Staying Tender and Hopeful

He’s been dragged through the Amazon on the back of a giant anaconda, stood in seventy-foot flames trying to save burning animals, and slept on jungle floors for decades to protect a forest most of us will never see.

Conservationist and author Paul Rosolie joins Lee C. Camp to tell the extraordinary story of how a dyslexic kid from Brooklyn followed a calling into the Amazon rainforest — and gave his life to protecting it. From near-death encounters and viral moments to faith, sacrifice, and hope, this conversation explores what it truly takes to change the world and why the future of human flourishing is inseparable from the fate of the wild.

Key Ideas:

• Answer the Call Paul’s life shows how vocation often begins not with credentials, but with saying yes to the next faithful step placed before you.

• Love What You Protect Conservation, Paul argues, is not driven by ideology but by intimacy — knowing rivers, animals, and people well enough to fight for them.

• Stay Human in Crisis Facing ecological collapse without despair requires resisting cynicism and choosing hope as a disciplined, courageous act.

• Courage Is Costly Following a true calling often demands sacrifice — financial, relational, and personal — but meaning grows precisely in that cost.

• The World Is Connected The Amazon is not “out there”; it regulates climate, water, and life everywhere, binding New York, Bangalore, and the jungle canopy together.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Show Notes, Resources and Transcript⁠⁠ for abridged episode with Paul Rosolie

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No Small Endeavor: An award-winning podcast that asks what it means to live a good life. Through conversations with leading thinkers across theology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and the social sciences, we explore human flourishing, meaning and purpose, faith and culture, science and religion, virtue and character, community, and the practices that help shape a good life grounded in truth, beauty, and goodness.

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Host Lee C. Camp: Lee has worked as a professor of theology & ethics for more than 25 years, teaching and writing on topics of faith & politics, inter-religious dialog, and human flourishing at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy, and social sciences. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@leeccamp ⁠⁠⁠

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