Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of CNN Opinion pieces on people who are finding new ways to help solve the world’s biggest problems. The founding president of eBay, Jeff Skoll is a philanthropist and founder and chairman of the Skoll Foundation, Participant Media and the Skoll Global Threats Fund, organizations aiming to help build a sustainable world of peace and prosperity. Sally Osberg is President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, which produces the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

Ecologist Thomas Lovejoy tucks his trousers into his socks with a casual warning about chiggers and then hikes off into the Amazon jungle. Shaded by a tall canopy and dense with ferns and underbrush, the old-growth forest looks healthy, but Lovejoy knows better. Three decades ago, the surrounding forest was mowed down and torched as part of a research project, and the effects have spread like a cancer deep into the uncut area. Large trees have perished.

Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, founder of the Amazon Conservation Team, talks about the “uncontacted,” isolated groups living deep in the South American forest resist the ways of the modern world. He’s featured in the article “The Lost Tribes of the Amazon,” by Joshua Hammer, in the March issue of Smithsonian magazine.

Colombia may more than double the size of the remote and poorly-known Chiribiquete National Park to make it the biggest protected area in the Colombian Amazon, reports El Espectador.
Under a proposal laid out last year, Colombia’s national park service is slated to expand Chiribiquete to about 3 million hectares, up from its current 1.3 million hectares.