Best New Thinking: Can the Amazon Be Saved?

02/13/25 • 32 min

New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast

Fernando Trujillo discusses his work to protect the Amazon’s freshwater basin during unprecedented drought and dangerously low river levels.

What happens in the Amazon is of planetary consequence. Its rainforests influence weather and rainfall around the world. Its rivers account for 1/4 of the available fresh water on earth. Its drainage basin is more than twice as large as that of the Congo River in Africa, which is the world's second-biggest. It harbors an estimated 10% of the planet's known lifeforms.
Our guest this week on New Thinking for a New World is Fernando Trujillo, Colombian marine biologist, 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize winner, and National Geographic Explorer of the Year. Trujillo, who is a global expert on river dolphins, leads a team that is working to keep the Amazon's freshwater basin alive. That is particularly important at a time when the region is suffering from record drought. River levels are low—in some cases historically so—and water temperatures are at intolerably high levels, especially if you're a fish. Continuing deforestation makes everything worse, of course.
Obviously, none of the consequences of the Amazon wasting away would be good for any of us. Can it be stopped? Listen as Trujillo explains his search to answer that question.
Please tell us what you think here.

This episode was originally published on December 11, 2024.

Fernando Trujillo discusses his work to protect the Amazon’s freshwater basin during unprecedented drought and dangerously low river levels.

This episode was originally published on December 11, 2024.

Previous Episode

Through a Viewfinder, Brightly

Photojournalist Fabio Bucciarelli shares what compels him to keep documenting the world’s most dangerous conflicts.

We live in a violent and complicated world. Wars, big and small, on every continent; mass migrations, often targeted for abuse by criminals as well as by governments who don't want the migrants; spreading cartel violence; increasingly disastrous consequences of climate change; pandemics and epidemics.

So much for the Age of Aquarius and the End of History!

If there is any good news in this litany of man's inhumanity to man, it's that most of us have not yet been inured to the brutality to which we are constantly exposed. We can still be appalled, angered, outraged—and we should be.

In large part, that's a tribute to the journalists who report the stories. The good ones don’t aim to shock, but to compel their audiences to reflect on the complexities, of the world as it actually exists.

Fabio Bucciarelli is that kind of journalist. He is an amazing freelance photographer and an even better storyteller, whose beat is some of the most dangerous places on Earth. Listen as he discusses what drives a world-class photojournalist to keep returning to the front lines in a conflicted world.

Next Episode

The Brave New World Is Here: Are We Ready?

Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education and Skills Director, shares insights from the Survey of Adult Skills, revealing its good, bad, and ugly.

We live in an increasingly complex technology-driven world. How we learn, how we create, how we make and grow things, how we interact with each other is being transformed by new technologies that themselves are rapidly evolving. In a perfect world, this technological transformation would lift all boats, make people smarter, healthier, more prosperous, maybe even wiser and more human.
This, obviously, is not that perfect world—in part because the unpleasant fact is that too many people in too many places lack the skills to cope with even the day-to-day realities of modern life.
That is the stark conclusion of a massive study of adult skills in 31 major countries across Europe, the Americas, and East Asia recently published by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Simply put: adult literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills are declining or stagnating almost everywhere. That’s the exact opposite of what our societies need.
No wonder so many people in so many places seem dissatisfied—seem to fear the future, not embrace it—and no wonder democracy seems to be in trouble.
Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, oversaw the organization's Survey of Adult Skills. In this conversation with host Alan Stoga, he explains the good, the bad, and the ugly of what his team of researchers discovered.
Do you have the skills you need to use technology, or are you being used by it? Please tell us what you think here.