Recently PBS’s Need To Know aired a story on the price of gold, which reached an all time high this month, surpassing $1,800 an ounce, and the gold rush in the Amazon Rainforest, which is home to millions of the world’s known species and provides about 20 percent of the world’s oxygen. It has been estimated in the rush for gold the Peruvian Amazon region of Madre de Dios 2,000 square miles of forest have already been destroyed due to the mining of gold. veteran war photographer Ron Haviv and journalist Donovan Webster set out to document this ecological threat in the forthcoming documentary “Amazon Gold.”

Learn more in the video below.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

For more on illegal gold mining in the Amazon, visit Amazon Aid, producers of the documentary “Amazon Gold.”

To see more of Ron Haviv’s photography, check out his website.