JUNGLEKEEPER

Having spent more than 20 years working in the Peruvian Amazon, an adventurer and environmental activist cuts through lore—both overly romantic and catastrophizing.

Ten years after Rosolie’s debut Mother of God, the threat to the landscape and species of the Amazon rainforest remains dire. Since first making his way to the remote Madre de Dios region, the author has imagined and refined an ambitious goal of saving the Las Piedras River basin and safeguarding the biodiversity and wonder of a major tributary to the Amazon River. No matter how far his Junglekeepers organization may have come, both inspirationally and systematically, from the author’s “barefoot machete days” of exploring the wild with his friend, JJ, a member of the local Ese Eja Indigenous community, the Amazon offers up an endless supply of novel experiences and vantage points. Rosolie collects the wonder of his experiences, involving anacondas of record-breaking size, encounters with the mysterious, voluntarily isolated Mashco Piro tribe, and a climb to the top of the jungle’s canopy. The author also tracks the false starts and disappointments along the road to viral videos, millionaire funders, and luxury treehouses. Villains abound: the drastic logging and mining of the 20th century has given way to the more staggered destruction of gradually encroaching land grabs, forest “colonization” initiatives, and undercover narco-traffickers. Rosolie profoundly understands the necessity of seeing a place if one is to be moved to protect it, and he enlists his language powerfully in this mission with rich, poetic passages capturing the light of treetops at dawn, the darkness of untouched jungle at night, and the magnificence of confronting rarely seen species up close. His is an eloquent and valuable contribution to a growing demand for a more determined, less doomsday reaction to human-made climate change.

A call to confront today’s acute environmental threats with a combination of persistence, adventure, and awe.