The Ghost Forest: Bringing Wildlife Back from the Brink

About this episode

This episode explores the crisis of defaunation in the Amazon and the efforts to bring wildlife back through various conservation initiatives.

What is required to bring wildlife back to the Amazon, and can species that have vanished from depleted forests return? In this episode of Rewilding Amazonia, I investigate the crisis of defaunation: the slow, invisible emptying of the Amazon's wildlife that leaves forests standing but ecologically hollow. Scientists estimate that between 350,000 and 1.25 million animals are trafficked in Peru alone every year, with official figures capturing as little as three percent of the actual trade. Through conversations with three people working at very different points in the same crisis, I follow the full arc of wildlife recovery: from Magali Salinas of Amazon Shelter in Puerto Maldonado, who has spent twenty years rescuing and rehabilitating trafficked animals and releasing them into private forestry concessions when protected reserves can't be trusted, to Mario Haberfeld of Onçafari, whose team achieved the first ever successful rewilding of captive-raised jaguars in Brazil's Pantanal and has since expanded that work into the Amazon, to Brian Griffiths of One Planet and Georgetown University, whose research with the Maijuna Indigenous community in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon…

People in this episode

Host: Brooke Mitchell

Guests: Magali Salinas, Mario Haberfeld, Brian Griffiths

Topics covered

• wildlife recovery
• defaunation
• conservation
• rewilding
• Indigenous communities

Keywords

• defaunation
• wildlife trafficking
• Amazon rainforest
• conservation tools
• rewilding jaguars
• community-controlled management

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Amazon Shelter, Onçafari, One Planet, Georgetown University

Places: Peru, Amazon, Pantanal, northeastern Peruvian Amazon

More episodes of Rewildology

• The Long Game: Forging the Amazon's Next Chapter · June 9, 2026 · 33 min
• The New Economy: Making the Amazon Forest Worth More Standing · June 2, 2026 · 37 min
• Whose Forest? The Defenders of the Amazon · May 26, 2026 · 42 min
• Rivers in the Sky: The Amazon's Tipping Point, Sentinel Dolphins & the Geothermal Deep · May 19, 2026 · 34 min
• Seeing the Invisible: Tracking Destruction, Measuring Recovery · May 12, 2026 · 31 min
• The Severed Lifeline: Rebuilding a Fragmented Amazon · May 5, 2026 · 33 min