INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

I've followed Paul Rosolie's journey for years—from afar and via a screen, not yet in person. I find his storytelling captivating, his masculinity and adventurism infectious, and his spiritual passion for nature echoed in my own soul #1507948, #1508570

Across three appearances on Joe Rogan, another few on Lex Fridman (including one recorded directly in the Amazon), and another on Modern Wisdom, I've clocked some 25 hours with him over the years... and now another few hours with this 300-page book.

The book itself, Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World, out this year by Penguin, is well put together, incredibly vivid and personal. An on-the-ground account of a real-world conservationist's life: the successes and setbacks, the wonder and the despair.

I'm altogether impressed by him: He has this naturalist ethos wrapped in a spiritual, all-consuming, adventurous love for the jungle.I'm altogether impressed by him: He has this naturalist ethos wrapped in a spiritual, all-consuming, adventurous love for the jungle.

He looks good and he puts his money (and health and reputation) where his mouth is, so I appreciate his words a lot, even in the important ways in which I disagree with his ideological, anti-civilizational takes, voiced and implied.

To have some clarity in this pretty comprehensive account, I've split my remarks across two parts:

Part 1: The Journey of a Life: Personal Development and the Price Paid for Living Your Dream, where I'll discuss and recount Rosolie's life and the struggles of living fully for the dream that possesses you. Even though I was fairly familiar with Rosolie's stories and life trajectory, the book filled in some of the gaps I had in his past and some outstanding questions I always had: personal life, connection to India, and particularly the timeline — he first went to the Amazon in the early 2000s, but I only ever heard of him a few years ago. What gives?

In Part 2: The Economics of Forests, Property Rights, and Climate Change I turn to the more meaty, economic, controversial, and environmental/ecological meta-conversation that Rosolie frequently and expertly sidesteps. He talks about that approach a little in the book, learning in early interviews and TV appearances to stick to what he knows intimately — his journeys into the wild, what he's seen and done, what's happened on his river — not speculating or going off on larger specialized/scientific debates he's unsuited for.

The Journey of a Life: Personal Development and the Price Paid for Living Your DreamThe Journey of a Life: Personal Development and the Price Paid for Living Your Dream

Rosolie mostly stays away from the anti-human, world-is-dying, climate change and industrial society killing our planet stuff I have increasingly little patience for (#862261, #862916, #1270722). He might believe those things anyway and just being too PR wizz to talk about them on air; reading Junglekeepers I get the feeling that he embraces those beliefs (Jane Goodall is an idol of his…#1483141) but cleverly stays away from discussing them, knowing he'll reach a larger audience talking positively about their fight and the wonders of nature.

We can hold two thoughts in our minds at once.

“Extreme competence,” says Lex Fridman. “He’s good at surviving.” Judge a man for what he does and achieves, not what he may in the depth of his heart believe or, performatively around those he admires, claim to believe. Reading between the book's lines, I suspect that he’s more fascinated by and in adoration of the vastness of the natural world (coupled with an adventurous spirit and a hunger for knowing how things work and what he can do) than he is possessed by anti-human and eschatological convictions or the statist anti-economic undertones of much green beliefs.

He’s not soft, wishy-washy, or woke (at least to my knowledge, or in my idealization of him):

“How did we get so soft? That everyone’s worried about their little 401(k) or their feelings… go try!”“How did we get so soft? That everyone’s worried about their little 401(k) or their feelings… go try!”

In this first of two parts, I want to tell a beautiful story of perseverance, of personal development, of life challenges, of working diligently toward a small, sliver of a hopeful potential future. Rosolie is driven — compelled, really — by a relentless mission, unformulated for most of the story, and an insatiable love for nature, animals, and adventure.

I think this deep, nothing-else-matter passion is what’s so relatable. To give yourself entirely to nature. I see and feel this pull, too. And the enormous vastness of Amazonia (and Greenland ice, and Icelandic highlands, and snowy Alps) hold great power over me, too.

He and Chris Williamsson discussed this powerful graph:

In Junglekeepers we follow along his struggles, trying to find his way, torn between a standard life and marriage and family expectations, and the deep wild calling him elsewhere. He weaves a tale that’s a lifework, with all the horrible setbacks and depressions and broken relationships and potentials that accompany the stories of true greatness. Serendipity.

How close he was to dying, on multiple occasions, and failing, repeatedly; never really made it, becoming anywhere close to the conservation heroes he looked up to. Scraping by. For years, not knowing the confident and successful guy on worldwide podcasts he would once become.

This is not the kind of life you (are supposed to) lead.

I come from a good family. Italian immigrants who came to America and worked hard. New York City people. Brooklyn people. My grandfather was a cop, and my grandmother never needed to vocalize the pride she felt about his being a Marine in World War II or an officer in the NYPD. […] Her children were teachers, hospital administrators, and a successful lawyer. They had married other successful people. These are people who go to church on Sundays. Who stay together for holidays.

“Naturally,” Rosolie continues,

“they were concerned when one of their own began making pilgrimages to places they could barely pronounce”“they were concerned when one of their own began making pilgrimages to places they could barely pronounce”

Nobody ever knows that one's final destination is such success... <insert that quip about frozen bodies on Mt. Everest once being highly motivated people>

There was no way to convey to anyone back home the vastness of the wild, the size of the trees, the depth of the swamps, and the overwhelming diversity of what lurked in them. It was another world, and it was thrilling.

His first tiny success is devoid of credentialist backdrops. He had this one interview article in a conservation magazine, it "was something I could link in an email and that made me seem legitimate. It was the only credential I had, and I squeezed every last drop out of it." (p. 91)

And when he saw his credentialist superiors in action (scientists, PhDs, "real" researchers), they were not impressive, voluntarily “one trophic degree removed from the source of whatever magic powered this place.”

"I was already known for being on social media with my shirt off. What a show-off. Not a biologist. Just a sensationalist." (p. 131)"I was already known for being on social media with my shirt off. What a show-off. Not a biologist. Just a sensationalist." (p. 131)

He makes a realization later on, that so many of the people who worked with him over these twenty years were disingenuous, looking out for number one, out for virtue signaling. Rosolie felt shocked that the people he worked with, who were supposed to be good people, turned out to be anything but

They weren’t kind people helping us get closer to our dream as much as they were grabbing power for themselves. [We] were slowly plunged into a purgatory of confusion as people from other countries vied to take credit for the work we had put our lives into making real [...] Our experience and years of toil were being robbed every day. The world seemed like a vicious and unfair place where everyone was just trying to eat one another. (p. 208)

"The injustice was almost intolerable... It wasn’t supposed to be like this.""The injustice was almost intolerable... It wasn’t supposed to be like this."

When he gives up, at rock-fucking-bottom, his marriage in shambles, now well into his thirties with nothing but jungle scars and injuries to his name, it's painful to read. We, his readers, from the comfort of posterity, know that he'll make it... but he obviously doesn't:

Right around that "This is pointless" moment he's shoved into an online meeting with Dax Dasilva, Canadian tech-entrepreneur billionaire. Dasilva listens as Rosolie describes his life and his sliver of Amazonian paradise and what he wants to build. We learn from Rosolie's reminiscent words that his heart isn't in it... fine, yet another fatcat wanting to bask in our (non-)glory, associate themselves with something cool.

...and when the money comes in, they having funds to build and invest, hire people and pay themselves a salary! Incredible.

Finally, I want to close Part 1 with two writing twists that Rosolie (or his editors? Or collaborators? Whoever... they're total geniuses) employs in the first fifty pages of this powerful, personal, character-arc-like story. I don’t care if I spoil it…

They're so powerful and sudden that they felt like literal gut-punches when I read them.They're so powerful and sudden that they felt like literal gut-punches when I read them.

First, he describes the innocence of the early years, when he and his mentor/collaborator JJ are out playing in the jungle... learning, going further, exploring the wild. The anthropomorphism of this paragraph is beautiful, the twist a smack in your face:

Years passed in this way, with the stream as the center of our world, the church—the place of mariposas and symphonic birdsong, where the nights throbbed with frogs and crickets and the world was lush—and the canopy a towering ceiling of lofty leaves. (pp. 15-16)

Then one day they burned it down.

We arrived in the boats as we always did. Machetes and no shoes. But this time what we found was a hellscape. The great trees lay dying, their charred bodies smoking, their lifeless arms spread across the black earth.

As if I hadn't learned from that one literary technique, a few dozen pages later, I'm hit yet another time, so impactful that my stomach literally churned as the words on the page took on meaning in my brain:

Rosolie describes a guy, their neighbor's son, a kind and soft spirit — the sweetest sort of man, compassionate and nice. Quiet; "made children smile." He didn't want to go to town (= too noisy), he was content with his marginal life on the edge of the world, alone out in the woods:

His was a life lived so far from the madness of the world, all alone and quiet with the fish and the trees and the birds. He was found face down. Whoever shot him did so from behind. (pp. 54-55)

Junglekeepers is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, with tax-deductible donations, operating in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. Grab some merch from their online store, or donate—which I will with whatever scrappy lil sats this post may raise.