Speaker

Paul Rosolie

Paul Rosolie

Naturalist, explorer, author, and founder of Junglekeepers. Rosolie has spent roughly twenty years based in the western Amazon, primarily on the Las Piedras river in Peru, beginning at age eighteen with no academic credentials and no institutional backing — working alongside indigenous guides and communities, then gradually expanding into formal conservation. He is the author of Mother of God (HarperCollins, endorsed by Jane Goodall) and Jungle Keeper, and the driving public face of a ranger-and-land-acquisition programme that has placed 130,000 acres of intact rainforest under protected status.

Background

Rosolie describes failing out of high school, beginning unmatriculated college courses, and going to the Amazon with his friend JJ — a local indigenous expert with decades on the Las Piedras — out of ‘sheer love of it’ for nearly a decade before any institutional recognition followed. His practical training came from indigenous people in the field: tracking, fire-starting, anaconda handling, tree-climbing, caiman surveying. He has physically caught over 90 anacondas, including specimens approaching 20 feet, and has studied scarlet macaw ecology, butterfly populations, and old-growth canopy structure on the Las Piedras.

Jane Goodall’s decision to endorse an unpublished manuscript he handed her at an NYU talk in the early stages of his career was, in his telling, the single event that made Mother of God, Junglekeepers, and everything following possible. He models his own interactions with young conservationists on her example — stopping what he is doing and paying full attention.

The Junglekeepers model hires former loggers and gold miners as park rangers, using their local knowledge and existing community relationships to patrol the territory. Rangers receive better wages than extraction work pays; the programme funds ecological surveys, coordinates with the Peruvian National Police, and has recently been operating in active conflict with narco-traffickers who have moved into the basin. Both Rosolie and JJ have confirmed contract hits against them following a confrontation with narcos triggered by drone footage of a coca operation.

Core positions

  • The uncontacted tribes of the Amazon are not a relic or a curiosity: they are people who have chosen isolation, and their continued existence depends entirely on the survival of the intact forest that surrounds them.
  • Conservation at scale in remote Amazonia requires working with extractors — hiring them, understanding their economic constraints — not treating them as enemies to be expelled.
  • Hope is not optional in conservation work; apathy is the primary mechanism through which destruction wins. He describes Goodall as ‘in the hope business’ and takes that as a professional model.
  • The great ironwood trees of the Las Piedras are not simply large organisms: they are the structural pillars of a complete ecosystem and carry a spiritual significance for the uncontacted tribes that mirrors their ecological centrality.

In the wiki