Save the rainforest!

Willie Smits restores a rainforest

Within a year, Rainforest Crunch was on the shelves.

It may be the next rainforest, in terms of pharmaceuticals.

I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest.

This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest, from above.

This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest, from above.

So I said, Well, you've got to make a rainforest ice cream.

It's a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rainforest.

Brazil's 1988 Constitution declares its Amazonian forest, to be a national heritage area and any use would be subject to the law.

So we had our own miniature rainforest, a private beach with a coral reef.

Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land.

During a Ministerial Meeting held in Manaus, Brazil, in September 2004, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the eight Amazonian countries welcomed this programme.

The Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia is an international project to expand understanding of the climatological, ecological, biogeochemical and hydrological functions of the Amazonian region.

Conscious of the negative ecological impact of the hurricane on the coastal region and the inland rainforest,

You're talking about biodensities and biodiversity, again, higher than the rainforest that just springs back to life.

Jodi Lomask, and her wonderful troupe Capacitor, joined me in the canopy in my rainforest site in Costa Rica.

The Eastern Hemlock forest is being considered in some ways the last fragments of primeval rainforest east of the Mississippi River.

And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it.

Many rainforest countries have united in recent years to suggest the establishment of a rainforest conservation fund by the rich countries, to pay impoverished small farmers a small amount of money to preserve the forest. A well designed fund would slow or stop deforestation, preserve biodiversity, and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide the burning of cleared forests.

And what happened then was the sponsor gave revenues to Ecosia, and Ecosia is giving 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project.

In January 2005, her Government had established a national institute for the development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro Peruvian peoples, which directed national policies on indigenous peoples and coordinated implementation of programmes relating to their rights and development.

Or for that matter, if you look at the genetic level, 60 percent of medicines were prospected, were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef.

Meanwhile, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees continued to help repatriate Rwandan refugees from the rainforest of the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And by linking these together, we could have 90 percent of the site as a rainforest, instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees and bits of road around buildings.

It may be tempting to dismiss the Enola patent as an aberration, but there are hundreds of examples of such biopiracy. Mexican beans, South Asian basmati rice, Bolivian quinoa, Amazonian ayahuasca, Indian chickpeas, Peruvian nuña beans, Andean maca all have been subject to predatory intellectual property claims.

And what these images are you'll see them at the start of the slide show there's only about four images but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through, and even today, individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before, including, in the summer of 2006, Hyperion, the world's tallest tree.

By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, biologist Willie Smits has found a way to re grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems.

The difference with Ecosia though is that, in Ecosia's case, it draws the revenues in the same way, but it allocates 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon.

A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships.

And in a place where we thought no life at all, we find more life, we think, and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest, which tells us that we don't know much about this planet at all.

Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected entirely protected in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park.

In this context, I should like to highlight the initiative led by Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea of creating a Rainforest Coalition to protect all forests and ensure payment for the environmental services that they provide us.

We found a global atmospheric watchtower there, in the middle of the rainforest, and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower, to look for isoprene, and of course, other things while we were there.

We found a global atmospheric watchtower there, in the middle of the rainforest, and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower, to look for isoprene, and of course, other things while we were there.

This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me.

The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea Highlands and the Amazon Rainforest.

In 4 minutes, atmospheric chemist Rachel Pike provides a glimpse of the massive scientific effort behind the bold headlines on climate change, with her team one of thousands who contributed taking a risky flight over the rainforest in pursuit of data on a key molecule.

Others emphasize a buildup of combustible materials. The nature of such fuel accumulations runs the gamut, including swamp drainage in Indonesia, rainforest destruction in Amazonia, self thickening woods in American wildlands as a result of fire exclusion, and everywhere the intrusion of urban sprawl and fire prone houses.

After cutting down a swath of rainforest, soils are often quickly leached of their nutrients so that they cannot sustain crops or nutritious grasses for livestock. As a result, the new pasture land or farmland is soon abandoned, with no prospect for regeneration of the original forest and its unique ecosystems.

Led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, a group of developing countries, a new rainforest coalition has now come forward with an innovative proposal, not only offering to commit to greenhouse gas limits, but also showing how this can be done in a way that will promote their development.

I came directly here from the deep, deep tropical rainforest in Ecuador, where I was out you could only get there by a plane with indigenous people with paint on their faces and parrot feathers on their headdresses, where these people are fighting to try and keep the oil companies, and keep the roads, out of their forests.

Finally, the Bush administration must ratify the Kyoto Protocol, in order to allow both global firms and Bolivian community entrepreneurs to create yet more rainforest ranches and other creative initiatives that reduce poverty, harbor biodiversity, and cool a warming world. Perhaps Bolivia is indeed rich in a way that could benefit all of us well into the future.

And what was so amazing to me, and what fits right in with what we're all talking about here at TED, is that there, right in the middle of this rainforest, was some solar panels the first in that part of Ecuador and that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women wouldn't have to go down.