dr. laurence: there's lots of reasons to care about tropical forests. obviously they're the greatest bastions of biological diversity anywhere on the planet and of course, they're producing massive amounts of oxygen, which help to keep our whole biosphere survivab. they also store a huge amount of carbon in the vegetation. and so, when those forests are slashed and burned most of that carbon is going up into the atmosphere and carbon dioxide and methane and other kinds of greenhouse gases, of course which is the reason that we have the greenhouse effect. so, maybe a quarter of all the greenhouse gases that are being produced by humanity right now are occurring as a consequence of the rapid slashing and burning and razing of tropical forests. so, i think that we've really got our work cut out for us. there's been some successes -- some new parks and reserves that have been designated, but i think we have to be very vigilant. right now, i feel like we're sort of like we've got our fingers in the dike, and, really, we're trying to stave off a potentially c

dr. laurence: there's lots of reasons to care about tropical forests. methane and other kinds of greenhouse gases, of course which is the reason that we have the greenhouse effect. so, maybe a quarter of all the greenhouse gases that are being produced by humanity right now are occurring as a consequence of the rapid slashing and burning and razing of tropical forests. so, i think that we've really got our work cut out for us. there's been some successes -- some new parks and reserves that have been designated, but i think we have to be very vigilant. right now, i feel like we're sort of like we've got our fingers in the dike, and, really, we're trying to stave off a potentially catastrophic flood of extinctions. pringle: when you talk about conservation or preservation trees are in some sense perhaps just the easy benchmarks that we can reach for -- we've saved this many trees. but when i think about conservation i do think about, okay, we may have saved that many trees but how many fungi have we saved underneath the trees? for every tree that you've s