Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Jerome Roland. And you put the three of us together, put some super glue between us, hold us together for an hour and a half. You've got an episode of Stuff You Should Know. I love Olivia helped us with this. I love her title of this one. It was titled the awe Inspiring, absolutely Crucial Amazon. Yep. And that's what we're going to talk about. This amazing biome about the size of the continental United States that it's you want me to keep going? Yeah, that is so big that it has I mean, how big is it compared to the world, Like one percent of the world of the Earth's surface, Yes, but houses about thirty percent of the biodiversity. Yeah, the world's terrestrial species. I mean, like it's it's really difficult to overstate just how unique and important the Amazon rainforest is. It's want to go now, Yeah, I like looking at pictures of it. It would be cool. I'm sure it would be cool, but it'd be one of those things where I wish I could just teleport there and like hang out and then teleport home. Like that's probably a big trip to get into the Amazon these days, you know. Yeah, And I'm also curious about what kind of trips are good trips that don't disturb things in such a way, like where you're not just some like Credi American tourists doing the wrong thing. Right for sure, for sure. But one of the things about the Amazon is that a lot of people take it as this pristine, untouched natural wilderness that we're trying to protect. And for a very long time, that's what that was the consensus, not just among the general public, but among anthropologists, archaeologists, um, a bunch of different oologists, and that the people who had lived there lived so lightly upon the land that they were almost you know, they were they were almost having about the same impact as some of the other like some of the wildlife there, that it just wasn't they weren't impacting it enough to even consider it a significant amount, And that that Amazon was just this natural gift on Earth m that we we had, you know, as part of our cultural or global heritage, right, yeah, like a giant international park or something exactly. So what we've come to find is that that's absolutely not the case. That the Amazon was actually not entirely but significant chunks of it were engineered by humans, and that probably the best way to preserve it is to hand as much as we can of it over to the humans who have traditionally lived there, who are the descendants of the people who engineered it years back. Yeah, which, well, we got some stats on that later, but I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, for sure, So I we should probably start further back than humans, even because the Amazon has been around for about the last fifteen million years, and it started out as a giant lake, yeah, a big freshwater lake. And over time, like to the tune of millions of years, sea levels fell and eventually, you know, things are going to change geologically speaking around it, and it became a wetlands and then about eleven millionish years ago it finally turned into a river system flowing east into the ocean. But that wasn't all right. Things continue to change from there. Yeah, So basically they carved the rivers flowing from the headwaters in the Andes eastward towards the Atlanta. They carved well, they made an impression on the continent and they also brought sediment to the river, so soils started to grow, which is really significant because tropical rainforest soil is typically rather infertile because it's so hot and so humid that stuff decomposes basically too quickly to create nutrients trapped in the soil. So the fact that that there were sediments, that there were nutrients being brought into it by the river is what allowed the i Amazon basin to become so lush, yeah, and diverse. So still, this is, you know, like eleven millions years ago, you had savannahs, you had big patches like Olivia called them islands of forests, and he had all sorts of sort of smaller biomes. And then through different ice ages ages, we'll just call them ages. Sure, things were changing, things were shifting. It became wetter than it became drier. The river system would change direction like in its flow. And basically if you go back about five million years is where you finally get to the point where the Amazon kind of as we know it speciologically speaking, I don't know that's a word, but that's kind of where things started as far as what we know lives there today. Yeah, you would if you went back five million years, four million years, you would probably recognize it more than you would have, you know, several million years before that. Yeah, So for the past thirteen thousand years at least, humans have been shaping the Amazon as well. We've talked a lot about some of the law civilizations of the Maya and other Mesoamerican groups, indigenous groups, well, they were no strangers to the Amazon basin, and so much the same way that we've discovered ancient Maya cities, we've also discovered other ancient cultures in the Amazon as well. We'll talk a little more about them in a second. But one of the big marks that humans left on the Amazon was something called terra pretta, which is black soil in Portuguese, and black soil refers to highly fertile, highly productive soil found in huge swaths of the Amazon basin that were basically created. These soils were created a couple of thousand years ago. They're still fertile today. They you can still put a plant in this soil and not fertilize it and it will grow very very well, which again is really uncharacteristic for an Amazon rainforest. So they started looking into it and they found that there was a technique that was either purposeful or accidental. Either way, it created this terra pretta where they would they would create landscapes of biochart. They would do these low intensity burns that didn't burn trees all the way down into ash, but left huge chunks of charcoal which got subsumed into the soil along with food waste and sometimes broken pottery, and that that would hold this organic available carbon in the soil again for thousands of years. And there I feel like the consensus is leaning more toward this was a purposeful thing that they did to create the soil, because we also know that they used it for agriculture too. Yeah, so the thought that it was just hunters and gatherers for many, many tens of thousands of years is looking like that's not true, and it was more hunters and farmers, right. They probably did some gathering as well. Should imagine if there was something to gather, they weren't like, I'm not gathering anything. It's not part of the job description. We know how to plant things, we know how to engineer this great soil. But there is evidence that they were, you know, domesticating plants back as far as like six thousand BC. And on the same note that there's just so much we thought we knew about the early indigenous peoples of the Amazon that was completely wrong, as it turns out, and one is like how many people were there and how they lived and what they basically kind of come to the conclusion now after you know, a couple of hundred years of thinking otherwise, is when Europeans would encounter like a sort of smallish tribe of disparate people. It wasn't just that they were roaming around the Amazon. It's that they were displaced by those very Europeans, and that at one time there were groups in the Amazon that numbered in the you know, two or three thousands, and that those groups live near enough to each other where they were larger groups of up to like a million people that were like building roads in using sort of rudimentary tools and lanting things and building six story high complex structures. Yeah, there's one particular complex called the Launostemojos. It's about the size of England and it housed about a million people um in I believe the beginning of the last millennium to about the fourteen hundreds, I think, and in particular, there was the Casarabe culture um and they did what was considered low density urbanism, cultivated a letter in there by the way I looked it up, that's correct though, Oh really huh, Solidia left it out. Yeah, I believe so, all right, look at you Casarabe. Finally, my addition of an extra vowe really comes in handy because whether it's correct or not, you know, right, So, but they did they did what you were talking about where they built these structures. They built raised terraces that so that their crop land wasn't affected by regional or seasonal flooding. They connected these villages by raised causeways. They did all this amazing stuff. And then because of probably climate change like we saw in the you know what happened to the Maya civilization episode, we did, they abandoned these structures. And then once the Europeans showed up and introduced smallpox, that was that was it. Like whatever civilizations were left were wiped out, to the tune of potentially ninety percent of the inhabitants of the Amazon were wiped out by smallpox starting in the sixteenth century onward. And then so yeah, when the Spaniards came across these you know, wandering bands of hunter gathers. They just assumed that's what it had always been there, who had always been there. And it turns out that these were essentially refugees from European conquests, smallpox and a climate change essentially, and that they didn't they didn't really resemble the cultures that they had come from at all. Yeah. And not only that, but the Spaniards were writing about these big, interconnected roadways that were maintained and wide and usable between these different villages, and they would write about those and for you know, a couple hundred years, people were just like scholars and researchers were just like, yeah, they clearly mistook it, or that just definitely wasn't going on, and now they're thinking like, oh, those probably were roads. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those amazing reversals of understanding that you rarely find in history, where these stories of legendary last cities actually were true and we're finding them now. It's pretty thrilling, actually, I mean from a historians point of view, not like I don't know, from a computer programmer's point of view. It's so so so that gets us kind of where we are today, which is the Amazon Rainforest is in nine countries in South America. Most of it, sixty percent of it is in Brazil, and then the rest is divided among Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Guiana, Suriname, Ecuador, and French Guiana. Right is that right? Yeah? Yeah, I think they just spell it differently because they're lee francaie. Yeah. And that's two million square miles, not acres, my friends, square miles. It's so mind boggling that, like we said, has about ten percent of all known species on planet Earth reside there in thirty percent of terrestrial land walking species. There's a really great stat that seems to be accurate. I don't think it's just one of those copy paste stats. The ants one, Yeah, that on certain bushes in the Amazon, you may find more species of ants on that one bush than you'll find in the entire British Isles. That's how biodiverse this area is. Yeah, that's one of the reasons, like I do want to go visit because it sounds amazing and life changing. But then when I think of and I'm not necessarily afraid of insects or anything, but I think it's so buggy and insecty it's even someone who's not too bothered by it can kind of be pushed over the edge, my friend. The largest spiders in the world are found in the Amazon, in particular, tarantulas that are thirteen inches or about thirty three centimeters across. Can you imagine seeing a tarantula coming at you that's a foot across? I would just be like, just kill me now. I know you can't kill me, but please figure out a way to kill me. Tarantula. Oh, could you know? They're not actually deadly to humans? They're what they're not deadly to humans, they're just terrifying looking. No, they're deadly in that you you die of a cardiac arrest right when one of them sinks their fans into you with there and looks at you with their I don't know what they have, like two hundred eyes at least. Yeah. So um. The life in the Amazon rainforest and in all rainforests, really are divided up vertically, Like there's basically different ecosystems from the tops of the trees down to the forest floors. They're so radically different that just going up and down a single tree you find all this different kind of life, and not only different kinds of life, different climates depending on where you are. If you're at the top of the rainforest and the overstory or the canopy, that's a much different world than it is down at the shrub level. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I guess we should start at what you said was the overstory or that's also known as the emergent layer, where did Lando Calariesian live sky City or something? Yeah, I can't remember, Okay, that's basically that. Yeah, boy, I'm sorry Star Wars people. I'm a Star Wars guy, but I don't remember all that stuff. I think it was sky City or Skyville, USA, something like that. Yeah, he's like, did you get your T shirt when you've flew in? Ya? Smirnov is playing tonight. So there are we're talking tall, tall trees, a couple of hundred feet tall, sometimes that limbs spreading out one hundred feet wide, blowing and dropping seeds all over the place. Then under that you're gonna have your canopy. Um that is where you have your overlapping tree branches. And this remarkably holds sixty to ninety percent of life in the Amazon nuts in the canopy is crazy. And also I saw that these these branches just appear to overlap, especially from an airplane overhead, But if you actually could walk from tree to tree, you would see that they're None of the trees touch. There's like a few feet different between the trees in the canopy. And it's a mystery. They have no idea exactly why the trees don't grow touching one another. Um. They think that's probably to keep from diseases from spreading or like you know, um, destructive beetles from being able to climb from one tree to another. But they actually don't touch, and they stay about a foot or so a couple feet away from one another on all sides. Isn't that fascinating? Oh? I figured they overlap, meaning they don't touch, but they overlapped vertically. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they'll do that, but they don't actually touch. Oh oh yeah, Okay, they just go I'm not touching you to one another, right, Okay. The canopy, like you said, is a completely different environment. You're gonna have all kinds of fun birds and lizards and slous and monkeys and all kinds of creatures and plants up there. One hundred feet up. Sometimes it's much hotter. You talked about the different climates, much hotter and much dryer during the day, and it's there's a lot of canopy out there, so the visibility is very poor, so there's a lot of noise because they're all chirping at one another. Yeah, and one hundred feet up at the canopy and then you know another one hundred feet at the over story. There's a lot more wind. It's really being blasted by bright sunlight. And that's just again a different world from underneath the canopy, on the shrub layer, the forest floor. It's really humid, that the light is dappled, it's very rarely direct in places, and for that reason, you have like a much steadier kind of climate than you have at the top. And yeah, that's where that decomposition happens really really fast, so that forest soils can't don't hold in nutrients very well. Yeah, and I don't think we mentioned that there is a lot of life in the overstory as well. You're gonna find monkeys up there too. There can be a snake in a tree just live in his life one hundred and eighty feet up in the air, and bats insects, eagles, all kinds of birds. Something else I found, Chuck that I thought was fascinating is that the study of rainforest life is still kind of in its infancy because it's so hard to consistently get to these places to study this life. Yeah, isn't that fascinating? It is apparently good in a way. I saw that Now that drones are here, especially little handheld drones, it's making it much much easier and less destructive, to be honest. Yeah, that's true, So they'll probably advance, but there's still a lot more to be learned in that field. Yeah, I guess we should talk about rain because it's a rainforest and it does rain a lot. Compared to the most rainy state in the United States. Do you know what that is, Texas? It is Mississippi, Mississippi. Atlanta is pretty high up there too. I think Atlanta's top five or six, I believe it. I call it the Seattle of the South Man. Well, this is talking about total rainfall. I think that's them. You know, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you understand this. But if you just think, like you know, Atlanta, it rains a lot more than in Seattle and Portland, but they have more days of rain, more of those drizzly, sort of dark days, whereas in Mississippi and in Atlanta in the southeast, it's just pouring hard rain to the tune of in Mississippi about five and a half feet a year. In Atlanta we get about four point three feet per year. In the Amazon, they get between six and ten feet of rainfall a year, so up up to double what the rainy t state here gets and most of it fromes to it from December to May alone during the rainy season. Yeah, I mean that's what packed in four or five months. Yeah, it's rainy. Pretty impressive. But I don't know if it's the time to visit or not. But it does not rain much in August that's the driest month, and they only get a couple of inches in August. Yeah, So I say we take a break and then come back and talk to more about the Amazon rainforest. Where do you think let's do it all? Right, we're back. We've talked a lot about animals. We're going to talk more about animals and birds and insects and all that stuff. But there's a lot of people in the Amazon rainforest. And again, like you, I think I sort of pictured it as uh, you know, these largely undisturbed tribes that are still just hunting and gathering and that's all. But that's not true. About thirty four million people live within the ring of the Amazon rainforest. Yeah, that's nuts. There's a whole city, manaus brazil Um has a population of two million in the Amazon Um. And then I think, out of those, um, how many people did you say lived there, between one and a half three are indigenous people who have lived there. These are like their ancestral lands, and a good hundred of the I think three hundred and fifty to five hundred distinct indigenous societies in the Amazon are uncontacted, which, if you'll remember our man in the whole episodes to both of them, I believe. Yeah, I think we did two episodes on them. They uncontacted doesn't mean like they're not aware people exist. They don't want what they don't want to have anything to do with outsiders, usually because of a terrible thing that befell them and or their families. Yeah, it's their thanks, but no thanks tribes exactly. So, I think like thirty five percent of the Amazon right now make up indigenous territories, which is good for the Amazon because, as we mentioned at the outset, one of the things they figured out is the best way to preserve the rainforest is to hand control of it over to the indigenous groups. So you can chuck up about thirty five percent of the Amazon is safe right now. Right. If animals are something you like to talk about, then the Amazon is a pretty great place to be because there are a lot of fauna and megafauna in the rainforest. And one of the starts of the show is certainly the jagyar. Yeah, no, for real, the jaguar. The jaguar. Yeah. If you're buying a car, it's a jaguaw. Yeah, the jaguar. I don't know, I don't know where we got the wire from, but that's what we say, right, Yeah, that's how we say it. And this is just a beautiful, beautiful beast that used to be much more common sadly in the southwestern US, even all the way down to South America in places like Argentina, but about forty percent of their range has been lost yea, in Central and South America, and not over hundreds and hundreds of years. This is in the last like thirty or forty years, and now they are considered near threatened. And these these animals like to move a lot, so they have huge, extensive ranges of hundreds of kilometers, but they just don't have them in such area anymore. Yeah. No, there's about ten thousand of them in the Amazon, which is now their largest contiguous area of habitat. But because the jaguars get so much attention, some of the other ones get ignored unless you start to dig beneath the surface, and when you do, you'll find there's the jaguarundi, the ace a lot, yeah, the Margai, the onsilla, and that last one, the onsilla is a little like five pound cat with a leopard coat that is just adorable standing on a little tree branch. They're all very beautiful, for sure, animals, but they vary in different sizes, shapes, coats, but a lot of them look like like they have a housecat head on, like a mini leopard body or something like that. It's kind of cool. I'm saving my dad jokes from now one. After the b incident, by the way, oh no, I think everybody's been been pretty much in favor that it was definitely worth while. Oh. I've had a couple of yeas and a couple of nays so far. My point that I made to one of them was like, if I wrote that joke down and told it, it's probably pretty terrible, but it was off the dome. Yeah, I thought it was great. I still, like, I wake up laughing thinking about it almost every morning, So I won't make jokes about acelots and auclttles. I'm not gonna do it anymore. I think that's a good good choice in this kid. There's also monkeys, Oh, lots of monkeys, one hundred and fifty plus species of monkey, everything you could imagine. I love how Olivia put this one. The nightmarish looking bald. I guess that's you a cary monkey. Yeah, you need to look that one up. It's oh I did it looks like the the It looks like this sounds awful to say. It looks like a monkey who had his face peeled off. Wow. Yeah, it does look like that a lot. It's just a very bright red. It looks like it a wound almost, Yeah, or like it has an angry, angry sunburn on its face. Only Yeah, it's really neat looking, it's a cool monkey. There's also squirrel monkeys, which are basically what you would think. They're very tiny, but they're considered large brained if you put any stock in brain to body ratio, because they have large brains considering how small they are, and they live in massive groups of up to three hundred. And I looked up I was looking at them and somebody asked on Google or squirrel monkeys good pets? And the answer to that is a thousand times no, oh really yeah, because they have to have constant stimulation, so you have to pay attention to them, basically constantly, and if you don't pay attention to them, they will just start messing stuff up all over the place and making your life miserable. So my advice to you is, no, you don't want to squirrel monkey as a pet. Ahead not looked that up until just now, And I get white people want them as beets. Yeah, are cute, They're very cute, and they're I'm sure a lot of fun to hang out with, but maybe just in the jungle. You know, if you don't pay them enough attention, they'll peel their face off and become bald ukari. So these monkeys are very valuable to the ecosystem, though they are not just for looks and being cute and making fun noises and like being cheeky and stealing food off your plate. They play very key roles. They they're up there chowing down on leaves and they're gonna be pooping that stuff out. They're gonna be spreading seed. That's gonna you know, the trees are gonna be more productive because they're gonna be like, something's eating me. I need to grow more, and that's gonna you know, we always talk about the domino effect in these ecosystems. Then there are more insects that are feeding on these little leaves. That means more birds are gonna be eating the insects, and it just goes down the chain and it's good for everybody. Yep. They also eat seeds or fruits and then poop the seeds out with plants more trees, and they benefit humans by sampling dates to find out if they're bad and poisonous. First, I told you we just watched that recently and that that scene was tough. The only solace and was that it was a nazy monkey. Yeah, and even my daughter at seven and a half was like, yeah, that monkey was no good. Speaking of movies, so I saw that on the plane on the way out, and then on the way back saw Raiders. You watched it, Yeah, I watched like the third or half or something like that. Yeah, that's good comfort food. And then on the way back I watched everything everywhere all at once for the first time. Yeah, that is one of the most magnificent movies I've ever seen in my life. Man, Oh, I hate did you have to see it on an airplane? It was fine. I was you know, like I had something in my eye for like the last third of it, and like it was that was gosh. Anybody who has not seen that movie, see that movie and just make sure you're wide open for it. Oh boy, it was great. A sawt in the theater the Yeah, and never got used to the hot dog fingers. I thought that was so great. Spoiler alert they're hot dog fingers. What else did they have out there? They have the pink river dolphin, the botos, which is pretty amazing. They swim up in those flooded forests and tributaries. Yeah. I just thought that was so cool, Chuck, that they had um that they swam in the forests. Yeah, that's just amazingly cool. Yeah, you got your eyes out for the jagyar and you're like, look out for that dolphin, right, the pink one coming at you. Yeah, and they're pinkish, Like I was expecting more pink than I got when I looked them up. But yeah, they're pinkish. And it looks like they're they're little snouts are way way longer, right, Uh, yeah, they do look a little they needed to burrow past all the stumps in the flooded forests. And if you want color, my friend, forget the pink river dolphins. And because your attention on poisoned dart frogs, there's and stay away dozen. Yeah, I don't get close. Just like at pictures, there's dozens and dozens of species of them, and they are so beautiful. There's just like the different colors and how vibrant they are and like, how is that not glow in the dark paint? It just it's just mind boggling. But ironically, the m so they're called poison dart frogs because the tribes have used their their toxins that they naturally secrete for blow dart hunting, right, that's where they get their name. But ironically, the least colorful of them all, the golden poisoned dart frog, is the deadliest. They have enough toxin in them to kill ten people. This tiny little frog does, so steer clear of the golden poisoned dart frog. If there's one lesson in this episode, it's that we won't get too detailed. But there are all kinds of rodents, There are all kinds of terrestrial mammals roaming the ground. The birds just forget about it. I mean, you want to go see a two can up in a tree or a macaw, that's where you're going to find them. And that's I think would be one of the kind of coolest parts for me is looking up and seeing those birds that you've seen in like cartoons and they're real and they're just flying wild. Yeah, flying past. You're going just follow my nose. You got electric eels, you got tarantulas, you got piranhas and snakes. All kinds of things also want to kill you. In the Amazon. Yeah. The bullet ant, which is the insect with the most most painful sting of any living thing in the world, lives in the Amazon. Yeah. Thank you, and I came across one more thing about animals. I came across another word that is kind of like masked that I love brows, just like just like you browsed through a book. Brows is a word for the leaves and twigs of trees and shrubs the animals eat. I like that, you got brows, you got masked. Put it together. You got a dinner for a tapier. What's a tapier? Well, go ahead and say so. It's it looks like it's um, it looks like a pig with a short elephant trunk, but it's more related to horses and rhinocerii. Yeah. I think we should do with something on Piranha at some point. Maybe it's Shorty the movie. Well we'd have to mention it, sure, but yeah, because I think Paranha misunderstood, and you know, growing up in the seventies and eighties, probably because of that movie. Like I think there was the notion that it's like playground stuff that you hear, like if you fall in a pool of Piranhas, then you know you'll be bones in five minutes and that kind of thing. And I don't think that's true because I always kind of had that notion, and then when you would see people in the rivers of the Amazon where there are piranha, I would just be like, what are you doing? You're about to be bones from the waist down, and that's just not the case. I think the coolest creepiest thing about the piranha is when you go to an aquarium and you see them and they're not moving. You're used to fish swimming around, and those piranha are just motionless in water. I've never noticed that before. While yeah, it's very unless those weren't real piranha, just wax perranha. Are they on the string? Yep? No, I think I think they We'll have to get into that, but I know I've seen motionless piranha. There's one other thing to steer clear of, and that's the candy u, which is a parasitic catfish that is found in the Amazon River and if you're not careful it, we'll swim up your urethra. Oh. We talked about that and something we should talk about that in every episode, just to make sure that never happens to the stuff you should know a listener, Yeah, wow, okay, yeah, Verona can and motionless for hours. I just had to confirm that it wasn't crazy. Very nice, You're not crazy. I could have told you that you want to take a break. Yeah, let's take our last break and we'll talk about well, other great things you can find there and how humans are destroying those things. So, Chuck, we talked about how biodiverse the Amazon is, and that in and of itself is worth preserving. Just the fact that there's that many animals and that many different animals, and I think what four hundred billion trees was the estimate. Just that there's all that life that lives there, it makes it automatically worth protecting. But just within biodiversity, there's there's even more reason to protect that life. Because when you take all those different animals and all those different trees and you put them together on this one type of geography and topography with this these different types of climate, you put it all together, you have a very unique biome that produces all sorts of ecological services that humans benefit from, like drinking water, purification, decomposition of waste, getting rid of parasites and disease. All these different amazing things that the Amazon does comes from the biodiversity. All the interactions of all these different types of animals that have evolved to fill these different ecological niches in this in these ecosystems, and it produces all these benefits from us. So there's number two, and the list just keeps going from there. Yeah, I mean medicines that we use a lot of these have come from the Amazon, and that's what that Sean Connery movie was about, is you know, is the cure for cancer somewhere in some jungle waiting to be discovered. Uh, you know you've heard of ACE inhibitors. ACE inhibitors which can help control hypertension that come from studies at the venom of the fair de lance snake led to the development of that. So that's just one example of the many medicines that we've derived and synthesized from the region. Did I say region? I'm getting very fancy and other things we can learn. Olivia pointed out another cool example of something that we haven't figured out yet, but the leaf cutting ant, which I think we talked about in the Ants episode. They avoid leaves with that are naturally anti fungal, and so when they're harvesting this vegetation for their fungus, farms. They know to stay away from those. We don't quite get how they do it, but we might could study them and learn that and maybe even learn how to control fungal growth where we need it. Yeah, it's going to be a future treatment for athletes foot just around the corner maybe. And you'll notice everybody like you might be waiting for us to be like And it's the reason we can all breathe thanks to all the oxygen. It actually is not true. Yes, the Amazon puts out a lot of oxygen forest, that's great, but the reason we are all here on Earth breathing is because of ocean algae. Yeah, that's really who we have to thank. That's not to downplay the role of the Amazon rainforest. One of the things that definitely has a huge impact on is the water cycle, and that the Amazon actually produces its own weather and then recycles it five six times and then sends it along off to different parts of the world. And every single day, through transpiration of all the plants in the Amazon rainforest, twenty billion tons of water vapor are released every single day. That's definitely significant. Yeah, it affects rain as far as the Midwest of the United States. And all the way down as south as Argentina apparently. Yeah. The big sort of benefit and now concern of the Amazon though, which is what has been on the radar of humans for a while, and there's been a lot of awareness in the past few decades around it, is that it's a carbon sink, really really important carbon sink for planet Earth, to the tune of about one hundred and twenty three billion tons of carbon and just buried in the ground there. Yeah, which is great and valuable. But the problem is is what's been going on since the late nineteen seventies, which is burning hundreds of thousands of square miles of the rainforest and releasing all of that carbon into the air. Yeah, because not only is it in the ground, it's locked into the wood of living trees, but when those trees aren't living anymore, and in particular when they burn, all that carbon gets released all at once. Where like if a tree falls over in the woods, whether there's somebody there to hear it or not, doesn't matter. As it decomposed, is it slowly releases carbon. If you burn a tree, it releases a ton of carbon all at once. And if you burn a huge swath of trees. That's a big carbon release. And yes, the Amazon has been burning, burning, burning since the seventies, largely to make way for agriculture in the most for the most part, cattle grazing. They're burning down the Amazon to make pastures for cattle for the most part. And as a result, they're actually concerned that if it hasn't happened already, that in the not too distant future, the Amazon will transfer from being a net absorber of carbon carbon sink to a carbon emitter, a net emitter of carbon where it will put out more carbon than it holds in, which is terrible. You don't want your the world's largest carbon sink aside from the ocean, the world's largest land based carbon sink. How about that to turn into a net emitter. That would be a bad And all is basically driven by fire in one way or another. Yeah, but you know it's because of climate change. Even where there haven't been these fires, I think, like the southeastern part of the forest hasn't been as burned down yet, but they have also become a net emitter because trees there are dying. They're dying too fast. They're dying faster than they can grow, and a lot of it is because of the warming climate, hotter, drier conditions on average, and then the level of rising carbon dioxide in the air. So more CO two is gonna make a tree grow faster, which is good in a way, but faster growing trees die younger, and like you said, they die, they decompose and then release that carbon again. So it's the cycle where it's sort of feeding itself almost right in the wrong direction. Yeah, it's definitely the wrong direction. Another part of the problem too, is that will affect that that water they and all of the weather that it impacts, and it will also make the Amazon less rainy because as more and more portions of the forest become deforested, that rain that is that hits the canopy and the overstory and then trickles down slowly to the understory and the shrub layer, and then the forest flooring gets like basically trapped in the forest floor and becomes that nice humidity that keeps the whole thing going and keeps the plants flourishing. That rain just runs off into the river and it doesn't get locked into the soil, so that just leads to further and further deforestation and then the up I guess the result of it. Nope, I'm not gonna say that the result of all of this is that these forest lands turn into grasslands savannahs, and that's just not nearly as big of a carbon sink. That's not Again, that's not what we want the Amazon rainforest to be. Even just for the fact that you don't want to lose the Amazon, that's enough to do something about this. Let alone, all of the sub details that make the Amazon what it isn't make it valuable for all these different reasons. Yeah. So if you're out there and you're saying so, that's what Don Henley's been going on about. That's what Don Henley's been going on about for all these years and a lot of other people. And when it comes to taking action like that, I'm glad people like Don Henley or raising awareness and literally doing like feed on the groundwork and raising money when he's not suing people. But the government is where it really comes into play, and wealthy nations chipping in is where it comes into play. Because for about the last twenties years or so, governments in South America have tried to curb deforestation here and there and have done a decent job. Some people say it's too little, too late. It's obviously never too late to try. But again, if we've passed that tipping point, then it literally may be too late in the long run. But Brazil, where like we said, sixty percent of the forest is, they're going to be a big contributor one way or the other. And it's sadly driven by politics. So it hit a six year high deforestation just last year in twenty twenty two, and that was the end of a three year period where the conservative president how do you pronounce his first name is that, Tyre Gayer Bolsonaro, was saying, yeah, we need money, and the way to do that is to cut down then burn these forests. And before that we had a drop in deforestation in a pretty big way under the leftist president Louise in a great name an Assio Lula da Silva. And this is from two thousand and three to two eleven, and he's back in power now. I think he's the only Brazilian president to be elected three times, is what I read? Oh is that right? I thought this was just a second but yeah, I guess he was too term. And now this is his third term. Huh yeah, so he's back and he's saying, hey, we got to reverse these policies and protect these lands. If you look at charts of UM deforestation under different presidents, when when Lula came in, that's what he's affectionately called in Brazil, it just drops deforestation, just drops off precipitously. Um I saw I was down by like two thirds, I believe during his administration. And so not only did he institute protection further rainforest, Brazil's long had plenty of laws against things like illegal mining, UM, illegal agriculture, protections for indigenous land that they just weren't enforcing, and they definitely stopped enforcing when Balcinaro came into power. UM that that all they have to do is start enforcing some of these and that will just have enormous effects. But in addition to that, they're also like okay, like there are reasons people engage in illegal mining. There are reasons people UM use like like forest fires to drive indigenous people off their land because this land is valuable for people who are in some places in times desperate for money to feed themselves in their family. It's not totally under ununderstandable, especially on a more local level when you get into like large politics, it's all just discussed and greed. It's the definition of greed of demolishing a global good for personal gain. I don't believe that that also translates to the local level where you're trying to feed your family, right sure, but what you can't do as a wealthy nation is just say you get guys, need to change what you're doing, right without chipping in and helping some right. Right. So there's a couple of ways to do this, and one that I believe Brazil is really interested in internally is figuring out how to exploit the Amazon without her army in the Amazon, right without doing exploiting it in a sustainable way. Now exploiting like taking it's the wealth of nature from it, like and nuts and fruits, and getting into ecotourism that isn't actually harmful. That's a big way to kind of say, hey, you don't have to do this illegal mining anymore. Here's some other stuff we can do, and you're going to make even more money to be able to sustain in your family and the forest will continue to thrive. The other way is like you said going to wealthy nations, being like, hey, this is a global common good. You guys think that it should be around that the biodiversity alone means that it should be protected. Well, then chip in. If this is like belongs to all of humanity, why should we be the only ones who have to suffer to preserve it, Because there's a lot of stuff they could extract, like oil in the Amazon that they're saying, pay us not to do that, Like, we could use that and to keep up and pay off the debts that we owe you guys, so pay us to leave it there, and then the Amazon gets preserved and then we don't have to we don't have to extract this oil to support ourselves. Yeah, and oftentimes set payment, you know. Kind of mentioned it is in the form of debt forgiveness, and there's been a big push in the past, I feel like fifteen to twenty years for wealthier countries to forgive the debt of poorer countries. And I think Bono is big into this cause, but I think more in Africa. Yea, if I'm not mistaken, I don't remember, but I feel like he's tried to raise awareness for that and kind of pushed for debt forgiveness, and if some of these people like Brazil and Ecuador and Columbia had debt forgiveness, they may not be doing the mining and the oil drilling, although the cynic in me says that someone would come along and try and just exploit it for the riches of it, not necessarily to pay the debts. But one thing we have found that works, like we mentioned at the very beginning, and we're coming full circle here, is that what they have squarely found is that returning control of this land to the indigenous cultures, there is seen a massive, i think a two thirds decrease in deforestation in areas where indigenous people have full ownership rights. So there's your answer right there is give it back to them and say how would you like to treat this land? Probably how you always wanted it treated, right, But also that means so that that's saying you're protecting that by giving it back, by saying like this is protected area, this is indigenous territory, you can exploit it. But that still leaves the problem of the non indigenous people who are trying to make a living out of it. And again you come into the wealthier countries and say why don't you guys chip in and actually chuck. There's been studies of people like households in North America. Norway is really big on it, and I believe the UK of what's called willingness to pay WTP among distant beneficiaries. It's people like you and me who are probably never going to set foot in the Amazon, but we still want the Amazon to be round. And I've seen as much as Norway households are willing to pay as much as one hundred euros per year to keep the Amazon intact as it is now. In the United States, we've been shown to be willing to pay as much as five dollars for every percentage of forest lost avoided. So if they can predict how much would be lost and you say, well this is going to say fifteen percent, the average American household be willing to pay five dollars per percent for that fifteen percent, and that the most agreed upon way of doing this is to say, how about let's let's make this happen, and then we're just going to make it a special tax that you pay when you pay your income tax every year, and each household pays fifty sixty bucks. And when you start to put that together among all households in America and then households in other Western nations, you suddenly have a really giant fund to preserve the Amazon. Yeah. Pretty neat. And you know, if you're looking for charities, I have not vetted all of these, but just a cursory search. And I do recommend anytime you're giving to charities, vet them and do your due diligence and check them out and all that good stuff. But just cursory search. There are a list of you know, best charities for protecting the rainforest, like the Rainforest Trust, Amazon Conservation, Cool Earth, Rainforest Foundation, Rainforest Action Network, Amazon Watch. There are all kinds of them out there. I don't know which one Don Henley's. Oh here it is the Hotel California Fund. No, No, I'm kidding, Okay, I got you. Yeah, I'm surprised. All right, what is the name of his? I don't know. Okay, can we look it up? No, as long as it's not that, that's fine. I'm sure you can. Don Henley Amazon Fund. Yeah, you got anything else? I got nothing else? Well, Um, I thought this is a pretty good episode. I would say it's a throwback episode to like the eighties, like Save the Amazon, but it's pretty much been ongoing ever since then. Huh. Yeah, Well, if you want to know more about preserving the Amazon, just start looking around to find out how you can help, and I'm sure you'll find all sorts of cool ways. And god speed to you for doing that. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this hot off the presses another Delirian. And by the way, you know I asked for I'm sure you'd notice in the emails. I asked for calls for people to let me take a ride in one or drive one. And it turns out we have a lot of stuff you should know, listeners that own Delirians. Yeah, who knew? Yeah, I mean I don't know by a lot, but I feel like we got a dozen or so emails at least from people in different places say, Chuck, you're on when you want to do it? I know it's pretty cool. So I mean, I'm gonna save all those and then I know those one in Boston, a couple of Canada. Are you going to do them all? Yeah? That should do them all. Hush, to drive all the Delirians. Yeah, just a big road trip. No. I'm going to figure it out though and meet up with somebody. Okay, but I'm going to call this another Delirian email. Loved the Delirian EPP. I actually owned one, learned a few fun things about it that I thought you might be interested in. When I was younger, my grandmother left my siblings and me money specifically for our first cars. A serendipitous amount of time later, I saw one for sale on the side of the road. A collector of World War two cars was thinning out his car collection, and of course I wanted it as a sound financial investment for a pre driver's licensed team. I was fourteen. I can't believe this first, and bought a Delirian at fourteen. I bought a moped at twelve months, but tails in comparison to event the kind that you was a bicycle as well like a true mop ed. Yeah. It also didn't work. Yeah, they never do as a sound financial investment for a pre driver's licensed team. My mother agreed to spot the rest the sixteen thousand, five hundred as soon as we could. We got a McFly vanity plate for it. My sister drove us around town for a joy ride. I love this person, pre bought a car before they could even drive. Yeah, a Delirian no less. Yeah. We went through a Chick fil A drive through and ultimately couldn't get our order through the very tiny window, so we had to back up and drive back in with enough allowance to fully open the gull wings as the whole staff look through the window at us. Nice. I would just sit in this lazy boy level comfortable, almost horizontal seat of my stainless steel paper weight. And here's a few fun facts. There's a sign behind the seats that says this vehicle is negative Earth hates Earth. Still have no idea what that means? Is what Kat says. There's a one foot by one foot by one foot ish safe that the Delirian key opens, hidden directly behind the driver's seat. Oh wow, man, I had no idea about any of this. Didn't know this either. And there was a red button on the center console. I don't remember what it was supposed to do because it didn't work. It was just an unlabeled red round push button. Wow. Just daring you too, Oh man. I always wanted to put a little Acme Co sticker, I'm sorry, a glass case and a tiny a tiny hammer around it, you know, for emergencies. So that is from Kat Chaffin And that's a great email. Cat. This may be the best Delirian email we got, hands down. I mean, everybody else's Delirian email is pretty great, but this was no on top. This way to go, Kat, that's an amazing story. Thanks for all the extra info about the Delirian too. I didn't know about that safe. I'm sure there was never cocaine in those saves. Never. If you want to get in touch with this, like Kat did, you can write us an email too. Send it to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the IHEARTRADI you up Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.