What the people of the Amazon know that you don’t

Now, I'm an ethnobotanist.

That's a scientist who works in the rain forest

to document how people use local plants.

I've been doing this for a long time,

and I want to tell you,

these people know these forests

and these medicinal treasures

better than we do and
better than we ever will.

But also, these cultures,

these indigenous cultures,

are disappearing much faster

than the forests themselves,

and the greatest and
most endangered species

in the Amazon rain forest

is not the jaguar,

it's not the harpy eagle,

it's the isolated and uncontacted tribes.

Now four years, I injured my foot

in a climbing accident

and I went to the doctor.

She gave me heat,

she gave me cold, Aspirin,

narcotic painkillers, anti-inflammatories,

cortisone shots.

It didn't work.

Several months later,

I was in the northeast Amazon,

walked into a village,

and the shaman said, "You're limping."

And I'll never forget
this as long as I live.

He looked me in the face and he said,

"Take off your shoe

and give me your machete."

(Laughter)

He walked over to a palm tree

and carved off a fern,

threw it in the fire,

applied it to my foot,

threw it in a pond of water,

and had me drink the tea.

The pain disappeared for seven months.

When it came back, I went
to see the shaman again.

He gave me the same treatment,

and I've been cured for three years now.

Who would you rather be treated by?

(Applause)

Now make no mistake, Western medicine

is the most successful system of healing

ever devised,

but there's plenty of holes in it.

Where's the cure for breast cancer?

Where's the cure for schizophrenia?

Where's the cure for acid reflux?

Where's the cure for insomnia?

The fact is that these people

can sometimes, sometimes, sometimes

cure things we cannot.

Here you see a medicine man
in the northeast Amazon

treating Leishmaniasis,

a really nasty protozoal disease

that afflicts 12 million
people around the world.

Western treatment are
injections of antimony.

They're painful, they're expensive,

and they're probably
not good for your heart.

It's a heavy metal.

This man cures it with

three plants from the Amazon rain forest.

This is the magic frog.

My colleague, the late
great Loren McIntyre,

discoverer of the source lake of Amazon,

Laguna McIntyre in the Peruvian Andes,

was lost on the Peru-Brazil border

about 30 years ago.

He was rescued by a group of isolated

Indians called the Matses.

They beckoned for him to follow them

into the forest, which he did.

There, they took out palm leaf baskets.

There, they took out these
green monkey frogs

— These are big suckers,
they're like this —

and they began licking them.

It turns out, they're
highly hallucinogenic.

McIntyre wrote about this, and it was read

by the editor of High Times Magazine.

You see, the ethnobotanists have friends

in all sorts of strange cultures.

This guy decided he would go down

to the Amazon and give it a whirl,

or give it a lick, and he did,

and he wrote,

"My blood pressure went through the roof,

I lost full control of
my bodily functions,

I passed out in a heap,

I woke up in a hammock six hours later,

felt like God for two days.

(Laughter)

An Italian chemist read this and said,

"I'm not really interested
in the theological aspects

of the green monkey frog.

What's this about the
change in blood presure?

Now, this is an Italian chemist

who's working on a new treatment
for high blood pressure

based on peptides in the skin

of the green monkey frog,

and other scientists are looking

at a cure for drug-resistant staph aureus.

How ironic, if these isolated Indians

and their magic frog

prove to be one of the cures.

Here's an Ayahuasca shaman

in the northwest Amazon, in
the middle of a yage ceremony.

I took him to Los Angeles

to meet a foundation officer

looking for support

for moneys to protect their culture.

This fellow looked at the
medicine man, and he said,

"You didn't go to medical school, did you"

The shaman said, "No, I did not."

He said, "Well, then what can
you know about healing?"

The shaman looked at him and he said,

"You know what? If you have an infection,

go to a doctor,"

but he said, "but many human afflictions

are disease of the heart,

the mind, and the spirit.

Western medicine can't touch those.

I cure them."

(Applause)

But all is not rosy in learning

from nature about new medicines.

This is a viper from Brazil,

the venom of which was studied at
the Universidade de São Paulo here.

It was later developed

into ace inhibitors.

This is a frontline treatment
for hypertension.

Hypertension kills over 10 percent

of all deaths on the planet everyday.

This is a four billion dollar industry

based on venom from a Brazilian snake,

and the Brazilians did not get a nickel.

This is not an acceptable way

of doing business.

The rain forest has been called

the greatest expression of life on Earth.

There's a saying in Suriname

that I dearly love:

"The rain forests hold answers

to questions we have yet to ask."

But as you all know,
it's rapidly disappearing,

here in Brazil, in the Amazon,

around the world.

I took this picture from a small plane

flying over the eastern border
of the Xingu indigenous reserve

in the state of Mato Grosso
to the northwest of here.

The top half of the picture,

you see where the Indians live.

The line through the middle

is the eastern border of the reserve.

Top half Indians, bottom half white guys.

Top half wonder drugs,

bottom half just a bunch
of skinny-ass cows.

Top half carbon sequestered

in the forest where it belongs,

bottom half carbon in the atmosphere

where it's driving climate change.

In fact, the number two cause

of carbon being released
into the atmosphere

is forest destruction.

But in talking about destruction,

it's important to keep in mind

that the Amazon is the mightiest

landscape of all.

It's a place of beauty and wonder.

The biggest anteater in the world

lives in the rain forest,

tips the scale at 90 pounds.

The goliath bird-eating spider

is the world's largest spider.

It's found in the Amazon as well.

The harpy eagle wingspan

is over seven feet.

And the black cayman.

These monsters can tip the scale

at over half a ton.

They're known to be man-eaters.

The anaconda, the largest snake,

the capybara, the largest rodent.

A specimen from here in Brazil

tipped the scale at 201 pounds.

Let's visit where these creatures live,

the northeast Amazon,

home to the Akuriyo tribe.

Uncontacted peoples

hold a mystical and iconic role

in our imagination.

These are the people who know nature best.

These are the people who truly live

in total harmony with nature.

By our standards, some would
dismiss these people as primitive.

They don't know how to make fire,

or they didn't when they
were first contacted,

but they know the forest

far better than we do.

The Akuriyos have 35 words for honey,

and other Indians look up to them

as being the true masters

of the emerald realm.

Here you see the face of my friend Ponay.

When I was a teenager rocking out

to the Rolling Stones in my
hometown of New Orleans,

Ponay was a forest normad

roaming the jungles of
the northeast Amazon

in a small band,

looking for game,

looking for medicinal plants,

looking for a wife

in other small nomadic bands.

But it's people like these

that know things that we don't,

and they have lots of lessons

to teach us.

However, if you go into most

of the forests of the Amazon,

there are no indigenous peoples.

This is what you find:

rock carvings which indigenous peoples,

uncontacted peoples, used to sharpen

the edge of the stone axe.

These cultures that once danced,

made love, sang to the gods,

worshipped the forest,

all that's left is an imprint in stone,

as you see here.

Let's move to the western Amazon,

which is really the epicenter
of isolated peoples.

Each of these dots represents

a small, uncontacted tribe,

and the big reveal today is

we believe there are 14 or 15 isolated groups

in the Columbian Amazon alone.

Why are these people isolated?

They know we exist, they
know there's an outside world.

This is a form of resistance.

They have chosen to remain isolated,

and I think it is their
human right to remain so.

Why are these the tribes
that hide from man?

Here's why. Obviously some of this

was set off in 1492,

but at the turn of the last century

was the rubber trade.

The demand for natural rubber,

which came from the Amazon,

set off the botanical
equivalent of a gold rush.

Rubber for bicycle tires,

rubber for automobile tires,

rubber for zeppelins.

It was a mad race to get that rubber,

and the man on the left, Julio Arana,

is one of the true thugs of the story.

His people, his company,

and other companies like them

killed, massacred, tortured,

butchered Indians like the Witotos you see

on the right hand side of the slide.

Even today, when people
come out of the forest,

the story seldom has a happy ending.

These are Nukaks. They
were contacted in the '80s.

Within a year, everybody over 40 was dead.

And remember, these
are preliterate societies.

The elders are the libraries.

Every time a shaman dies,

it's as if a library has been burned down.

They have been forced off their lands.

The drug traffickers have taken over

the Nukak lands,

and the Nukaks live as beggars

in public parks in eastern Colombia.

From the Nukak lands, I want to take you

to the southwest, to the most spectacular

landscape in the world:

Chiribiquete National Park.

It was surrounded by three isolated tribes

and thanks to the Colombian government

and Colombian colleagues,

it has now expanded.

It's bigger than the state of Maryland.

It is a treasure trove
of botanical diversity.

It was first explored botanically in 1943

by my mentor, Richard Schultes,

seen here atop the Bell Mountain,

the sacred mountains of the Carajás?

And let me show you
what it looks like today.

Flying over Chiribiquete,

realize that these lost world
mountains are still lost.

No scientist has been atop them.

In fact, nobody has been
atop the Bell Mountain

since Schultes in '43,

and we'll end up here
with the Bell Mountain

just to the east of the picture.

Let me show you what it looks like today.

Not only is this a treasure
trove of botanical diversity,

not only is it home to
three isolated tribes,

but it's the greatest treasure trove

of pre-Colombian art in the world:

over 200,000 paintings.

The Dutch scientist Thomas van der Hammen

described this as the Sistine Chapel

of the Amazon rain forest.

But move from Chiribiquete
down to the southeast,

again in the Colombian Amazon.

Remember, the Colombian Amazon

is bigger than New England.

The Amazon's a big forest,

and Brazil's got a big part of it,

but not all of it.

Moving down to these two national parks,

Cahuinari and Puré

in the Colombian Amazon

— that's the Brazilian
border to the right —

it's home to several groups

of isolated and uncontacted peoples.

To the trained eye, you
can look at the roofs

of these maloccas, these longhouses,

and see that there's cultural diversity.

These are, in fact, different tribes.

As isolated as these areas are,

let me show you how the outside world

is crowding in.

Here we see trade and transport
increased in Putamayo.

With the diminishment of
the Civil War in Colombia,

the outside world is showing up.

To the north, we have illegal gold mining,

also from the east, from Brazil.

There's increased hunting and fishing

for commercial purposes.

We see illegal logging
come in from the south,

and drug runners are trying to move

through the park and get into Brazil.

This, in the past, is why you didn't mess

with isolated Indians,

and if it looks like this
picture is out of focus

because it was taken
in a hurry, here's why.

(Laughter)

This looks like — (Applause)

This looks like a hangar
from the Brazilian Amazon.

This is an art exhibit in Havana, Cuba.

A group called Los Carpinteros.

This is their perception
of why you shouldn't

mess with uncontacted Indians.

But the world is changing.

These are Mascoteros
on the Brazil-Peru border

who stumbled out of the jungle

because they were essentially chased out

by drug runners and timber people,

and in Peru, there's
a very nasty business.

It's called human safaris.