The Cork Oak Is for My Grandson

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Portugal is home to the largest cork forest on Earth. A single estate just outside Lisbon holds more of it, under one owner, than anywhere else in the world; the size of Washington DC. Trees whose bark won't be ready to harvest for fifty years.  </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The land around it is one of roughly three dozen places on the planet ecologists call a biodiversity hotspot. In this episode, Steve Mokaya goes inside Companhia das Lezírias, 18,000 hectares of man-made ecosystem, with biologist Sandra Alcobia, to decode what this land demands of the people who run it. </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">There's a lot interesting facts in this biodiversity concurcopia. A horse worth over a million euros that's never once allowed to mate on its own. Cork peeled like fruit, and left alone for half a century after. Tree roots that share water with each other underground. And a squirrel extinct here for five hundred years, just returned back. </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Some of what gets planted here will never be harvested by the people planting it, but by a grandson they'll never meet.</span>