Front 02:09 Isolation as Choice03:36 Quarantine and Territory05:39 Policy Wins Under Fire07:19 Green Minerals Dilemma09:12 Venezuela Mining State14:04 Gold Economy Trap19:48 Suriname Logging Shock21:27 Saamaka Rights Fight27:39 Exile and COP3031:27 Peru Mining and Mercury35:40 Tourism and Culture37:57 Live Beautifully Closing
Rivers in the Sky: The Amazon's Tipping Point, Sentinel Dolphins & the Geothermal Deep
Saison 3 · Épisode 222
mardi 19 mai 2026 • Durée 34:22
The Amazon isn't just a forest. It's three interconnected systems that have taken forty million years to build, and all of them are under pressure. In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I set out to understand how the Amazon functions—not as a place on a map, but as a living system where atmosphere, water, and deep earth are in constant conversation.
Dr. Carlos Nobre, the Brazilian climate scientist who coined the concept of the Amazon's tipping point, explains how the forest engineers its own rainfall through "flying rivers"—invisible atmospheric currents carrying moisture across an entire continent—and what happens to the global climate if we push past the 20% deforestation threshold he first identified in 1988.
Jimena Valderrama, National Geographic Explorer and scientist with Colombia's Omacha Foundation, uses the health of Amazon river dolphins as a diagnostic tool for the health of the Amazon’s river systems. What her team is finding in their blood, including mercury levels seventy times the permitted limit, tells a troubling story about what’s entering the water.
And geothermal scientist Andres Ruzo takes us to the Boiling River, a thermal river running at 87 degrees Celsius and 700 kilometers from the nearest active volcano, sitting atop a geothermal world that remained hidden from scientists until recently.
This episode is about understanding the Amazon as a system: because the more you understand how these layers talk to each other, the clearer it becomes what's at stake when they start to break down, and what it means to protect them while we still can.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Amazon Tipping Point 00:43 Three Interconnected Layers 01:59 Geology Shapes Rainfall 03:20 Flying Rivers Explained 05:55 Carbon and Collapse Risk 06:18 Tipping Thresholds Today 09:38 Avoiding the Point 10:14 River World and Dolphins 13:34 Dolphins as Health Mirrors 15:06 Mercury and Mining 17:52 Sentinel Species Wins 20:15 Geothermal Underworld22:37 Legend of Boiling River25:07 Discovery and Protection28:34 Extremophiles and Biotech30:58 El Dorado City of Life33:17 Final Takeaways and Next
Seeing the Invisible: Tracking Destruction, Measuring Recovery
Saison 3 · Épisode 221
mardi 12 mai 2026 • Durée 30:31
The Amazon is one of the most remote places on Earth—and one of the most watched. In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I follow the people who have built new eyes to see what's happening inside a forest too vast, dangerous, and politically complicated for traditional monitoring to reach.
Brian Hettler, Director of Mapping at the Amazon Conservation Team, has spent fourteen years using high-resolution satellite imagery to track illegal mining barges pushing into protected indigenous territories on the Colombian-Brazilian border, and to help communities legally prove their presence on lands they risk losing not through violence, but through paperwork.
Cristina Vollmer Burelli of SOSOrinoco built an anonymous open-source intelligence network of journalists, scientists, and indigenous witnesses to document over 1,000 hectares of illegal gold mines inside Venezuela's Canaima National Park—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—when physical access was impossible and speaking out could get you killed.
And Brazilian entomologist Leo Lanna of Projeto Mantis has spent a decade discovering that praying mantis community diversity is one of the most accurate indicators of Amazon forest health available, and that the "invisible islands" these insects occupy have profound implications for how we approach reforestation.
This episode is about visibility: what it means to be able to document almost everything happening in the Amazon—and what it will take to get the world to act on what we're seeing.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Guard Post Porto Franco Post Burns 01:37 Watching the Amazon from Space 03:09 Mapping And Titling 05:04 How River Mining Works 07:36 Turning Images Into Action 08:31 Hope In New Clearings 09:39 Venezuela Park Exposé 12:48 Anonymous Network 14:32 AI Needs Human Eyes 16:20 Borders And Balloon Effect 18:41 Meet The Mantis Scientist 20:36 Insects As Forest Signals 22:30 Invisible Islands Insight 25:07 Night Forest And UV27:48 What Gives Hope29:23 You Cant Protect Unseen29:49 Next Episode Tease
The Severed Lifeline: Rebuilding a Fragmented Amazon
Saison 3 · Épisode 220
mardi 5 mai 2026 • Durée 32:52
In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I follow the broken edges of the forest—the roads cutting through Indigenous territories, the degraded corridors between ecosystems, the unprotected landscapes sitting just outside national park boundaries—and the people stitching it back together.
Juliana Martins, a road ecologist and PhD candidate at Imperial College London, has spent years working alongside the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon, whose nightly closure of the BR-174 highway has produced the longest-running citizen science roadkill monitoring project in road ecology history and measurably higher wildlife diversity inside their territory than outside it.
Ben Valks of the Black Jaguar Foundation is six years into one of the largest rewilding projects on earth: a 2,600-kilometer biodiversity corridor reconnecting the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna through a 17-step restoration approach, farmer by farmer, across a landscape the size of the distance from Boston to Miami.
And Bruno Paladines of Nature and Culture International helped unite six Ecuadorian provinces and Indigenous nationalities under a single conservation agreement, the Amazonian Platform, to protect 60,000 square kilometers of intact, connected forest that had no formal protection at all.
This episode is about landscape scale: what it takes to stop a forest from falling apart, and what becomes possible when the people who have always belonged to the land are finally given the tools to protect it.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Spider Monkey Wakeup 01:38 Roads And Fragmentation 02:21 Road Ecology Explained 04:12 Highway Through Indigenous Land 06:47 Night Closures Save Wildlife 08:48 Canopy Bridges Solution 10:05 Rethinking Road Building 12:46 Mega Corridor Restoration 17:00 How Black Jaguar Restores 18:06 Winning Farmers Trust 20:03 Wildlife Returns Fast 21:08 Protecting the Ecuador Amazon 24:25 Amazonian Platform Strategy26:26 Future Fund Governance28:23 Unified Voice At COP29:47 Jaguar Refuge Buffer Zone31:46 Connectivity And Next Steps
The Ghost Forest: Bringing Wildlife Back from the Brink
Saison 3 · Épisode 219
mardi 28 avril 2026 • Durée 33:31
What is required to bring wildlife back to the Amazon, and can species that have vanished from depleted forests return? In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I investigate the crisis of defaunation: the slow, invisible emptying of the Amazon's wildlife that leaves forests standing but ecologically hollow. Scientists estimate that between 350,000 and 1.25 million animals are trafficked in Peru alone every year, with official figures capturing as little as three percent of the actual trade.
Through conversations with three people working at very different points in the same crisis, I follow the full arc of wildlife recovery: from Magali Salinas of Amazon Shelter in Puerto Maldonado, who has spent twenty years rescuing and rehabilitating trafficked animals and releasing them into private forestry concessions when protected reserves can't be trusted, to Mario Haberfeld of Onçafari, whose team achieved the first ever successful rewilding of captive-raised jaguars in Brazil's Pantanal and has since expanded that work into the Amazon, to Brian Griffiths of One Planet and Georgetown University, whose research with the Maijuna Indigenous community in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon reveals why community-controlled wildlife management may be one of the most powerful—and most underutilized—conservation tools available.
Together, their work points toward an answer that is already underway, being built piece by piece in rescue centers, rewilding enclosures, and Indigenous territories across the Amazon basin.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Ghost Forests Mystery 00:45 Jaguars Return Home 01:48 Amazon Shelter Origins 03:50 Trafficking By Numbers 05:47 Rehab And Release 08:31 Monkey Comes Back 11:24 Why Jaguars Matter 12:49 Mario Conservation Vision 14:44 Ecotourism Jaguar Boom 15:35 Rewilding Breakthrough 17:51 Amazon Rewilding Expansion 21:02 Hunting As Conservation 23:22 Loggers And Starvation 25:25 Managed Harvest Science 28:01 Economics Of Saying No 29:46 Barriers And Big Picture32:37 Hope And Next Steps
The Pattern: Tracing the Amazon's History
Saison 3 · Épisode 218
mardi 28 avril 2026 • Durée 25:23
I started this investigation with two questions: What does it actually take to rewild the Amazon, and who are the people dedicating their lives to protecting this globally significant biome? What I discovered traces back centuries—from ancient Indigenous civilizations that managed the forest for 11,000 years to the catastrophic diseases that killed 90% of the Amazon's population after European contact. This episode follows a repeating pattern: extraction booms that devastate ecosystems, followed by conservation promises that fail to stop the next wave of destruction. Through conversations with wildlife rescuers, scientists, and Indigenous leaders across five Amazon countries, I reveal why decades of protected areas and international agreements haven't slowed deforestation—and introduce the people working to break the cycle. With the Amazon at 17% deforestation and scientists warning that 20-25% loss could trigger irreversible collapse into savanna, this series is about the people refusing to let the world's largest rainforest reach its tipping point.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Illegal Mining Reality 01:05 Podcast Mission Setup 01:45 Amazon Touches Everything 02:47 COP30 Sparks Investigation 04:26 What Is The Amazon 05:18 Contact And Catastrophe 07:21 Why Conquest Failed 10:31 Rubber Boom Slavery 14:06 Fur Boom Mass Killing 16:29 Highway And Dictatorship 19:06 Chico Mendes Martyrdom 20:19 Paper Protections Rise 21:46 Narcos And Criminal Rule 23:44 Tipping Point And Hope 24:57 Next Episode Tease
What does it actually take to rewild the Amazon, and who are the people making it happen? Rewilding Amazonia is an eight-part investigative documentary podcast series that goes beyond the headlines to find the scientists, tribal leaders, land defenders, and community organizers across six countries who are doing the work regardless of the threats. The story is more complicated—and more extraordinary—than you might imagine. Episodes drop every Tuesday beginning April 28, 2026.
DISCLAIMER The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and details may change—always do your own research and consult primary sources where it matters.
#217 | The Great Plains Comeback: Inside America's Largest Rewilding Project with Daniel Kinka, PhD
Épisode 217
mardi 20 janvier 2026 • Durée 01:10:28
When Lewis and Clark traveled the Missouri River in the early 1800s, they encountered bison herds stretching to the horizon, grizzly bears roaming the plains, and wildlife in numbers that seemed endless—but just 100 years later, it was nearly all gone. In this episode, Brooke sits down with Dr. Danny Kinka, Director of Rewilding at American Prairie, to explore the science behind the largest landscape rewilding project in the continental United States. American Prairie is working to restore 5,000 square miles of Montana's Great Plains by restoring keystone species like bison and creating the conditions for wildlife like beaver, prairie dogs, and eventually large carnivores to naturally return and thrive. They discuss why bison grazing is essential to grassland diversity, how prairie dogs are the unsung heroes of the plains, why American Prairie isn't ready for wolves yet but grizzly bears are a different story, the complexities of conservation in working ranch landscapes, community relations, and what you can do to support wildlife restoration wherever you live in the world. This is the science of rewilding, Montana's Great Plains comeback, and the tangible hope happening on the ground right now.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 The Return of Wildness in Central Montana 00:22 Introduction to Rewildology and today’s guest 01:51 Meet Dr. Daniel Kinka: From Psychology to Rewilding 03:17 The Historical Transformation of the Great Plains 07:27 The Ecological Impact of Wildlife Loss 12:12 American Prairie: Mission and Goals 16:53 Rewilding Strategies and Challenges 26:57 The Role of Large Carnivores in Rewilding 33:15 Current Status and Future of American Prairie 35:57 Functional Recovery of the Ecosystem 36:08 Rewilding Progress and Challenges 37:37 Wildlife Restoration and Management 38:07 Community and Economic Impact 40:40 Public Support and Skepticism 50:54 Global Significance of Rewilding 57:08 Personal Reflections and Hope 01:00:38 How to Support Rewilding Efforts 01:07:28 Final Thoughts and Call to Action
Join Brooke and Charles for their end-of-year Nature Coffee Hour as they reflect on 2025's biggest conservation moments! They swap their usual evening beers for morning caffeine and dive into the stories that shaped this year: green sea turtles downlisted from endangered to least concern, Florida's record-breaking leatherback nesting season, the troubling rollback of U.S. wetland protections, Ecuadorian fishing communities protecting mangroves from industrial shrimp farms, and the historic High Seas Treaty protecting two-thirds of our oceans. They also share personal updates—Rewildology's Project Patagonia series becoming a Jackson Wild finalist, Charles's health recovery and new PhD students, and some unexpected philosophical realizations about humanity and our shared planet. This conversation covers the conservation wins, losses, and everything in between as we close out 2025 and look ahead to what's next.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Introduction 01:34 Morning Beverage Chat 06:49 Project Patagonia Success 20:05 Charles' Health and Lab Updates 30:43 Top Headlines of 2025 40:49 State Policies and Their Impact on Wildlife 41:40 Ecological Consequences of Removing Protections 43:21 Private Land and Wetland Conservation 43:54 The Importance of Wetlands and Potential Risks 44:33 State-Level Actions and Public Responsibility 46:57 Positive News: Green Sea Turtles' Recovery 47:48 Sea Turtle Conservation Success Stories 55:10 Community-Led Conservation in Ecuador 01:02:42 Global Conservation Efforts and Personal Reflections 01:12:55 High Seas Treaty and Ocean Conservation 01:21:31 Closing Thoughts and Future Plans
REWILDOLOGY FIELD EXPEDITIONS Where The Wild Calls: Patagonia Puma Expedition & Torres Del Paine Adventure, March 31 - April 7, 2026:
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SUPPORT This episode is supported by Cool Earth, a charity that gives cash and data directly to Indigenous communities to protect rainforest and fight the climate crisis. Learn more at coolearth.org.
DISCLAIMER The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and...
DISCLAIMER The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and details may change—always do your own research and consult primary sources where it matters.<...
DISCLAIMER The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and details may change—always do your own rese...
DISCLAIMER The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and details may change—always do your own research and consult primary sources where it matters.
DISCLAIMER The views expressed by guests are their own and don't necessarily represent those of Rewildology or its host. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, science evolves and details may change—always do your own research and consult primary sources where it matters. Thanks for listening!
REWILDOLOGY FIELD EXPEDITIONS Where The Wild Calls: Patagonia Puma Expedition & Torres Del Paine Adventure, March 31 - April 7, 2026: https://rewildology.com/patagoniaexpedition/
