In an attempt to stall Amazon deforestation, the Brazilian government is stepping up law enforcement and ranchers are experimenting with a new method to profit from their forest. Living on Earth’s Bruce Gellerman and Bobby Bascomb travel with federal agents who are outgunned and outnumbered on a raid of an illegal ranch. They also meet a carbon cowboy who wants to harness greed to stop deforestation.

In Brazil’s Southwest Amazon region, an ancient tribe turns to modern technology to save their forest, culture, and perhaps the planet’s climate. The Surui people have preserved their forest for millennia. Now they’ve devised a new management plan to protect it in the future. It calls for reforesting 18,000 acres cut by loggers and planting 1 million trees. Bruce Gellerman and Bobby Bascomb travel to the Surui reserve to see the tribe’s re-forestry project in action.

Brazil is the world’s 4th largest emitter of greenhouse gasses. The majority of those emissions are from the destruction of the Amazon forest. In the past loggers were mainly to blame but today cattle are driving deforestation, as 80 percent of the cleared land is converted to cow pasture. To preserve what’s left of the forest and stall climate change the United Nations has proposed a plan known as REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Living on Earth’s Bruce Gellerman and Bobby Bascomb travel to the Amazon to investigate the connection between cows and climate change.