Crossing Continents Folgen

The Amazon rainforest is perhaps the world's greatest single environmental asset. For years the accepted wisdom has been that the remorseless tide of destruction there is unstoppable. Justin Rowlatt travels to Brazil to question this conventional account and finds that over the last five years rates of deforestation have plummeted by more than half. There is now serious and credible discussion about stopping deforestation completely and even replanting rainforest in deforested areas. He joins raids deep in the jungle with a team of armed Brazilian environment agents - and watches as a gang of loggers are caught in the act. He meets the farmers and ranchers who are now conserving rather than cutting the forest, including one of the world's biggest farmers, the man they call the King of Soya, Blairo Maggi. He meets an Indian tribe who have been enlisted as "smoke jumpers" - frontier firefighters protecting the forest from wild fires.He travels to the most remote state in Brazil to see a project which has created a viable market for the traditional industry of wild rubber tapping by building a condom factory in the middle of the jungle.Of course there is still enormous pressure on the forest. 2011 saw a spike in deforestation and a big debate about the management of the forest which has shown the continued power of the rural lobby. While Brazil's success in taming deforestation remains fragile Justin asks if there is cause for hope that the greatest ecosystem on the planet can be preserved. Producer: Keith Morris.

Sir Ernest Shackleton has a heroic place in the annals of Antarctic exploration, famously for his expedition on the aptly-named Endurance in 1914. He intended to cross over the Antarctic landmass. Instead, his ship became stuck in ice which eventually crushed it. Shackleton and his crew made a desperate voyage in three small boats to Elephant Island, where they split up. The men on the island were left under the command of Shackleton's Number 2, Frank Wild. Shackleton and a small team sailed 800 miles to South Georgia, from where they mounted a rescue mission for Wild's group. Nearly a century on, reporter Karen Bowerman joins a group of Wild's relatives retracing his extraordinary journey to the southern seas. They are bearing Wild's ashes, which they bury next to Shackleton, on South Georgia. Producer: John Murphy.

Jill McGivering, the BBC World Service South Asia editor, investigates the discovery of thousands of bodies in mass graves in Indian Kashmir. Human rights groups suspect they are just some of the victims of "disappearances" at the hands of the Indian military in this contested region. The authorities respond that the bodies are in fact those of militants who have infiltrated from Pakistan. Will an official investigation reveal the truth? Producer: Michael Gallagher.