Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: You've been awake since 4am not because you had to be, but because you couldn't sleep.
You've been looking forward to this since you booked the trip, maybe longer. Your guide is at the back of the boat, reading the river in the dark with the ease of someone who has done this a thousand times. And you're at the bow, watching the sky lighten over the tree line.
When the clay bank comes into view, your heart leaps in anticipation.
The first macaws arrive in pairs, feeling at the bank from the canopy above, calling back and forth before dropping lower.
Then more come and more until the clay wall is covered in a living, shrieking tapestry of color. Hundreds of birds jostling for position, scraping clay with their beaks and filling the river valley with a cacophony of noise.
They're here for the minerals in the clay. And they've been making this journ to this same bank for longer than anyone has been keeping record.
You are exactly where you want to be.
This isn't just a spectacle of nature.
It's also a living example of how the forest can sustain communities economically.
The lodge you slept in is co owned by the Essehal tribe on the Tomapada River. Your guide is Essehal, and the money you spent to be here flows back into the community who owns this territory.
The forest is standing and the river is clean enough to fish. Because this your presence, excitement and four o' clock alarm is worth more than destroying this beautiful place.
Welcome to episode seven of Rewilding Amazonia. I'm Brooke Mitchell.
Let's discover how the forest can pay for itself.
We were near the end of our conversation when I asked Eduardo what had kept him going for 35 years.
So what's kept you going? Why are you still doing this today?
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Okay, you are asking a very deep question to me.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: He started tearing up before he answered. And then he told me his story about a McCall.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: I remember I was 8 or 10 and then one time I asked my mother why, why, why I cannot have a Macau. And then she told me, because When I was 17 or 18, there was a pilot who was trying to date with me. And that pilot brought me a macaw as a present.
My grandmother put a macao in the kitchen and closed the doors and windows and everything and they went to sleep. And next day the whole kitchen was destroyed, completely destroyed. And my grandmother go crazy and this macaw has to go out of this house and everything. It was a huge drama, crying, a terrible pain. So then I understood that. Then I became a WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER I went to the Amazon and I was working at the Macaw Clay Lakes with one Blue Life Conservation Society. And I used to go to the Clay Leak and had hundreds of macaws in front of me and I was five meters away taking pictures of faces and it was so exciting, the noise, the color, the smell. I used to go to the blind at five o' clock in the morning before the sunrise and sleep there until they come and they woke me up with a noise.
I lived there for six months alone, me, my boat and my camera going there.
So I developed a huge attachment to the Amazon and to the wildlife. It's like you find peace.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Eduardo Nicander founded Rainforest Expeditions in 1989.
He trained as an architect, published photographs in National Geographic and spent six months alone at the Clay Glick when he decided that the only way to keep doing this work, to keep being near the thing he loved, was to build a business around it.
His parents provided the initial investment and for 15 years he paid himself almost nothing, reinvesting everything back into the company.
From the very beginning, the model rested on a powerful the health of the forest and the health of the business were the same thing.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Ecotourism needs a big piece of land, and if a piece of land is not in good quality in terms of the forest and the animals, then your business is not going to work. So what the ecotourism did is came here to prove and put in value the knowledge of the community.
So they start knowing that their knowledge has value too, and their culture has a value and their language has a value. They little by little start learning that the largest a forest is, the more animals are there, and then they get a better experience for their guests and and more money. They will have their own motivation to protect the rainforest because it represents a way of increasing their standard of life.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: An economic analysis published in PLOS ONE would eventually put hard numbers to what Eduardo had been testing. By instinct, researchers compared every major land use in the Tamapata region ecotourism, cattle ranching, agriculture, unsustainable logging and gold mining and found that the net present value of ecotourism controlled land was higher than all of them.
The forest left standing and managed for tourism was worth more per hectare than anything that required clearing it.
The partnership with the SA hall community of Infierno came together in the mid-1990s through what Eduardo still describes as a moment of perfect timing.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: At the same time that we were thinking of buying some land and Vita Lodge in between, we got a letter from the community telling us that they wanted to talk to us of how to work together in the future. It was a perfect combination, us needing a lodge in between and the community wanted to work more in a community level. So we did a joint venture. It took six months to walk from house to house in the community.
I prepared some panels explaining with drawings of how this project is going to work. And it took us six months with two other members of our community to work from house to house, from house to house to explain literally how the project will work.
And then after six months, we had a big meeting with a big assembly meeting and they vote and almost everybody votes for yes. And just two people decided not to vote because they felt that they didn't understand very well. So that is the way we started.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Funding was the harder battle.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: I was doing fundraising for the project for a year and putting money from the company this year to keep the project alive. But I never got the money because all the grants were saying that it was difficult to give the money for the private sector.
I got a message from MacArthur foundation telling me that they will support all the training for all the the native community to run the project. But then I got a phone call from the Peru Canoa bilateral fund to say, okay, we're going to support with all the cost of the infrastructure. So I said, great, we have the two most important things. So then the project started.
It was in the beginning was rocky and then it became good and then became Rocky again because NGOs and government didn't like the idea of a private sector doing this. We had a lot of opposition from outsiders and coming into the inside to insider community to saying things that they were not right.
The project went so well that the community started getting dividends. They saw, whoa, we are getting money from the project. A lot of people is working in the project.
The community got strong enough to prevent from outsiders to come to try to poison the relationship. And now we NGOs and government are the first ones asking us to talk about this project. They invite us to go to do lectures, presentations and all of this. It was very rocky in the beginning. Then come they rock again. And now it's like cruise speed.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: What Eduardo built over those years was more than a lodge.
It seeded an entire parallel economy.
Guides trained at Rainforest Expeditions who went on to work across the region.
Chefs who moved into Puerto Mondinaldo's hospitality sector.
Fish farmers supplying fresh catch to the kitchen.
Community members hired specifically to watch Harpy eagle nest near the trails.
University degrees funded by lodge profits, accountants and marketing professionals who Came back to work in tourism.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: It promotes other economies in the community, and then it's a team of activities, and it's not the golden bullet.
So that is a way of doing, spreading the benefit and training the member of the community to be able to take other jobs. When other people comes and they say, we want to rent your land to do agriculture. They say, no, no, no, because now you rent a land, do the agriculture, and in three years the land is not going to produce the same kind of quality of agriculture. And we have no money anymore. But if we do it for tourism, they will have permanently money coming in because their resources are not being destroyed.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: But the lesson Eduardo said he most wanted to pass on wasn't about the economic model.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: I will work with the community with a paternalistic mind. That is the worst way of working with local people.
What I learned is that they are well prepared.
You just have to be patient and learn the language they speak and never think that your solutions or your alternatives are going to be the best alternatives. By giving the problems and the alternative and the opportunity and the right for them to solve the problems, it gave me freedom.
It was unbelievable. And then I said, okay, this is the problem I put on the table. You decide how to solve was so much more relaxing.
And I always said my opinion how to do it. But at the end, they knew how to do it better than me. So my recommendation for this is you can work with community. It's very, very difficult. But at the end, the reward you get from them and the satisfaction of finally learning that they are like you and they can learn as much as you is amazing. Now, when I talk with members of a community, it's like, unbelievable.
We are the same level, we are the same people, we have the same heart, the same mind.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Near the end of our conversation, he returned to the McCalls as a specific, urgent problem that his whole career had been trying to solve.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Macaws don't build nests. They evolved with the forest in millions of years. They use the holes that the trees, because they are so old, they form these holes by breaking a branch and then insect eating the inside of the tree. And in 50 years, suddenly you have a cavity that macaws like, and they come inside, they clean it, and they use as a nest for the next 300 years, because these trees live 800 years. And suddenly you have an industry that is allowed to sell these woods, and they cut trees that took 500 years to make a nest, and then you cut the tree in three days. So what is happening in the rainforest that macaws are not having a place to nest.
And then what happened? You see the population apparently healthy, but actually they are aging. There is no juveniles coming into the next generations every year. So suddenly it's going to collapse. My legacy should be that I provide a nest that will stop macaws from getting extinct in the wild.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: Research confirmed what Eduardo observed firsthand, that secondary forests recovering after logging only partially regained the large, deep, high cavities that Macalls require. Even after 18 to 34 years of regrowth, large mature cavities suitable for macaw's remain limited.
By the time the population decline becomes visible, the generation that would have replaced the aging birds is already gone.
That invisible slow motion collapse is what eduardo has spent 35 years working against.
And in recent years, he's concluded that rainforest expeditions alone can't stop it. Which is why he's now doing something that surprised even him.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: The philosophy of right now, of Rainforest Expeditions is now we are training every ecotourism initiative in the region. But if we don't make this region completely well prepared for ecotourism, other activities that are not compatible with conservation are going to come in. So now our philosophy is to spread our knowledge to small, medium and large entrepreneurs and communities. We're working with tumor communities also so they can do success.
They can success and then they can see the return and then become stronger. So when the big problems come, it's going to be an army with no guns to stop the risk and the danger to the Amazon.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: After chatting with Eduardo, I kept thinking about those centuries old trees that the Bacalls depend on. And it made me wonder, is it even possible to harvest trees sustainably in the Amazon?
The question matters because the world still demands timber after all. And that line of thinking led me to a family that has been working in the Peruvian Amazon for nearly 80 years.
Drago Boisevic is the third generation of his family to manage forests and Monterey Dios. His grandfather arrived from Montenegro after World War II, a Yugoslav fighter who had fought with the Allies and couldn't go home when the communists took over.
He was offered two jobs by the Red Cross in Lima. Work the docks at the port, or cross the Andes and work as a lumberjack in the Amazon.
[00:14:54] Speaker C: So he said, hey, I'm young, I'm strong, I want to work. One paid a lot more than the other, but was much more harder, of course, and he didn't think twice. And he hopped on a truck and four days later he ended up in a small town called Oxapampa. Where a lot of immigrants, European immigrants, went after, particularly the First World War. Immediately he started working again as a lumberjack. And that's where he met my grandmother. And he got married and started working with his brothers in laws and founded a small sawmill.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: That sawmill eventually became a company.
The company grew across three generations, expanding from Oxampapa to Lima, then from Peru to international markets in the United States, Mexico and Asia. Drago's father took it to the second generation.
Then in 2001, when Drago had just finished college, his father died suddenly and tragically.
Thankfully, his grandfather was still alive and took Drago under his wing.
[00:15:58] Speaker C: Grandpa, we're all in. I mean, whatever you do, we'll do it. My grandfather lived five more years and he could teach us, you know, he was a very wise man. He was already semi retired. He would come to the office every morning, to the factory, and then he will wait for me.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: He'll tell him at 5am and I'll
[00:16:17] Speaker C: try to get by 6am just to have a quick chat, you know, and ask him questions, what he would do if he was me. He was just like an oracle. Just show me the way. Right or left?
[00:16:30] Speaker A: The third generation that Drago, his brother and his cousin Bill, is different from what came before. In one important way, they turned the company's sustainability commitments from a byproduct of how they operated into the explicit foundation of the business.
Madeira Rabocevich, the family timber company, now over 70 years old, operates alongside Conservacion Odorongo, a separate company created specifically to manage their forest concession under a productive company conservation model.
Together, they oversee approximately 183 hectares of primary Amazon rainforest in the Monterey de Dios region, one of the largest FSC certified sustainable forestry operations in the Peruvian Amazon.
[00:17:13] Speaker C: The product that you're buying comes from a well managed forest. The company also complies with all national laws. You treat workers with dignity, according to law and it's above national standards, really. It's not just complying with law, much more than that. The third pillar of fsc, it's economic.
They make sure you are a profitable company because it's making money and it brings benefits to society overall.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: The harvesting itself operates on a 20 year cycle.
Each year, Drago's team enters a new section of the concession and conducts a full inventory of every species present, commercial and non commercial alike.
From that inventory, they identify mature trees that are no longer producing seeds and meet national sustainability standards for harvesting.
At least 20% of the best seed producing trees are always protected Brazil nut trees are never touched. And the roads built for access are left to the jungle to reclaim.
[00:18:14] Speaker C: The intensity of our harvest. It's less than one tree per hectare every 20 years. It's, it's like I'm pulling hair from your head and that's it. You'll never notice. And people sometimes forget that trees are living beings and they actually die just like any. Anything else. It's like, okay, I have two options. I can harvest this and I can, I can, I can make a product that, that can give a lot of jobs and pay taxes and, you know, not only there, but for all the whole production chain, machine, you know, it's, it's, it's a beautiful resource. It's, it's an exotic fine. I mean, you build instruments, it's, it's a beautiful material. I mean, you can, you can actually use it, just let it die with no economic impact.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: The proof of this approach can be seen 20 years later.
[00:19:07] Speaker C: Conservacino Toronto has more than 20 years already. So, so we're back to, to club number one. And that's amazing, the natural regeneration power that has this vibrant forest. I mean, these micro harvest that we do with so little impact and us staying there, checking that's everything's going well.
This second time we're going to the same area we already explored and harvested more than 20 years ago.
We're finding more, we're finding more trees, we're finding, we're finding more and more cubic meters of wood. It's not a thesis, it's not a projection anymore, it's reality that we can measure. So the model does work well.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: During the dry season, the work is timber. During the wet season, when machines bog down in the mud and harvesting is impossible, the forest offers something else. Brazil nuts. Madre de Dios is unusually rich in Brazil nut trees. And Conservacion Otorongo has built a second operation around the wet season harvest.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: During the rainy season, we would even hire more people. We will hire people that live around the concession in small towns. We'll get them organized, we'll finance them, we'll give them all the infrastructure, whatever they need, and we will collect together these Brazil nuts during the rainy season. It's a great source of income during a time of year where usually woodworkers don't have a job. And basically what they do is they eat up their savings. Sometimes they don't make it to the next season, they get indebted and everything. So we take care of these people, we organize them, and together we will Sell it to the factories that will export these Brazil nuts. I think as of today, we're probably the largest production unit for Brazilians in Peru.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Year round employment in a region where the alternative is seasonal work and debt.
That's the social argument for productive conservation.
But there's also what it has done to the forest itself and to the wildlife. Inside, a wildlife research institution has been monitoring jaguars on conservation Otorongo's land for years.
The jaguar is what ecologists call, call an umbrella species. A top predator whose presence indicates the health of everything beneath.
What their monitoring found surprised even Drago.
[00:21:35] Speaker C: We have a jaguar density that's even higher than national parks. Minor national park. It's a very well known park in southern Peru. In Madre de Dios, we've become a sanctuary for wildlife because of deforestation. There's, I mean, so little forest left out there, at least in this frontierland, let's call it, so there's a lot of migration of wildlife. We get to see these, these beautiful creatures from time to time when we go to the forest. It's amazing. And there's people, scientists that just spend their whole life and really can't see one in the wild. I mean, just so lucky to see these guys. And they're not afraid of us.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: It isn't only jaguars.
Magali from Amazon Shelter, the wildlife rescue center in Puerto Mondonaldo that appeared earlier in this series, has released animals directly into the concession.
In just three decades of management, Conservion Odorongo's forest has become by default one of the last large refuges in the region for wildlife being pushed out everywhere else.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Jago the same question I'd asked the Eduardo why he still does this.
His answer was different in tone, but not in essence.
[00:22:51] Speaker C: I just don't think too much about it. We just love what we do. We've. We've invested so much and I'm not talking about money to, to have what we have. This, this right, this privilege to, to run, to manage this forest and the return of the investment.
Sometimes it's very, very small, if any, like the banks, you know, like we work with. It's like, why do you do it? I mean, it's. There's so little at the end and so much work and so much, you know, sweat and tears and unfortunately we have to say, but blood. It's not that we cannot do anything else. It's not that we don't know anything
[00:23:31] Speaker A: else but love this, that love doesn't make him romantic. About the stakes.
When I asked about the limits of what his model can do about all the land around him without a company like his managing it, his answer was blunt.
[00:23:47] Speaker C: You want forests to remain forests. They need to have an economic value to the people that live in there or live around them. If there's no value for that standing forest, it'll be destroyed it where there's not a private company, a private manager of the forest.
Forest gone. It's totally gone. If we weren't there, a big part of this beautiful forest will not be standing. And year after year it'll be just burning down. We need more companies like ours. I mean, we need more, more this model to be replicated by 20, by 200 times. There's so much abandoned land that's now opened up to all these illegal, unsustainable activities. If not, these guys will go to illegal mining, to drug trafficking, slush and birds for subsistence farming.
You choose.
That's the reality.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Eduardo and Drago both reached the same core conclusion from very different paths. The forest survives when the people who live in it have a strong economic resource reason to protect it.
But their models work best for communities that have either a wildlife experience to offer visitors or valuable forest products to harvest.
What about the communities that don't?
The families living deep in the Amazon with no lodge concession or obvious product to sell?
This is where Isabel Filandro spends her days.
Isabel trained as an environmental lawyer in Peru, worked for the Ministry of Environment, attended international climate conferences, and eventually found herself at Cambridge doing a master's in environmental policy, even considering a PhD.
Then she walked away from it all.
[00:25:38] Speaker D: It felt a little bit, the work I was doing a little bit in Silo, you know, and I want to do something more tangible that I can really see the impact I'm doing. And then again, you know, working in the government sometimes could feel very bureaucratic. You know, so many steps, it's very top down.
I decided to move from Cambridge, where I was living at the moment, to move back to Peru because I was okay. So if I want to work in what is really happening and support conservation, climate crisis, where better to be than going back to South America, Right?
I was really lucky to find an organization like Cool Earth. It felt very honest and so working directly with indigenous communities. And I started working with them in 2019. So it has been a long learning process since then. The most I've learned in my work is when I do my fieldwork. You know, when I go, I visit the projects, I talk to the people. I really Understand the context, the realities, and then every step after is easier.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: Cool Earth is a global climate organization that has been working with indigenous and local communities for nearly 20 years, providing direct cash, data and resources to protect rainforests. The model is built on a premise that Isabel states plainly.
[00:27:02] Speaker D: People don't choose deforestation. They don't choose, I'm gonna sell my trees, I'm gonna sell my land, my territories. It's more because they have this, they lack this income stability.
Selling, you know, the trees or the land sometimes becomes the only survival strategy. Imagine if your child is sick, if you want to provide food to your family.
Sometimes the only way to get that easy cash is to sell a tree. Definitely poverty is an entry point of deforestation in those areas now, especially remote areas like, you know, the Amazon rainforest. They lack access to basic needs.
The government sometimes have abandoned them and they have a lot of external pressures from, you know, coca growers, from mining, from logging. And now on top of that, they're seeing also or struggling with the climate crisis. They have more unpredictable or intense floodings, rainings, forest fires. So it's becoming more challenging to live in that environment. So if they don't have the stability, income, the income, the economic stability, then protecting the forest as they have already been doing, becomes harder.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: A peer review study published in Science Advances found that cash transfers to communities in poverty reduced deforestation in participating villages by 30%, with roughly half of those avoided losses in biodiverse primary forest.
And yet the communities doing the most to protect the forest receive almost none of the money allocated to protect it. Research by the Rainforest foundation in Norway found that indigenous peoples and local communities protect 36% of the world's intact tropical forests, but receive less than 1% of international climate funding. That gap isn't just unfair, is structurally embedded.
[00:29:04] Speaker D: The funding structure, the finance structure, climate finance structure is so bureaucratic, it's very top down. So for those communities to access to that money is really hard for them. So it's a lot of paperwork, it's a lot of legal requirements, it's a lot of language barriers. Sometimes I hear from so many indigenous communities saying that they have been applying for the Green Climate Fund. And I remember this woman saying like for 10 years and they haven't get the access yet.
I think the problem is mistrust. No, we don't trust vulnerable people when it comes to providing more unconditional direct funding to them. We call them the guardians of the forest.
No, it's like we read that in all the highlights.
Yeah, we celebrate them as the guardian of the forest. But we don't provide their resources so they can continue doing it.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: Cool Earth's answer to that mistrust is to simply not replicate it.
Their model, unconditional cash transfers directly to communities with no strings attached and no conditions on how the money is used is the structural opposite of the climate finance system Isabel spent years working inside.
Three years ago, Isabel and her team took the model a step further, launching the first conservation basic income pilot in the Peruvian Amazon.
Inspired by universal basic income principles, regular individual unconditional payments, the pilot was designed in partnership with two woman led indigenous organizations.
[00:30:42] Speaker D: When we pitched this pilot to the leader of Onamiyaf, she was very suspicious, you know, like she was okay, this organization is going to come and just provide unconditional cash to us. No string attached, no conditions.
Historically there is a lot of also mistrust in the communities because they have experienced, you know, the abandon of the government.
They have experienced also armed conflict, big organizations coming and giving very little back to them.
So we have to explain the concept of what as a basic income pilot and why we wanted to trial with them.
But I think what was really interesting for that organization is that we said we are going to design the pilot together and that was game changing for them because it's very rarely that organization come and say okay, we are going to design this thing together. Most of the time it's very top down project that has already been designed away from the communities.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: In November 2023, Cool Earth sent the first payments to nearly 200 people across three Ashanika and Yanesha communities in the Yunnan region.
For two years those communities received received regular individual payments. In early assessments found that participants used the money primarily for basic needs, reported feeling less stressed and happier and had more time to engage in conservation activities such as reforesting water springs and planting gardens.
According to the community's own feedback. The stability also strengthened their ability to resist external pressures.
[00:32:30] Speaker D: What we have seen is, is that people has been using the money to cover basic needs.
And we knew already that from other cash transfer experience that we had.
But also they reported feeling less stressed, happier that it has strained the bonding in their families. But also within their communities. They have more free time to spend with their children. They have more free time to be participating in communal activities like reforesting water springs. Some community has buy seeds so they are starting their own gardens in their house or also seeds to reforest the forest.
Just knowing that people feel happier, less stress and still committed to conservation, that's an amazing outcome.
[00:33:20] Speaker A: There is another dimension to economic stability that goes beyond conservation outcomes.
Isabel sees it clearly in the places where Cool Earth works.
[00:33:30] Speaker D: When people lack the economic resources, they definitely become more vulnerable to pressure, to coercion, and sometimes to violence.
And I think that's key when we're talking about defenders. Those communities also, they don't lack the support. They are exposed to more risk.
Sometimes indigenous people, they really give their life in protection of, you know, the communities, the territories, their lives. And sometimes they do it with no agency, with no support, with no income. And we have seen how indigenous leaders, sometimes they use the money we provide to travel to a capital city to claim for their rights, you know, because they want to go and talk to the Minister of environment, they want to talk to a congress because they want their rights to be respected. They want recognition of their land.
So just providing the economic support can help, you know, on their mission of doing that. And probably for them to be less vulnerable and less exposed.
[00:34:42] Speaker A: Isabel knows the model isn't a silver bullet.
[00:34:46] Speaker D: A big part of the work that we do now is advocacy. So we create the advocacy department in the organization two years ago because we want for more governments to understand that this model works. You know, big institutions, governments, and hopefully start running more basic income, unconditional cash transfer to indigenous communities in other parts of the world.
And we were in the climate change conference in Brazil, so there were great conversations about after, why we shift the finance model to provide more resources to those people. So that also provides hope that we are seeing that little by little there are more conversations around that and recognition that we have to provide more support to indigenous people.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: Eduardo Drago and Isabel are making the same argument from three different corners of the Amazon that the forest survives when it has more value standing than gone.
A community that earns its living guiding tourists to a clay lick has every reason to protect the old growth trees. The McCalls nest in a family that has managed 183,000 hectares for 80 years and found more trees on the second pass than the first has proof that the model works in a community that receives unconditional cash no longer has to choose between feeding its children and protecting its forest.
The economic case for the standing forest isn't idealism, it's evidence.
But evidence only goes so far. Without the legal framework. Find finance flows and political will to back it up.
That's where we're heading in the season finale.
I'm Brooke Mitchell. This is rewilding Amazonia. See you in episode eight.
