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we bought this all of this together with you our Mossy Earth members so that we can restore the degraded areas and also protect the wonderfully diverse Forest that is left and we've done so with Freddy a kitua man born and Brad in the Amazon rainforest who asked us to buy this land to protect it and all the wonderful species that live here and this place it's incredible what a beautiful busy little red monkey it's just amazing to see and right here in the land that we are now protecting as you can imagine we have a lot to show you because we're spending 2 months here exploring the land and
making all sorts of plans for the future and in this video today I want to introduce you to this place to this new project I want to introduce you to this new video series and also tell you what our purpose is here in this strange place so far from home but first let's get some perspective because the Amazon rainforest is the ultimate temple of biod diversity it is one of the last places that can truly boast of an uncontrollable and untameable explosion of life and all its wonderful shapes and forms this place is fueled by bright equatorial sunlight and abundant Cloud bursts of rain all year round which means that growth here is nonstop it's always spring or summer in the jungle
the greens are always the greenest greens you've seen all the insects are booming all of the time the birds are always busy with their nests the frogs are always croaking at night and the monkeys the monkeys always seem to have a little baby on their back half of the rainfall here is generated by the evaporation from the forest itself it is an ecosystem that creates its own climate a rainforest that creates its own rain and if it's properly sunny and bright in all likelihood it'll be hammering it down later it is a chaotic place where everything competes with everything else for light for water and for nutrients every morsal of energy is recycled there is an animal specialized in every Niche and over millions of
years all of this wonderful frenzy of life has found a balance but we're not really here to do another nature documentary about the Amazon rainforest we uh we do nature restoration we do Rew Wilding and as you can see all around me there is plenty of potential here for more restoration we're buying this land in a degraded State 8 hectar were logged for cow pasture and 15 for monoculture cacao plantations there were gold miners trying to buy this land for its many creeks and balwood Harvesters that wanted to grow and log balwood here and the nearest oil pipe it's just down the road I think that rainforest conservation can be quite the Bourgeois Pursuit where we have people who are comfortable who are well off
telling people who are desperately poor that they need to fix this super complex mess and those people that transformed the primary Forest that would have stood proud here you know Full of Life full of biodiversity that you know transformed that into this horrible mess I think that they are not at fault and this is why we as most Earth have never worked in the Amazon it simply never made sense for us because we never found a reasonable way in an idea that was Grassroots enough and one that seemed sustainable in the long run but all of that changed when Freddy came into the picture I am Freddy wallinga I grew up in the jungle I mean I was born in the jungle I grew up here and I had I got some opportunity to go
to the city to learn Spanish because my first language is kitua and grew up Hunting Fishing when I was child I used to say I don't want to live in the jungle anymore because I grew up with my mom farming uh you know harvesting corns it was a lot of work like I imagine in this in a dry season I said I want to work in the office like in the banks I want to be a director and just sitting in the office but when I grow up it I Chang you know my mind my idea changed because the best way to live is the nature you know living the nature is the best one thing that Ecuador has done really well is to recognize that indigenous people that live in the Amazon are entitled to their Forest they're entitled to own the land
and this gave Freddy an opportunity I was biking I was walking canoeing later I make some a few friends around and I knew so that was there were a lot of potential to save this forest and do something always in my mind was to do tourism and he got to work his project mandar panga gives a whole Community some extra income through tourism and that is a good additional reason to consider taking care of their 7,000 hectar of rainforest it's conservation through economic alignment and not self-righteous preaching and it is with this in mind that Freddy reached out to Adrian one of our biologists who had visited mandari panga the year before while on holiday he wanted us to buy and protect this land when it came up for sale so when the time came we
jumped into action Adriana worked with Silvana a lawyer from keto to create an Ecuadorian organization we paid a topography to map the borders of the land together with Freddy and when all the papers were done we beat the competition and bought the land for 85,000 us okay so there we go these are the documents the line documents that are coming back to Europe with us between Freddy sylvana and some additional due diligence the risk was low and well managed but it was still a pretty stressful process of course and I really have to take my hat off to our biologist Adriana who managed to get this from idea stage to done deal in a little over 3 months it's really incredible work as you know here at Moss Earth we
often focus on places and species that aren't as obviously exciting as the mighty Amazon rainforest and I love that about our work I love that we work with a snail in a deserted island in the middle of the Atlantic I love that we work with an abandoned Quarry but I have to admit it as well this here has been on another level I just wanted to make the point that this here this Forest protecting this land is already a really great achievement for our little online reing community I mean we're like a small village of a few thousand people having a really big oversized impact for the number of people that are actually doing these projects and I would like to remind you that the only way we can do
all this is because of our Moser Earth members and you can become a member at moss. Earth our projects can range from reflooding flood plane forests to create Wetlands all the way to creating coral reefs or even reintroducing important keystone species such as oysters suslick or even ocelots the key thing is trying to bring back nature as efficiently as possible across a wide range of ecosystems now it's about time that we get you located and for that I want to bring out a proper map this is the Amazon rainforest and our land is here in the corner close to the Andes in the headwaters of the Amazon basin this region is the most biodiverse place on land because this is where the special
conditions of the Andes the equator and the Amazon rainforest come together and the reason we know this is because researchers map the species richness of amphibians birds mammals and plants and found that there were only a few places where diversity was at its PE for all four of these groups at the same time those are the areas that you can see in red here and as you can see in this map that is the yasuni area as well as some bits of Peru so this is clearly a really important place I mean it's the most biodiverse place on land which is why in 1979 the yasuni national park was created providing some form of official protection for more than 1 million ion hectares then a decade later in 1989 the
UNESCO biosphere Reserve was created covering 2.7 million hects and including the wani ethnic reserve the wani are one of the indigenous groups of this region of the Amazon together with many others such as the kicha communities the sapara in the South and some of the world's last voluntarily isolated indigenous groups with this in mind a no-o Zone was declared down here in 1999 with the intention of stopping the expansion of extractive Industries however as is often the case much of this has been disrespected two oil roads have carved their way through the national park the Maxis Road goes from up here all the way into the buffer zone of the no-o area which breaks with the original purpose
of said buffer zone it damages the rainforest but above all it endangers the few people that still live there and then there is the alar Road AA is actually a perjorative for wani meaning naked man so the name of the road should tell you all you need to know this road is even worse than the maxos because since it was built in the 1980s it has led to uncontrolled settlements that Year bye is eating into the primary Forest around the national park and transforming it into cattle pasture oil infrastructure and monoculture plantations and our land is here at the end of a smaller Road which branches off from the oil road to meet the current border of the national park we are far
enough from the nearest oil pipe to have some hope that maybe it won't reach us and just in the right place where cow pastures and cacao plantations meets the pristine rainforest that is left so it seems to us that this is exactly the right place to try to make a difference I traveled to the Amazon with Adriana and Thiago two of our biologists with olle from Ry science who is a rope access genius who likes to climb tall trees and get himself into all sorts of trouble and with Julia my girlfriend turned full-time filmmaker for this occasion and on the way we met with Freddy and went to the land together by both stepping on the landine with the right foot for good luck oh this is crazy Jenna how does it
feel I have no words it's insane yeah and here we are now it's uh time to get to work well a lot of the initial work was already done by Freddy He restored one of the houses so that we could use it as a base and I must say it felt wonderful to have a solid roof over our heads with the heavy Amazonian thunderstorm that welcomed us to the rain so the first step to properly understand what's going on in our piece of land is to try and map it with the Drone which is why uh Thiago over here is uh getting ready to send the drone on a mission to um at least get a sort of an initial survey of the land uh to see if it matches with the maps that we have just jungle that keeps on going it's crazy and going this is a
clearing is that the one you were saying yeah no it's not that it's a little further down the river as usual it was immediately interesting to look at things from higher up it's just a better perspective from up there but the key bit of work was to take more than 1,000 photos to create this super detailed map of the land then using the Pix 4D software it was easy to figure out the land cover of each area and we found out that about 86.1% of the property is mature rainforest 7.7% are the cacao plantations and clear Cuts in early stages of succession 4.1% is the grass or the degraded cow pasture and 2.1% corresponds to the roads and the various houses we then printed out this map and
sat down together with Freddy and crucially also our neighbor haime that has lived here for more than two decades and this was really useful to complete the based on the historic use of the land we have identified 17 distinct areas and this will be really useful to monitor the stages of succession and to better understand how the forest recovers we've added all the maps and relevant information to a report that all of you who are M Earth members can download in your account I'll also use this map in the coming videos as we explore the area in more depth and as we uncover the wildlife that lives here including a species of mammal that we believe has never been filmed before which is pretty
exciting but there's potential to do a lot more than simply buying up bits of the Amazon we view our project area as the whole Forest we want to try to find a multiplier for our impact which is why we are working with Freddy to get some more economic activity to the area we have a few ideas Brewing but the current thinking is not the land and the houses here should be used by volunteers to bring some value to the local community that they could serve as a base for researchers and students to document and show why the rainforest is worth protecting and crucially to use the land for a smallscale tourism Venture that can bring some initial money to the area as we continue to find ways to bring economic value to this
forest and protect what is left of this amazing ecosystem and the perfect example of this is our neighbor Heime we hired him as the guy to show us around every nuke and cranny of this place and he was really dedicated and hardworking and I think he actually had fun running around the forest with some Gringos who got excited about every creature that they saw and did silly things like climbing super tall trees and putting cameras in the canopy we will hopefully be able to work with him and others like him for years to come so that something sustainable and longterm can be set up here so as usual a huge thank you to our Moss Earth members you're truly the only thing that makes this
project and all our other projects possible and if you're not yet a member but you would like to support our work then please consider becoming one at moss. Earth again that is moss. Earth the link in the description or in a pinned comment down below and if this is a really big step for you right now to support our projects financially then please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel every bit help it really advances our projects meaningfully as well and it's absolutely free and I know that only about 30% of you watching these videos are actually subscribed so it would be a huge step if all of you actually decided to subscribe but yeah this is the jungle this is our new
project and I'm super excited to show you all the animals that live here to show you the canopy and to tell you what our plans are here until next time cheers
