AllMovie

As emceed by Jean-Michel Cousteau - eldest son of the late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and his wife Simone - this PBS documentary springboards from the assumption that one of the Earth's most immense bodies of water, South America's Amazon River, will dramatically reshape (and is now dramatically reshaping) the entire global climate and ecosphere. It is scarcely a coincidence, as Cousteau reminds us, that the said river flows through some of the planet's most immense rainforests - home to the broadest ecological diversity imaginable, where evolution has literally run rampant. Now, a quarter century after Jean-Michel and Jacques first visited the Amazon, destructive and potentially irreversible consequences have unfurled, including the "deforestation" of an immense area of land that can be equated geographically, with the size of Texas. Along with his children and the Ocean Adventures team, Jean-Michel travels to the Amazon and takes stock of the ecological damage wrought there by corporate and industrial expansion - both locally and on a global scale, above ground and under water - while surveying the aesthetic and biological glories of the said region.