Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World

Conservationist Rosolie (Mother of God) shares an energizing account of a lifetime spent protecting more than 100,000 acres of wilderness in Peru. A lover of nature since boyhood, the author signed up for an expedition to the Amazonian jungle at age 18. Seeing the devastation being wrought on the rainforest, particularly the new roads cropping up around the Trans-Amazonian highway, motivated him to dedicate his life to conservation. In 2014, he founded Junglekeepers, an organization that protects the Peruvian jungle by employing rangers to protect tracts of land. Here. Rosolie catalogs the dire threats posed by loggers and drug cartels who are slashing and burning their way through the rainforest, wreaking havoc on local ecosystems and the homes of Indigenous tribes. But he’s also refreshingly optimistic about the future, rejecting “antihuman” narratives that “we are a plague on the planet... and there’s nothing that can be done” by pointing to activists who have committed themselves to saving the environment. More personally, he uses the story of finding his own “calling”—a spiritual process in which he “lost my mind to find my path”—to advocate for the importance of following one’s dreams, even when it “requires cutting away most of what constitutes a normal life, parts of you that stitches can’t fix.” Honest yet hopeful, this will provide plenty of inspiration for budding conservationists. (Jan.)