Episode 1 I Bought a Rainforest

When he was seven, Charlie was obsessed with kingfishers.

When he was 13, just looking at animals wasn't enough,

and he was compelled to take pictures of them.

So it's hardly surprising

that Charlie became a wildlife photographer,

and his job has taken him to the most remote corners of the planet.

He often says that the world

is easier to understand through the lens of a camera,

but if you've been to the places Charlie's been,

you can't escape one simple fact.

Time is running out for our world.

I didn't want to sit around and spend my life being

depressed about the environment, not doing anything about it.

So I thought, right, if I can do my bit,

at least I know in my life I've done my bit, however small that is.

Charlie wanted to make a difference

so he did something that sounds crazy.

He went to Peru to buy a rainforest.

It makes you realise how important this place is.

To know that there's still people in there that have got

no contact with the outside world.

To protect the forest, Charlie needed to stop the illegal loggers,

ranchers and gold miners from cutting it down.

But the more time he spent with local people,

the deeper and deeper he got drawn into their lives.

You forget all the problems, all the environmental stuff,

and you just get fixed on getting some gold out of it.

There are those that say it's already too late,

that human beings have wrecked the planet,

but if we're all going down,

Charlie's going down fighting.

It's estimated that the Amazon is home to a quarter

of every land-based species on the planet.

And yet we've studied less than 1% of this ancient rainforest.

It's stood for more than 20 million years,

but if we continue to destroy it at the current rate,

it will all be gone in less than 200.

But the most staggering fact about the Amazon is that we've been

hearing for so long that it needs protection that we just don't care.

Or at least we don't care enough to do anything about it.

I got a phone call one day from my mate in Peru,

and he just said to me, out of the blue,

"Do you want to buy some rainforest?"

And really, without even thinking about it, I just said, "Yeah."

So I've gone and bought 100 acres of forest.

Well, me and your mum have bought it.

Why did you just buy it when you've never seen it?

That's a good question. It's a perfect question.

I didn't really tell Philippa immediately, I just went ahead

and did it and subsequently, she has gone to great lengths

to point out all the gaping holes in my knowledge of the place

and my trust with people.

I knew what he was going to do from the moment he started even mumbling

about it, I knew where it was headed and I knew why he needed to do it.

We all just need him to go there, see it, and then just come home.

Charlie has flown to Cusco,

the last big city in Peru before the Western Amazon basin.

His land is still a day's drive away but before he gets to see it,

Charlie has to pay £6,000 for his 100 acres of rainforest.

I've done it!

I just bought a piece of Amazon.

This road is hilarious.

We haven't stopped going up now for about two hours.

It's just on the other side of this hill.

The problem is this hill is the Andes

and it seems to be going on forever.

And the thing is, I'll get there

and it'll just look like all the other forest, but it'll be my bit!

Of course, you have to be pretty well off to entertain

the idea of trying to save a rainforest.

Conservation is a luxury mainly enjoyed by the rich.

And let's not forget that in Britain we've never been

shy of using our resources.

After all, we've cut down most of our trees,

killed half of the wildlife and poisoned the sea.

But sometimes we have to draw a line.

And for Charlie that line is Manu National Park.

The thing about Manu is that, of all the rainforests in the world,

it is the best one, and it's the most biodiverse place on Earth.

Some of the stats about it are just mind-blowing.

To think that in one National Park

that's about half the size of Switzerland,

you can have 10% of all the bird species in the world.

That's what we're dealing with here.

Although it's a protected area,

Manu is under attack from illegal loggers.

But to get into the park, they have to go through Charlie's land

which is strategically placed

at the end of the only road for miles around,

and one of the reasons he bought it was to find a way to stop people

smuggling valuable hardwoods out of the forest.

Blimey, that's it! It's a shame it's pitch black, isn't it?

But before he gets to grips with the issues facing this corner

of Manu, Charlie wants to see exactly what he's bought.

Oh, this is beautiful.

When you think of the Amazon, South America, all of that,

that's what I'm thinking of - a place like this.

Camp is just there and there's a little trail coming down.

I need to get the machete on it, walk down to here.

Look at that, there's the bath! This is my bathroom, then.

It's got to be.

Beautiful.

Someone's cut this trail within the last couple of months.

This looks nice but it's not. This is knackered forest.

This is all just crappy grass, bamboo.

All these things that grow fast once the forest has been cut down.

But the diversity here's unbelievable.

I'm probably being stalked by about three or four different

species of mosquito at the moment.

And there's cracking birdlife here, insect life's unbelievable.

It's still important stuff, secondary forest, it's still packed with life.

And you know, now I'm here to protect it,

it's only going to get better, isn't it?

Who knows what we could end up with?

At the end of the first day, Charlie's only explored

a third of his land, but it's clear that the big trees were taken

long ago, which is why the loggers have moved into Manu.

But the park authorities are so underfunded

that there's little they can do about it.

There are only 26 guards to patrol 17,000 square kilometres.

So Charlie's taking matters into his own hands.

I bought the land because I wanted to do some good.

So the idea now is,

I stop illegal loggers getting into the National Park and logging it.

There has to be rules, there has to be regulation,

there has to be decent protection for Manu National Park.

It is so important, not just in Peru, but to the world.

I know it's only a sign with some words written on it

but it kind of makes it official now.

It says, "Don't mess around with my bit of forest, not on my watch."

Charlie is going to stay in the Amazon for the next few months

to explore all the threats facing the rainforest,

and to try to find ways to protect his land and the National Park.

I'm already covered in bites,

probably cos I've got a tent full of biting flies.

Charlie's job often takes him to remote places,

but he rarely contacts his family.

If you get homesick in the middle of the rainforest,

you'd soon go mad with the bugs and the heat.

The experience of walking into a rainforest is bizarre.

It's claustrophobic, it's hot, it's deeply uncomfortable.

And you can't escape it,

there's no way of escaping the feeling you get from it.

And then you're basically a walking salt cellar,

there's very little salt in the Amazon.

So the moment you walk in and start sweating,

everything wants a piece of the action.

So you get covered with insects all trying to get salt off you.

And then also adding to that, you've got all these other insects,

the biting ones that are trying to get blood out of you.

So you very quickly become a valuable part of the ecosystem,

part of the organism.

Green hell, they call it. That's what it is.

For anyone used to western comforts, living in the rainforest

is like living in a kettle.

A kettle full of mosquitoes,

but because it's so rammed with life,

the Amazon is Charlie's favourite place on Earth.

Where's it gone? Where's it gone?

Stay there. Stay there.

Stay there. No.

That's the problem with this.

You think, "Oh, yeah, I'll just document all the insects I find,"

but they reckon there could be half a million.

I could be doing this for the next 500 years.

I got you. I got him, I got him.

So far, Charlie's seen little more than grass and bamboo

in his patch of forest, but over the border in Manu,

it's estimated that every acre contains

nearly three times more native trees than the whole of Great Britain.

so it's not just of interest to the people wanting to cut it down,

it also attracts the occasional scientist.

Thanks, Rob, don't mind me!

Rob Williams is a conservation biologist, and Charlie's nabbed him

to explore the area of his land closest to the National Park.

There's a hut there, look.

Hola!

Hola!

They've got some chain saw blades.

What's all this, Rob?

That's coca.

What, cocaine?

This is the coca leaf that, yeah, that cocaine's made from.

Blimey.

Someone's got a habit, haven't they?

-Shall we go in?

-Yeah.

Hmm. That's not good.

That's really weird. That's spooky.

I'm wandering around someone's house.

Well, there's some forest that's been cut down.

I think this explains the coca leaves in the house.

Why?

Looks like coca plants to me. Shall we go and have a look?

If that's coca plants, do we really want to be walking up here?

Shouldn't we be a bit...scared?

You've got quite a production here, Charlie.

Bloody hell, look at it.

Someone's been here recently pruning and harvesting...

-How recently?

-I mean, within days.

I mean, he's eaten his pineapple and then lain down on this

sheet of plastic on nice, soft, cut vegetation.

That's just blown a massive hole in the rainforest bubble.

Coca leaves have been a sacred part of South American culture

for thousands of years.

But Peru is now the largest exporter of cocaine in the world,

and Charlie's ragged patch of land is the reality

of what's happening to the rainforest.

According to the park guards, Charlie doesn't just have

a field of coca to worry about.

Somebody has written a reply to his sign on the border of his land.

Do you think it's a genuine threat?

What a massive cock-up.

It looks like Charlie has been terribly naive.

It's rumoured that the guy who owned the land before him is a local crook

called Tito, who did time for processing cocaine.

The guards suspect that Tito and his son Elias

are one of the families logging the National Park,

and that they are still using the hut on Charlie's land as a base.

It's not somewhere that I feel particularly safe any more,

and it worries me that at any moment a load of guys on motorbikes

could turn up with guns and do me over and rob me,

and that's not really what I had in mind when I bought it.

I thought, "Jesus, probably the best purchase I ever made."

I don't know what to do with it, I'm a bit down on it, but, you know,

it's better than a load of crap sitting around my house doing nothing.

Oh, I've bitten off way more than I can chew.

I'm useless at doing anything but taking photos.

After two weeks, Charlie has had enough,

and decides he needs to get away from the problems on his land.

He's not the first Westerner with deep pockets to try

and save a rainforest, but fortunately for Charlie,

not all of them have been scared off by the local people.

A day's boat journey east is the Creese Foundation,

a research centre that specialises in trying to understand

how to restore damaged rainforest just like Charlie's.

He couldn't have come to a better place for advice,

but Charlie's more interested in photographing the animals

being studied by head biologist, Andy Whitworth.

Ah, look at his little face.

Have you got the anti-venom?

I'd rather have it quickly.

A poisonous one, Andy?

An arboreal pit viper. One of the most dangerous ones out here.

This is enough maybe for the first couple of hours

until you would get somebody to a hospital.

When you say "couple of hours to get someone to a hospital,"

do you mean the hospital that's 12 hours away in Cusco?

Yeah, but we can stop at a small medical facility on the way.

All right, let's go.

Do you get nervous when you're doing this?

Yeah, most definitely.

I never get complacent, every time I handle a snake, I'm switched on.

Oh, he's beautiful.

Isn't he just?

He's quite a mean little guy, he's going to be angry,

he's going to want to strike.

OK. So you see how he's S-ing now?

He's ready like a spring... he wants to go.

Can he reach me from here?

He's full body length, so... 70 centimetres, 80 centimetres.

This guy's heavily haemotoxic,

so if you take a bite from him, you're going to bleed

from your gums, from your nose, from your eyes.

Sides are toxic as well so it will start to eat away at the flesh.

So your skin falls off?

Yeah, pretty much.

You wouldn't think something so small would be so deadly.

Ah, come on, little fella, back on the hook.

See, he's rattling his tail, he's getting really angry now.

This is the tricky bit, you've just got to watch your fingers.

Oh, that's not good. Don't come up there!

Hey.

Ah, OK.

Well done, sir.

Cheers.

Oh, it was lovely. What a beautiful animal.

I'm a bit disappointed I didn't get

to use my anti-venom for the first time.

The foundation own an area 20 times larger than Charlie's

that was once little more than a wasteland,

but now it's grown back to create a healthy secondary rainforest.

Look, he's right here, he's right here.

He's just jumped onto that stem.

This would have all been logged,

there would have been agriculture here, coffee.

So you can see it can regenerate given time.

So there is hope.

To see what wildlife might return to his land if given the chance,

Charlie has asked Andy to take him to an animal hotspot.

-Andy, how far to go?

-An hour?

Oh, only another hour and we've only been going 25 minutes.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-We'll start getting to the hill soon.

Oh, good, we've got a hill. Fantastic.

There's very little salt in the Amazon,

so mineral-rich areas are the forest equivalent of an oasis

and attract animals from miles around.

You know we're getting close now.

You can start seeing trails all over the place.

This is getting a bit heavy.

So this is where the salts must be coming from,

out of these rocks, and as the water's running off,

it's gathering here in this pool.

So you see the animals, they come in from all different directions,

and you see them shoving their head right in here.

-Are they eating this?

-Yeah.

I think they're one of the most important things in the Western Amazon basin.

Without them, the animals wouldn't exist.

They need the salt so badly, and without these clay-licks,

they just wouldn't have it in their diet at all.

The plants pretty much take everything up,

so all the nutrients, everything in the forest is stored in the canopy,

so the soil and everything down here is really poor,

and then you suddenly get these little pockets of salt

and it's like gold to the animals.

It's what they need.

Camera traps automatically take photos of anything

that passes in front of the lens.

But it's often more luck than judgment guessing where

the animals are going to be.

Pretend you're a tapir.

Lovely. You do a good tapir there.

Many large mammals also use human trails,

as they are the easiest way through the tangled undergrowth.

Yeah, beautiful. There, I reckon.

I think there are eight species of wildcats in Manu,

so could get any of them, but they're really hard to see,

and to get shots of.

I've done this for months in the past

and only ever got one shot of them.

OK, cat man.

You even snarled!

Andy's great. He's just a young, very enthusiastic,

incredibly knowledgeable bloke, who's just deeply in love with the forest.

Wandering around it with him is an education.

Nice tree there.

Yeah.

This is a cedar, Charlie.

So, if you planted a few of these on your land at the moment,

these cedars, this forest here is pretty much what your area

-should look like in sort of 30 years' time.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-This is beautiful.

The real problem you'll have now, Charlie,

is when you start getting the trees like this and they start

getting to a decent size, you're going to get people coming in.

They're going to want these trees then.

So, it's a sort of vicious circle, isn't it?

You make it better, create a nice forest,

everyone's going to want to kill it and chop it down again.

You've got to be nuts to do something like that.

I think I'm stupid, is what I am.

Yeah, it's true.

I'm still reeling about the fact that I bought the worst bit

in the most dangerous place in the area and everyone is laughing at me.

And I don't really want people knowing I'm there

and knowing what I'm doing cos I don't want to get shot or robbed,

or any of that stuff. And I'm vulnerable out there.

I'm vulnerable camping in that place.

It'll be a tough job.

Charlie's not going to enjoy everything that he's got

ahead of him, because he's going to have to change.

It's the local people that are going to protect it,

not Charlie in 30 years' time.

He's not still going to want to stand on that land

and live in a tent and look after things, so...

The imperialistic idea of buying up rainforest in a developing country

from the West isn't the solution.

Charlie can't save that land,

until he convinces local people why it's important to do it.

And that's the challenge.

Andy.

What have you seen there, Charlie?

Fresh jag?

-Ah, yeah, that's jag.

-That's fresh?

Yeah, you can see how wide that is.

Have we got a camera trap up here?

Yep, we got a camera trap not very far,

but that's definitely a jaguar pug.

It could be watching us now, couldn't it?

And if it is watching us now, what are the chances of us seeing it?

Should you expect to see snakes in the path?

One of the biggest ones I ever found was

just down the trail down here, about another 300 metres on.

It was a big female bushmaster, stretched

right across the trail about two and a half metres.

And a bushmaster would kill you, would it?

Oh, God, yeah.

We'll swap round and you can go at the front in a bit.

Ah! Oh, my God!

Oh!

-There's my camera trap.

-Look at how wide that is.

How nervous am I?

Nothing. Nothing.

Ah! It's a puma!

You got it!

-Look at the size...big male.

-Let me see, let me see.

-Check him out.

Ohhh... You're kidding.

The camera traps reveal far more wildlife than Charlie

expected to see in just a few days.

But only ten years ago, this area was hunted out

and there were practically no animals at all.

The thing that's hit me more than anything else

is the speed at which this forest has recovered.

-Whoa!

-He's staring at it.

And that made me realise actually that really in a fairly short

period of time I could get my bit of forest back up to

being, you know, decent, good land, full of wildlife, full of diversity.

So that's the main chunk of inspiration I've taken out of this place.

Charlie's like a child in a way,

like, he has this inner passion for nature,

and he wants to photograph it.

That's his way of telling the world about why something's so special.

But for him to buy a rainforest is completely off the cuff.

Who knows what he was thinking when he did it but...er...

..yeah, he's going to learn a few things.

The idea that we should create buffer zones

around national parks to protect the most precious

forests in the Amazon

was first suggested in the 1970s.

But conservationists now agree that it can't work

unless the local communities are in charge.

Unfortunately, Charlie's too scared

to go back to his land and face the people he thinks are logging Manu.

And yet wherever he goes, he sees more reasons to protect the park.

Slow down, slow down.

Just keep the boat at that speed.

This is unbelievable.

Just there are four uncontacted Indian women.

My heart is going completely crazy.

Everyone keep dead still.

They're shouting at us,

I've got no idea what they're saying, obviously.

WOMEN CALL

I never expected to...to see them.

You hear about them but you just never expect to see them.

As far as anyone knows, there are seven indigenous tribes

living in voluntary isolation throughout Manu, but combined

they would number less than a few thousand individuals.

Though they are rarely seen and often aggressively defend

their decision to be left alone,

our world is not totally alien to the tribes.

Missionaries and illegal loggers have been known to

lure them from the forest with gifts of cooking pots and machetes.

But any contact risks spreading disease

and could wipe them out forever.

It's just absolutely unbelievable... what I've just seen.

You know what, we are... 30 miles from my land,

and there's uncontacted women on the beach.

That's incredible, isn't it?

The uncontacted tribes have good reason to stay hidden.

Between 1850 and 1930, entire populations were

enslaved by American and European rubber barons.

A quarter of a million indigenous people died throughout the Amazon

so that we could have tyres and condoms.

But many of the tribes did not return to the forest,

and two days from Charlie's land is the indigenous community of Belgica.

Over the past hundred years,

the Yine have embraced many aspects of the industrialised world,

but they still see the rainforest as their home.

To support the community, the Yine have a licence to harvest

a limited number of trees from their tribal homeland,

a 500-square-kilometre primary rainforest.

The Yine manage their forest sustainably

and allow each logged area to recover

but, controversially, their quota

permits them to cut down 90% of their big-leaf mahogany,

a threatened species

that is protected in some South American countries.

The mahogany is a rare beast now and I've never seen one before.

The sad and depressing thing is that that particular mahogany tree

is marked, and it's getting cut down in 24 hours' time.

Last year, the Yine cut down nine of the 150

mahogany trees on their land.

But this forest is their only resource

and big-leaf mahogany their most valuable asset.

Each tree is worth £3,500 to the Yine.

And by the time it's sold as luxury furniture in Britain and America,

it could be worth 20 times as much.

But Charlie wants to know

what the environmental cost is of cutting down one of these giants.

And he's asked Andy to gather a group of biologists to catalogue

every species that depend on this single tree for their survival.

A bio-blast is sort of a funky name for...

HE LAUGHS

..some scientists looking at stuff!

You take something like the mahogany tree

and you very quickly assess how many different species there are.

So they can then have a picture of how much life

this thing's sustaining.

I'm going to photograph everything that we can get,

so that we've got a picture record of it,

not just a written record of a Latin name.

The thing about the rainforest is,

it's very rare to actually see anything in it.

You get buzzed around by a load of insects

but to take insects from it,

and stick them on white,

you get a really good chance to really have a look at them,

completely removed from the massive tangle of confusing greenery.

And it's then that you start to see

the incredible complexity of all the life here.

There are actual little characters in this. Little lives.

The place is just buzzing.

You know, there's probably three or four species of bee

just flying around me now.

But until you actually get one of those, stick it on white

and have a decent look at it, you can't really relate to it.

Just taking it off that wing and then this one should just come off.

You can see almost all of these birds look the same.

But they'll all have a slightly different niche,

different things that they feed on.

A tree like the mahogany that we've got here provides all these

different levels, these different homes, all the different food,

and when you remove those trees you remove the complexity of the forest.

It completely disappears.

And so you end up with only the very common species, the generalists,

and you lose the guys like this one that's more uncommon,

and probably a real specialist,

and probably relies on the tree that we're working on.

It's not comfortable, is it?

There's an absolutely stunning butterfly

that I've never seen before.

Don't you move.

-Yes! I've got it!

-You got it?

I've got it.

Now what are you going to do?

-No!

-You've lost it!

No...

The dirt and bees is just so painful.

Time passes slowly for the big trees

and this mahogany could be anywhere between 100 and 400 years old.

When it's cut down, fast-growing plants will rush in

and scramble toward the light,

and as the forest loses some of its oldest inhabitants,

it's inevitable that it also loses the specialist plants and animals

that rely on the extra sunlight that the upper branches provide.

Up on these top branches on the far part

there's some beautiful pink flowers.

I see them. Yeah, I can just see them up there.

Really nice orchid.

Every time I open my eyes, I get bees in there.

Ahhh, God!

HE SPLUTTERS AND LAUGHS

It's just crazy! It's crazy! Oh, my God!

How can something so incredible just be so awful at the same time?!

Ever get the feeling the tree is trying to say something?

-Yeah, "Leave me alone."

-Yeah.

God knows how many creatures I actually catalogued today

and how many I sat and photographed.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's depressing not just cos the thing's coming down,

but all these little lives that I looked at today,

everything's changing for them as well.

So, you're not just cutting down a tree,

you're destroying a whole ecosystem, a whole world.

It's totally bizarre to me

there should be a demand for this

because people think it looks nice.

There's no reason on Earth

anyone in Britain needs anything made from mahogany.

Yet, we're still importing

more mahogany than most other countries in the world.

-Oh, he's nice.

-Yeah, found this...

-Nice, mate.

-Grab him.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

Amazing.

This thing that we've got in the box is not something to mess about with.

It's a wandering spider.

It's the one spider in South America that you could potentially die from.

SIGHING AND CHUCKLING

Oi... That was on my finger.

-It's on the ground?

-Yeah.

All right, let's try again.

-Did we get any in the high traps?

-Yeah.

Jenny just told me that there's 36 butterfly species that we've found.

We don't have, we have similar.

-We don't have it?

-No.

So it's a new species... Excellent.

In the whole of Britain, there are seven native species of amphibian.

Around one tree in the Amazon, the team found 21.

In total, they found 204 different species in just 24 hours.

Some are potentially new to science

and may not exist anywhere else on Earth.

But there's one species that depends on this tree

that Charlie didn't think to photograph.

I suppose the thing that gets me is, I've watched since I was a kid

and been taught at school all about the Amazon

and rainforest destruction and logging

and all these environmental problems.

You know, I'm 40 now and those problems haven't gone away,

it's all still happening.

We had awareness in the '70s of what was happening to the Amazon.

Bugger all's changed, has it?

HAMMER STRIKES NAIL

An hour. Over 100 years gone in an hour.

That's all I can think.

People can have nice tables...

..coffins.

Lucky them, eh?

Nothing at all...says to me this is the fault of the community.

It's not their fault, they've got to survive. This is their land.

I can't...I cannot understand why people...

HIS VOICE CRACKS

..why people need to buy mahogany in the first place.

But it's not really about blame, is it?

It's about...trying to sort it out so that it doesn't have to happen.

But they've got to survive,

but I don't believe this is the way.

When I embarked on this project, I thought it would be much more simple

and I knew the answers, and actually,

the more I understand it, the less I understand it.

Because it's a very complex situation,

but...I feel like at least I'm doing something.

Three square kilometres of rainforest are destroyed

every day in Peru

and up to 80% of the trees felled are cut down illegally.

The system is so corrupt that by the time timber leaves the sawmills,

it's almost impossible to know where it came from.

But Charlie didn't come to Peru to solve all of the problems facing

the Amazon - he wanted to protect one corner of Manu National Park.

For the last three weeks, he's avoided returning to his land,

but if he doesn't face up to the illegal loggers now,

he may as well go home.

Yeah, they must have been... What they do is they bring it all out

and they pile it up and load it onto a truck.

It's almost certain that the previous landowner, Tito,

and his son Elias have been moving wood through Charlie's land

and the tyre tracks lead to a field that he hasn't been to before.

This massive area was burnt to the ground years ago

and now it's being used to grow crops.

Look, and there, that rim of trees is national park.

That's been logged. That should be primary forest, there.

If Tito and Elias have been here recently,

then it's possible they're still in the area.

It's actually the worst situation we could be in.

Elias is illegally logging the park and the whole reason

I bought that land was to stop the national park getting logged.

So I'm a bit... I suppose I'm a bit annoyed.

Actually, I think the thing to do is go and meet him.

Fresh footprints, there.

That can't be more than half an hour old.

In this heat, it would have dried out by now.

It's weird, isn't it? Tracking a human.

Chain saw.

I think I hear a chain saw.

We've got to measure this one up.

I don't really want to...bust Elias,

illegally logging in the middle of nowhere.

Er...

It could actually be quite dangerous.

MECHANICAL WHINE IN DISTANCE

That a chain saw?

Yeah, a chain saw, and we're in the middle of nowhere

and we just walked half an hour up a small forest creek.

WHINING INTENSIFIES

Elias!

Elias!

Hola!

Hola!

-Hola.

-Hola.

-Como estas?

Hola, Elias.

Elias...hola.

Elias. Hola, Elias.

Elias. Como estas?

Hi.

You are a hard man to find.

We need to... We need to talk about the land.

You have somewhere to sit and chew your coca while we talk about it?

Si.

MAN SPEAKS SPANISH Tito?

Because the thing I don't want, Tito,

is I gave you lots of money for the land and then...

you have all the money

and then things just carry on the way they were when you owned it.

Now is the time I want to protect it so that it can get better.

But I'm not some rich gringo who's come here to throw people off land.

That's why we need to talk.

Don't know what to say to that.

Not 100% sure I believe it, but...anyway.

I need to think about it, Tito.

It's balancing...what...

I suppose, ultimately what I value more.

Do I value protecting Manu

more than I...value...a family?

And that's what is complex for me because...

..I probably value Manu more.

So I've really got to...

I've got to put my pity and sorrow for them aside

and get on with the job that needs doing.

That's my thought at the moment, and that means booting them out.

They need to leave the land.

Next time, Charlie's wife comes to Peru

and sees straightaway that he's making a terrible mistake.

I knew it wouldn't be easy.

I knew conservation isn't just about putting a fence round something

and leaving it, and Charlie won't be told anything.

Charlie is more determined than ever when he sees the devastation

caused by gold mining.

But it's not as easy as he'd hoped to get Elias off the land.

-You know, what sort of

-BLEEP

-would I be if did?

Go on an interactive journey with the Open University

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Go to...

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