Help My Pal Save The Rain Forest? May 18, 2015May 18, 2015 He’s done amazing work, these past few decades, and deserves a nice 60th birthday present: In December of 1982, an American graduate student fleeing a South American civil war paid a bush pilot to drop him on the most remote airstrip in the rainforests of the northeast Amazon. There, Mark Plotkin was met by the Trio Indians, none of whom he knew and whose language he did not speak. . . . More than three decades later, Dr. Mark Plotkin is considered one of the most innovative and effective conservationists in the world today. And his partnership with the Trio people has endured and flourished, in conjunction with Mark’s organization, the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). . . . Together, Mark, ACT and the Trio tribe pioneered an approach to rainforest mapping that spread to 30 other tribes and resulted in the improved management and protection of more than 70 million acres of ancestral rainforest. (See more about this in an interview with Harvard Magazine.) Today, Mark and ACT focus much of their efforts on protecting the last of the uncontacted tribes and their rainforest. (You can learn more about this in Mark’s superb TED Talk.) It’s Dr. Mark Plotkin’s 60th Birthday! Help us raise $60,000 to create the first Shaman’s Encyclopedia in the Amazon. This document will become a template for tribal peoples throughout the Amazon, providing a tangible way to save oral shamanic wisdom in all of lowland South America. Lend Mark a hand? DRIVING A 1920 DODGE Get a load of this, if you like old cars — and mud. (Two minutes.) Thanks, Mel!