A bold vision to rewild South America with Deli Saavedra

0:00This place went from zero percent possibilities to site a shower in two, three days to a hundred percent possibilities to see showers. It's changing the perception of the people because now the shower is not a problem, it's an opportunity. Welcome to another episode of Rewilding the World. I'm Ben Goldsmith and I've got my friend, Deli Salvedra here, the first person to come onto the podcast twice because Deli used to run Rewilding Spain and was involved in some extraordinarily large in European terms, Rewilding Projects on the Iberian Peninsula. Deli's left Rewilding Spain since we spoke and has gone to Latin America where he now works for Rewilding Argentina and is leading the truly immense extraordinary Jaguar Rivers Initiative. Deli, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast again. I'm so happy to see you and I'm so excited to talk. Jaguars on Rewilding in Latin America with you.

1:01Hi Ben, thanks for the invitation and first of all, congratulations because I think after maybe 60 episodes over a while in the world, now this has been a big success. I know that there are thousands of people that follow in the podcast and the different episodes and I'm super happy to be here. 60 chapters after. It's really kind of you, Deli and it's all because of guests like you that I've had on and we're approaching a million cumulative downloads we're not far away. So it's quite exciting. Deli, before we talk about Latin America, I just want to talk about our mutual friend Fernanda Moran who sadly passed away at New Year. Fernanda Moran was a titan of Rewilding, not just in Spain and Portugal, he came from Asturias in Northern Spain, but really across Europe because he pioneered the return of European bison in the Iberian Peninsula and found that when herds of bison were formed in these landscapes, they built ecosystems that were much more resilient to fire and much more abundant in terms of wildlife and so on. And it's just such a tragedy, such a loss for our movement,

2:01Fernando died unexpectedly at the age of 54, just after Christmas, he was full of plans and I've been really sad about it. Yeah, I think Spain is mourning the laws of one of the most effective survivors and I'm in thinking also because there was also I've been also quite affected for the last days and I was thinking why the success of Fernando? And I think part of it is because he was an outsider so he was not coming from the conservation. He was a countryside bet that discover the species get got in love with bison's and decided that he wanted to save them and he was like a fried train. I mean, he wouldn't be a stop and I think this is in part because he was an outsider. So when the big scientists and the well-known scientists or the conservative conservation is well said, no, no, we don't want that. So we want the status quo so the species that we already have and we don't want a new species and he just couldn't care less. And when the regional governors were putting problems to release bison in public land, he decided,

3:03okay, we will do it with private land owners and he was so good speaking with farmers, hunters, private land owners. And I think that is the reason that he could manage to bring those 150 bison. He helped a lot with the provalski horses first introduced in Spain. So I mean, it's really a great loss. Yeah, you say he was like a fried train to me, he seemed like a bison, a bit like Derek Gao who has been very similar to Fernando in restoring first water voles and then more recently European beavers and now European wild cats in Britain, he was an outsider and he came to manifest in a way the species that he loved. He was just such a tough guy and his heart was so big and he loved nature so much. I'd never forget being shown wild bison in Andalusia by Fernando and he had his two teenage kids with him who he loved so much and his big idea for the future was to restore wild, large herbivores across the European continent. He had projects in Macedonia and Bulgaria and other places was working with rerouting Europe and he said that this is what we're missing. We're missing these big bovines,

4:03these big equines in the landscape and I feel that his legacy must go on and we're gonna convene a call of interested parties and we're gonna do everything we can a group of us to make sure that we build upon Fernando's legacy. But I do encourage people to look up the work of Fernando Moran and God bless him. Delhi, before we talk about Latin America, I'd also love to get a little bit of an update on what's happening in rewilding Spain because you initiated these enormous projects in the Iberian Highlands and elsewhere and you're still well in touch with the team in Spain. Spain, for me, seems like the most exciting national rewilding proposition in all of Europe just on the count of the scale of these landscapes. How's it going there? Well, in fact, he's going very well and he's much connected what we were talking before. So because Fernando was part of this help to the team of rewilding Spain to make possible the reintroduction of the provaski horses that already happened in different herds. I think there are more than 50 or 60 animals right now. The first bison arrived to Iberian Highlands to use a huge rewilding area between Barcelona and Madrid

5:06and there's a lot of things going on with the natural-based economies of new businesses, new tourist opportunities for an area which is for the people that remember that chapter very long ago is as populated as Mongolia and has a lot of opportunities but a lot of challenges and I think rewilding Spain is doing an amazing job is creating now the brand is created. So before I mean, I invented Iberian Highlands term but now if you talk about Iberian Highlands in Spain or in Europe in the conservation circles everyone knows about this amazing area. So and this is part of the project to put a brand to the areas we want to protect because this is part of the story. So I would say that this is great, it's going very well and for anyone just go to the website of rewilding Spain and rewilding Europe and you can see how the progress is being achieved. Fantastic, Deli, what was it that made you decide to leave these enormous opportunities in Spain and go back to Latin America and to work again with the legacy of Chris and Doug Tompkins? Yeah, in fact, I just got a call

6:08from the director of rewilding Argentina, from Sofia, we were in contact for some time. And he said, look, I had this huge idea here but I mean, it's not possible, I can't just not do it. I mean, I don't have time, I don't have the team, I don't have the resources. So why don't you just come here to try to make this initiative? And I, well, I think at first I like adventures and I mean, a point with my children growing on and my as my wife, my wife also like to have some adventures. So we were in the point to say, okay, why not? Let's go to lift to Argentina and to lead this new initiative, which I think that it's an amazing thing to start. And first, at first, adventure, of course, and second, I think I'm a bit of a catalyst. I think I'm quite good and to bring people and organizations together to create new things and to create ambitious initiatives. I think this is what they do well. So I say, well, why not? So I'm here in Northern Argentina, living in Ibera, Wedlands for one year already. So just to give a little bit of the background,

7:08there's a fantastic book, which is called A Wild Idea, which tells the story of Doug Tompkins and his wife, Chris Tompkins, it's a beautiful love story as well. And Doug Tompkins built North Face, the clothing, outdoor clothing brand. And Chris Tompkins was working in Patagonia and the two of them went down to Latin America and they started establishing protected areas and they began working with governments. And I think they've protected something like 10 million acres, possibly 10 million hectares, they'll be able to clarify. And the legacy following the death of Doug is two organizations, rewilding Chile and rewilding Argentina. And they continue piecing landscapes together and creating these vast protected areas. You're working for one of those. You're working for rewilding Argentina and you're specifically leading the Jaguar River's initiative. So what is the initiative? What's the big idea, Delhi? So the Jaguar River's initiative, in fact, is coming from these ideas of Christine and Doug Tompkins. And especially after the reintroduction of the Jaguar

8:08in Ibera, Wadlands, where you think that Ibera Wadlands is a huge area. I mean, it's 800,000 hectares of Wadlands that they were partly bought by the Tompkins. Part was preserved by the government. And now it's a huge national park and provincial park, totaling up to 800,000 hectares. There is where the Jaguar's reintroduction project is being happening by rewilding Argentina. But already what happened, even in these huge areas, the Jaguars are starting to move. And one day, one Jaguar just crossed the river and went to Paraguay. All the others went to other places. So even when you're working with such a big animals, apex predators, even you big areas at some moment, they are small. And then you start to think, okay, we need corridors. We need those animals need to be able to move from one place to the other. And South America is not the pristine area that maybe some of us we have in our mind. There's already this connection of the big landscapes between them. And we thought, okay, what are the best corridors? The best corridors are the big rivers of the Paranabazing.

9:12Paranabazing, just to put a bit of geographical context. Paranabazing is the second river basin after the Amazon is big. And in fact, it's the fifth river basin in the world. Just to put a bit of dimensions here, you could say for Americans it's like two Alaska's, for the Australians is like Western Australia state. And for the Europeans, it's the size of the Mediterranean Sea. So this is a big place with main rivers. And we thought, okay, let's use the main rivers with these evocative names like Parana River, Iwasu, Paraguay, Vermejo. There are five main rivers. And use them as a river corridors, as a life corridors for the restoration and the protection and the connection of ecosystems in all these parts that we could say that is the heart of South America. Before you conceived of this idea, was the Jaguar present at all in these landscapes? Because I understand that it would be not back a lot and in fact extirpated from a bunch of places

10:12and then was proactively reintroduced in Argentina. They actually released them from boxes. What's the extent of the Jaguars range today and where is it to be found still? Very different situation all across the Paranabazing. So in the southern part, which is where we're talking about Argentina, it was extinct. It was extinct in all this part of the Ibera wildlands and it returned thanks to these translocations initiated by Tag and Christine Tonkins. And now there are after 70 years, the first animals were released. And now here in Ibera wildlands, there are more than 14 individuals. In other parts of another Argentina, there are a few animals that remain and that's the reason there's another introduction going on in Impenetrable National Park. But then if you go to the northern part of the Basin, to the Pantanal, or to the Southern Bolivia, there the Jower is still, they still have Bible population, this is still more or less abandoned, but of course with a lot of threats. And the Jaguars to be found all the way up through the northern part of Latin America

11:13and through Central America, even into the southern United States. I heard of a male Jaguar found in the southern part of Arizona or somewhere and there are some American conservationists that hope the Jaguar will pass through natural corridors up back into the United States, although of course the Trump border will maybe an issue in blocking that. Yeah, now the regional range of the Jaguar went from Patagonia, which is now extinct, all the way up to Arizona and to Southern the United States. So imagine, I mean the distribution was completely is a big range and now they're still living some pockets, but it's very important to have these corridors. Of course, I have to say that the name Jaguar Revers Initiative is evocating the Jaguar, but this is not an initiative for the Jaguar. This is a river corridor for our wildlife. In the sense that what we explain is that if you are helping Jaguars to move along these corridors, all the other species can, let's say, move beneath their legs, no? In this evocative way to say that if the Jaguar can move, giant notters, specaries and monkeys,

12:15they also are going to be able to move along the river corridors. So what are the big species that you're hoping to conserve through these rewilded corridors? What are the ones that I will have heard of? So you have the apex predators are maybe the Jaguar and the giant river otter, that is also there's a double translocation project, a reintroduction project also in Argentina is happening and in Patanal and Bolivia, there are still good populations. Those are the two like carnivores. If you go to the Andean slopes, you have the Andean bear and this is a dangerous species that we want also to bring back to Argentina. And then you have the bigger herbivores will be tapers, they will have peccaries, different species of peccaries and then monkeys that also move in different species of monkeys and then very important and usually because no one is explaining about them, the large fishes, the large fishes that are living in the rivers, in the big rivers. Like for example, the Dorado, very apex predators of those rivers, that we also need to work with them,

13:18they do amazing migrations, they have a very important role in the river ecosystems and of course, we also want to work and to protect those species. This episode of rewilding the world is very kindly brought to you by Uni, that's UNI, the world's first nature friendly line of luxury body care. We've all heard about the harm that sun cream does to coral reefs but it's not just sun cream and it's not just coral reefs. Well, Uni makes plastic free nature friendly essentials like shampoo, conditioner, hand wash and even natural deodorant, all full of nourishing ingredients such as seaweed kelp, aloe vera and olive oil. We've been loving our Uni products, but don't take it from me, here's my wife, Jemima. Yes, I really love them, they're such clean and nourishing products. The micro algae body oil is so good and really smells amazing. You can find Uni products at SpaceNK or at weareuni.com.

14:19When we think about these river systems in terms of the wider geography, I don't know the geography of Latin America very well, but I know you have the Amazon river basin, which is an enormous rainforest largest in the world. And then a little to the south and to the west, you then have the pantanal, which is, I think the world's largest inland wetland. And the pantanal is fed by the Paraná River. Yeah, the pantanal is fed by the Cerrado area, so the higher areas of the Cerrado country. And Cerrado is this habitat that is rapidly disappearing because of social plantation. And this is disappearing because of the crops. And that's bringing a huge problem for pantanal. But if we can draw a little bit in terms of podcasts where people cannot look at the map, but I encourage you to check them up. You have this Paraná basin is ending all the water from these five rivers that they was mentioning before goes all the way to a Atlantic ocean in Buenos Aires, in the Mar de La Plata. But it starts in big parts in the Andes or to the west, it starts in all the Andean slopes.

15:21And there you have a special rainforest that is called Jungas, the Cloud Forest of the Andes slopes, very important and very endangered. Then you have in the middle you have two main things. Of course you have mentioned the pantanal, the biggest wetland in the world. But then you have an area, huge area called Chaco Forest. This is the biggest dry forest in the world that is being also deforested and fragmented big time. There are some calculations that one actor per minute is lost of this forest. And then you go into the eastern part of this Paraná basin and you go to the Iwasu River, very famous because of the Iwasu Falls. And then you have the Matadlantica, the Atlantic Forest, the Atlantic Rain Forest. And this one has also disappeared. So there's less in Paraná, Paraná province in Brazil, for example, which is one of the places with more soil fields. Only 5% of this rainforest remains in parts of Argentina and in Paraguay less than 1% in Argentina, maybe a bit more.

16:22But it's almost all gone and we need to protect those remains. So you see that you have a huge area with different ecosystems from the pantanal to rainforest and one dry forest. So the competing land use is a combination of arable and ranching. And the arable presumably is harder to compete with because it's profitable, it's highly valuable. But you sent me this week to go and meet the ambassador of Paraguay in London. And I was in his office in South Kensington on Tuesday morning looking at maps. And I didn't know Paraguay at all and I learnt so much standing there with the ambassador. And what he described to me is that the landscape that represents the future Jaguar Rivers Initiative corridor is mostly low-value cattle ranching. So the opportunity there is either purchase of that land or working with those ranchers on a nature-centric approach and a restoration of those landscapes and income for them from nature tourism and perhaps nature-based carbon and other things. So to what extent to establish this Jaguar corridor network

17:24in Latin America are we trying to display activities such as ranching and arable and other things and how do you pound doing that? Now you're completely right. And I think that works for all the world. If you want to do a welding in the most profitable land, you have a hard time because it's just too expensive. If you try to buy one hectare of soya fields in the Alon de Iwasu River in Brazil, it's gonna cost you more than 14 $14,000 per hectare. I mean, this is something that no conservation organizations can pay. If you go to places with, let's say, more marginal land, like those grasslands or cattle ranching, then you have lower prices. This is one thing. And the second is that you have some kind of land use that is more related or it's more compatible with rewilding and with the bringing up populations and creating a corridor. Because of course, in a soya field, there's nothing. Only pesticides, everything is dead and this is creating huge problems.

18:24Old intensive agriculture is one of the biggest problems. But when you go to Pantanal, when you go to those places that the ambassador well-express explaining to you along the Paraguay River in Paraguay, those are cattle ranching areas, not really very much transformed. The cattle has been there for, at least in Pantanal for 400 years. So I think they are making, in fact, they are doing their job as a functional ecosystem. So they, all these ecosystems and grasslands need big air reverse, but we don't have them anymore. So they are doing this, this role. And if you have good practices, if these raw cattle ranches, they have good practices, what is good practices? What we need to agree with them as a minimum to have in the corridor? Well, don't shoot jowards because are eating your cattle and we can comb later to weather the options for that. Make a good management of your cattle, don't do overgrazing, for example, and then just take care, for example, of forest fires. That's no much more. And there are some ideas and some very nice initiatives already in Brazil where there's associations

19:27of cattle ranchers in Pantanal. There's one very famous, and I also encourage you to look at the website that is called 5P, because of the three, the five nice things that is bringing this association for the Pantanal. And this is alliance for the Pantanal, is already with land owners, is already covering in 400,000 hectares. And inside this land, they continue doing their economic activities, but they are not shooting jowards, they are making money on the couturies, they are protecting against forest fires, which are increasing a lot because of climate change. So you can have good practices in private land. It's interesting that you should say that, because the consensus has always been in Latin American context that cattle are bad, full stop. Whilst in Europe, we recognize that cattle can play a kind of proxy role in place of the wild herbivores that used to be there, the bison and the orcs and so on. And that's why in the north of England, for example, or my land in Somerset, farming with old English native breeds of cattle is a pretty good ecological proxy and it works.

20:28But you're saying that cattle can fulfill such a role in Latin America as well, in those landscapes alongside the Paraguay River. But you also wrote a piece recently on LinkedIn about feral water buffalo in the Brazilian Pantanal. So I'd be really interested to talk about that, because of course it's considered an invasive species, a feral species that shouldn't be there. But your argument in that article was that actually the buffalo might be fulfilling an important ecological role in the Pantanal wetland. Yeah, of course this is my personal opinion, because I'm going to explain later, we are these allions, this initiative is an alliance of four organizations and they have different views and different roles. So this is my personal opinion. In general, I think that you cannot, as ecologists or natural conservationists, you cannot say that the cows are good or are bad. It depends. Nothing in ecology is white or black. It's always, always is gray. And I think we need to look well. When are the cases where, for example, having these herbivores is good? And when are the cases where it's not good?

21:29With what a buffalo in Pantanal is a bit the same. So those are feral animals, they escape, they were put there. They're using them because it seems that they defend very well against jowers. So they put them like a protection for the cattle against jowers. But the reality is that many of them, then they go feral. And they are roaming around the properties or around the Pantanal. And that could be bad or good. It depends on probability density, it depends on the kind of habitats, but the reality for me, and I think this is like a theoretical speech for me is one. We are talking about very productive, subtropical grasslands. So you have a lot of grass. I mean, amazing biomass of grass that is growing every year. If you don't have anyone that is eating it, you can only do presky burnings, maybe, but this is something that you can do in the small areas, but it is very difficult to do it in a big landscape. Or second, what is going to happen with this biomass?

22:30If you are very good as a five-fighters to suppress all the fires, this biomass is just piling up for the next season. So at the end, when all the conditions are bad, and this happened in 2019 in Pantanal, it happened in 2024 in Bolivia, then you have this amazingly vast forest fires that are burning hundreds of thousands of hectares, and this is anchilling billions of animals. So if we don't want that, we need to put some tools. And I think this kind of livestock in this extensive way that has been roaming there for 400 years, especially in Pantanal, I think this is a good idea. And I cannot agree with the people that just say that the cows are bad, because they are not coming from America, but they are coming from Eurasia. We could also are, for example, not talking about cattle, but another considered invasive species, which is the horse. We could consider that the horse was born, according to the experts, was born and was evolved in South America. Then those horses moved from South America to Eurasia, and when the men entered through varying shade

23:31and conquer the American continent, and the start to kill all the big animals, they killed the horses. So when people say, oh no, the horses have been living here only for 500 years, I would arc that they've been here for 500 years, they were not here for 4,000, but all the way for millions of years, until 5,000 years ago, the horses were here. So it's a matter of the scale and the scope that you're talking about, and I prefer always to have a conversation when we talk about grace, not black and white. Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything you just said, Daly, and I just wrote a sub-stack about Pablo Escobar's hippos in Colombia, and I made the same argument that perhaps this isn't just a standard situation of an invasive species which needs removing, perhaps they are fulfilling an ancient ecological role. There was a giant capybara, a hundred times bigger than the one that exists today, which was a riparian creature that did this grazing and this opening up of the wetlands and this fertilization of the water, exactly like hippos do. And so my personal view is that the hippos should not only stay

24:33in Colombia, but that fresh DNA should be added because there is a DNA bottleneck issue there. There were just one male and three females at the outset and now there's about 200 hippos. So I think these are very interesting discussions, similar discussions around mustangs and burrows in the southwestern United States, discussions around camels. There's more than one million camels, Dramedian camels living in the outback of Australia and they've got soft feet and they behave similarly perhaps to some of the giant musculpial herbivores that were wiped out by humans millennia ago. So in terms of the Jaguar River's initiative, what's the overarching strategy? On the one hand, you have this effort to persuade private landowners who have got marginal farmland that they can do better economically as well as having more fulfilled lives and souls by restoring nature on their land and co-existing with some of these carnivores the Jaguars in particular. And on the other hand, you've got potentially land purchase, that his excellency, the ambassador to Paraguay told me that there's one particularly large block of land on the Paraguayan part of the future corridor

25:35that is up for sale, who would buy it? How does that work? Is that that's basically Doug and Chris Tompkins approach? Yeah, so there, I mean, we can say that our toolbox as an initiative has a wider rate of conservation tools. So one, of course, is by a land to secure the wildlife corridors, but you cannot do this in a large scale, it's very difficult, it's very expensive. If you go to marginal lands, for example, the land you are considering now in the Paraguayan pantanal, yeah, maybe it's possible, there is a huge land of 130,000 hectares that is for sale and it could be about, but you cannot do this in the long run or in the big areas. Second thing is that not all the land you can buy in the Paranabasin, there are huge areas which are indigenous land and indigenous opa-blig land, but with indigenous land is very important, it is especially important in Bolivia, where what we do is to support the indigenous autonomous to effectively secure the protected areas. So they have the right by constitutions to declare protected areas, it is their land.

26:35In fact, the one that we are working with and that our partner in Bolivia is working with, they just declare a few years ago one protected area of 1.2 million hectares, that's fantastic, but they don't have the means, they don't have the money to secure this land, so we need to help them. Then another tool that we've been talking about is to introduce in the top predators, like a jowler or a giant otter, and many other species. And then of course, always creating products to boost natural basic business. And maybe let me explain, because we have like, we're working like in four pillars, because again, the question could be, I mean, you are talking about 2.5 million square kilometers, you cannot work at this scale, so where are you starting? And the answer for that is the four pillars that we envisage, and those are the first are the arcs. The arcs are those large, well-conserved areas that anchor biodiversity. And that's going to be the foundation of the Jowler Resinitiative. We are starting to work in those areas,

27:35especially the ones that have been national, the ones that are in the border between two countries, because we need to let's say break those borders, and make that those areas, they have no threats, and they have complete and functional ecosystems, and if they don't have it right now, in some areas like Pantanaloges, they have all the species, if they don't have them, we need to introduce them. And this is the case, the successful case, of where I'm living now, from Ibera, where more than 10 different species of wildlife, especially kids on species, where we're introduced, and now you have functional ecosystem, and not only that, but these arcs now become an arc in our strategy is able to give, for example, jowlers to other areas, because the population of jowlers that was introduced, and the introduction started only in 2021, but now they are more than 40 animals, and they are in the position to start to give animals to others. So that would be the arcs. Then around those arcs, statistically, we want to work on what we call buffer zones.

28:37Those are the surrounding the arcs, and they are very important to reduce the threats to the arcs. This is where the people live, and I'm always saying, we are not going to protect nature if we don't have happy local communities surrounding the area. And the surrounding communities in those buffer zones, we need to help them to have regenerative economics. If they are not thriving, those local communities are not thriving, they just enter into the parks, and we see this every day, they enter to a slasjan bar, they enter to hand-protected species, et cetera, et cetera. So we need that those are having economic opportunities, that they can work on ecotouries or many other things, and also in those buffer zones, we need to improve coexistence. If there are still problems, because jowlers are eating your sheep and your goats, or your cattle, you are not going to work with us. You are not going to like this project, so we need to work a lot on coexistence. So we have the arts, we have the buffer zones surrounding the arcs, then we have the stepping stones, what happened? Those big arcs are far away

29:39along the river from one to the other. So we need some kind of, let's say, services stations, a statistical located areas that shorten those gaps between the arcs. This can be managed by third parties. This is, for example, we're trying to do in Paraguay, so that every 150 kilometers of Paraguay river, there's one of those areas. They don't need to be very big for the South American standards. It could be something like 50,000 hectares, where the species, while they're walking along the rivers, they find refuge, they find food, or a site for reproduction. So there would be those service stations. And then finally, we have the rivers and the food planes, and the rivers and food planes, why are important? Because if you count all these five rivers, we are talking about a total amount of 7,000 kilometers of rivers. And this is, again, something huge for us. And there, we cannot work in all these 7,000 kilometers, but we are trying to make monitoring the threats

30:40with early warnings. You know that now you have global forest watch, you have systems for fire, rapid fire detection. We are trying to get early warnings, even when one tree is distracted from the forest, and also work a lot with organizations that are part of these alliance to advocate and to have protection policies, so to work also on legislation for the rivers. So you see that it's quite a complex and difficult initiative, which is also initiative. Initiative is not a five-year project. We think that this is going to last at least 20 years, maybe more. How are the governments reacting to this? Because you're working in four countries, right? Working in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguayan, Bolivia. How do those governments respond to the plan? And are they providing any kind of assistance, financial or other? The idea, so the initiative is an alliance of NGOs in Argentina, Rewalding Argentina, in Brazil is on safari, very well-equipped working in cohabitation

31:40between hours and people in the pantanal. Then you have Nativa in Bolivia, which is working mainly with indigenous autonomies. And then in Paraguay, Fundación Moises Bertoni, which they have been working a lot with companies. And we need those very big companies, agricultural, cattle ranching, rice producers, the hydro way. So all these companies will need on board. So I think the four organizations are really have different skills, and we are well-equipped for this initiative. What about the governments? The governments know they are aware, because we've been before the launch in New York in September, we were explaining to all the national governments and regional governments, our plans and our ideas. They agree, they like the ideas. But for the moment, they are not, in this part of the world, they are not really put in money. In fact, it's very difficult to get money from the government. So we work with philanthropy mainly,

32:41but they agree with these policies, and they want to somehow at least, at least if we can have this political support, it's going to be good enough to continue our plans. Well, Delhi, I mean, it's massive. Give me a sense once again of the scale of this project. And what are the distances? What are the acreages? Well, I can tell you that, for example, I'm living on a national park, on a protected area of 800,000 hectares of wetlands. Then I can tell you also, for example, when I go to Pantanal, I drive for almost 2,000 kilometers. And then I go to Pantanal, in some of the areas, you need to get by boat six, seven, eight hours to get to some of the places we're working with. And when I do what they call the tour, which is I go to the main arcs of the four countries, just to work with my colleagues and the four organizations, I just do a total of 5,000 kilometers by the land with the four-wheel drive, along a starting in Argentina, crossing to Brazil, going to Pantanal, then crossing to Cross, in all Bolivia and back to Argentina in the Andes.

33:44So, yeah, it's a huge area. I mean, this would be one of the greatest wild places on Earth, it already is, but connecting it all up like that, is truly a grand vision. And I dream of visiting, I've never been, and I'd like to see the Pantanal. What's it like? What is the Pantanal like to visit Delhi? Describe to me for a moment how it is in the Pantanal. Well, for me, I was writing the other day that for, but they were asking me, okay, so what is the place in the world that you like most? And this is always a very difficult question. And I say, well, my recent, because it's recent, my recent best place in the world, is a place called Cerro de Amolar. And this is in the middle of the Pantanal, right in the border between Brazil and Bolivia. So imagine this vast Pantanal, this vast wetlands where you are on the boat, just upstream Paraguay River for, I don't know, five, six hours. And suddenly, in the middle of this plane, there's like a huge mountain range that is appearing like a stranded boat in the middle of the plane.

34:44And you have this dry forest and you have the macos and all these birds calling and you enter into the dry forest. But when you go down, you go back again to the wetland, the marshes, you can even do a snorkeling in some very, very nice areas with clear waters. And you see lots of fishes. You see those rays, I didn't know that they were raised in the middle of Pantanal. So it's truly amazing and a condas, for example. So it's, for me, Pantanal is one of the best places in the world, really. And the best place to see Jaguars, which is the emblem of your big rewarding project. And the best place to see Jaguars is probably, they're both places in Pantanal. I like very much the one that is called Cayman because this is where on safari started the adventure where the founder and director of on safari say, well, I've been in Africa doing safaris and I can see leopards at three meters from the four-wheel drive, from the vehicle. Why can't I do that with a jowler? It would be a way to make the land owners earn money

35:48with a jowler and not shoot them because they're eating cattle. And he started 14 years ago to habituate those animals. And habituation doesn't mean that they are pets. The only thing that means habituation, like we see in Africa, is that the animals just don't care about the vehicle, about the car. They just are doing, they continue doing their life. And what is amazing in the last decade, this place that is called Cayman, and there's a lodge and you can visit and you can do safaris, this place went from zero percent possibilities to sight a jowler in two, three days to a hundred percent possibilities to see jowlers. So if you go there and you stay in that lodge for a couple of days, you're going to see, statistically, you're going to see at least one jowler, maybe two, three, four, five. So it's really amazing. It's a big change that is changing the perception of the people because now the jowler is not a problem, is an opportunity. Delhi, you're such a hero. You're one of the most important rewilders on the planet. And this is really a story of such hope, such optimism.

36:48I can't wait to visit you there. And I will, I'll bring my small tribe of children as well. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast again. And God bless Fernando Moran. Yeah, thank you to you. And I think it's very nice that we have made this a small homage to Fernando Moran, very important person. The world needs more Delhi, Sarvedras. It's just so exciting what he's doing in South America. It's not a part of the world that I know very well, but I certainly hope to visit him there at some point. If you enjoyed the episode, please do give us a like, give us a share on whatever platform you used to get your podcast. Post the link to this show to whatever notice boards or social groups you're part of if you think people will like it. It's growing all the time and that's thanks to you. Next time we're going to Croatia to talk to Maria Kronajic, who's responsible for rewilding Europe's massive project

37:52in the Velabit Mountains, one of Europe's last and greatest wildernesses. Maria is an inspiration and her story is one that you've really got to hear.