Mother of God: One man’s journey to the uncharted depths of the Amazon rainforest

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It has been a journey filled with unfathomable beauty and brutality that sounds more like fiction than fact: lost tribes, floating forests, murdering bandit-loggers killed by arrows, insectivorous slashing giants, and a secret Eden..." It wasn't until I was pretty deep into the book that I realized that the author, Paul Rosolie, is the guy who tried to get swallowed by an anaconda on TV last year. That certainly undermined his credibility more than a little. Paul Rosolie: This is the most important question! Most people reading this book or this interview don’t live near a rainforest. But there are actually many ways to help from home, wherever you live.

The plummeting waterfalls at the edge of the Andes create the start of the greatest river system on earth. Photo courtesy of Paul Rosolie. A vividly written narrative of an amazingly diverse world still to be explored, whose destruction, as Rosolie wisely notes, would be a devastating loss for humanity." - Kirkus Paul Rosolie: I don’t think it is hopeless, but it also is not pretty. One of the main problems in my opinion is that this fight has a very weak mainstream identity. Where do we hear about the value of ecosystems, or about what wildlife contributes to our lives? We don’t, really. Each person assumes that wildlife and nature are ‘somewhere else’, but not around where they live. The problem is we are all living in it. Paul Rosolie's Mother of God is more than a thrilling adventure tale, it's an old-fashioned boy-meets-jungle love story. Be prepared to fall for it." - Mark Adams, author of Turn Right at Machu PichuSecrets of the Floating Forest—the day that seven people tried to restrain a ~22ft anaconda. But the snake overpowered us and we were forced to let go, or be dragged under. Note, she did not retaliate (which she definitely could have). Photo courtesy of Paul Rosolie.

He immersed himself in the life and work of the research station, befriending an Ese-Eja—an Amzonian native—who taught Rosolie jungle lore. Become something of a native himself, he explored and came to love the jungle, both in danger and in beauty. And one day, talking to an old native, he discovered that there was a remote place where no white man had set foot, and that, as it is sacred to the natives, they shunned it too. And so Rosolie determined to be the first to penetrate this unbelievably remote, indescribably dangerous, hauntingly beautiful place. His actual journey there is the heart of his narrative, and I leave the extraordinary details to him…. Paul Rosolie has travelled to the very heart of this wilderness in search of rare flora and fauna. His adventures - with giant anacondas, huge cayman, the mighty jaguar and one very small anteater - are by turn thrilling, terrifying and revelatory. Paul crosses some of the world's harshest terrain and encounters some of its most extreme weather conditions. He battles with life-threatening tropical diseases and the extreme mental challenges presented by being alone in the heart of the jungle. Mongabay: Your route into the world of conservation has been truly unique. For young people interested in conservation and rainforests in particular, what advice would you give? A vividly written narrative of an amazingly diverse world still to be explored, whose destruction, as Rosolie wisely notes, would be a devastating loss for humanity.Reading this book, it was hard for me to even imagine the world Rosolie describes, because it is so very different from the world most of us live in. In the very first chapter, Rosolie is alone in the jungle in the middle of a storm with large trees crashing to the jungle floor around him: "One hundred feet to my right a branch the size of a mature oak snapped and hit the earth with the force of a car crash. [...] Some of the true giants are so interlaced with vines and strangler tentacles that when they fall, their weight tears down almost an acre of jungle. There is no escape" (6). The area Rosolie explores is so dangerous and so remote "that the only reference to the river in literature is from the early 1900s, in the book Exploration Fawcett, which describes one team of explorers" (33). It's hard to imagine a terrain so dense and impenetrable that hundreds of years may pass before another human sees the same patch of land. Through his first book, Mother of God, Paul Rosolie takes us to places few others have ever been and where we are unlikely ever to ourselves travel. We encounter a wilderness the likes of which we had become convinced no longer existed, a real life Shangri la. And as we plunge deeper in Paul’s---and our---journey---our awe is matched by the tension of knowing that its very existence creates a risk that it will be destroyed. Almost an inevitability. It is here that we encounter the basis for Paul’s battle against this juggernaut. He is not traveling into the jungle to wrestle the largest snakes on earth; Paul and the snakes are on the same side. Rather his struggle is to overcome an even stronger force, the eco-destruction of modern times. And we realize from the strength of Paul’s will that he---and we—are strong enough and smart enough to prevail. We just need the kind of inspiration that Paul Rosolie lifts us with.