How We Made a Rainforest Preserve
We were two Americans and one Ecuadorian in our late 20s, who had dropped out of the system. It started with an idea and no money. Now it’s a 2,500-acre rainforest preserve.
We started out by roaming some of the wildest parts of Ecuador for the better part of a year, trying to find the right site. It was not a very scientific approach. We would hear of a forest that maybe needed saving, in some remote corner of the country, and we would go there. Basically we would hike into it, sometimes get badly lost, accidentally meet some of the people that lived nearby, and generally take the pulse of the place.
It’s a good way to get to know a country, even for someone like Isabel who was born in Ecuador. It took us deep into places that few people — Ecuadorian or otherwise — have ever walked, places that most people have never even heard of. We explored the wet Chocó forests in the northwest, the dry Tumbesian forests in the south, lowland rainforest in the Amazon, and cloud forests on the foothills of both sides of the Andes.
We didn’t fully know what we were doing, but we had ideas and dreams. We also had the internal drive to convert those ideas and dreams into reality, and that was the main thing. That’s the benefit of starting something like this when you’re in your late 20s. At that point we still didn’t even call ourselves conservationists. We were just three people who were trying to do something.
One day we met a man whose father owned one hundred acres of forest at the very top of the coastal mountain range. He said the property was the birthplace of three freshwater streams that fell down the mountain in a cascade of waterfalls and charming little swimming holes. He also said it was blessed with cloud forest and overgrown cacao trees and had a view of the Pacific Ocean from the highest peaks. He said his father wanted to sell this land and offered to show it to us.
Naturally we said yes, because this is what we were doing at that time — we were going to every forest we could find, exploring it, and assessing its conservation value. It was kind of like speed-dating, but rather than looking for our life partner, we were looking for our forest. At each site we visited, we also assessed it on an emotional level. Is this land something we feel inwardly compelled to devote our lives to? That was the main question we always asked ourselves.
Initially we did not have high hopes for this man’s father’s forest. His description sounded too intriguing to be true and frankly we didn’t believe him. We had been to that part of the country before and we saw nothing that matched his description. In our previous assessment, we believed it to be an ecosystem that was already twenty years too late for conservation. Most of the forest was already gone, it seemed, and anyway the mountains were too low and too dry for cloud forest. But the man insisted he was telling the truth and so we humored him. If anything, we figured it would be fun to spend a day romping around a different ecosystem with this guy.
The man’s name was Gabriel. A week later we met Gabriel and his older brother in the rough-around-the-edges beach town of Pedernales, which many years later achieved national notoriety for being the town that was most badly affected by the 2016 earthquake. It was a sunny morning. We ate ceviche at a cantina with a view of the ocean where — I remember — a few people were drunkenly dancing to reggaeton. I don’t think they had gone to sleep the night before. This was in October of 2007.
We got into Gabriel’s brother’s truck and drove south along the coastal road. Most of the land we saw on this drive was parched cattle pasture with intermittent glimpses of the Pacific Ocean. One particularly charming stretch of the road passed through a tunnel of algarrobo trees. Somewhere around the halfway point we crossed the equator line. A small, unassuming sign along the highway marked the spot.
After about twenty kilometers, we turned left onto a gravel road that headed up into the coastal mountains. It was a clear sunny day everywhere else, but the peaks of the mountains were shrouded in clouds. Gabriel pointed to the highest peak and said, “That’s where we’re going.”
The first three kilometers of the road twisted through the small rural community of Camarones, a collection of a bamboo houses scattered about the denuded hills and cattle pastures at the foot of the mountain. It’s a community that we now know like the back of our hands. At one point we even lived there with a family for about three months. On this inaugural ride, however, we did not stop in town. We just kept going.
The truck drove through the waters of a river at various points. Gabriel said it was called the Camarones River because of the freshwater shrimp that live there and can be easily captured and eaten and taste very good. He also told us that this river was born in his father’s land, and all of this turned out to be true. How many times have I bathed naked in those waters by now? Hundreds and hundreds, I would guess. There was some garbage strewn about the banks of the river where it passed through the community, but upriver it was and still is pristine. It is one of the few places left on this earth in which you can drink directly from the river while simultaneously swimming in it, with total impunity.
After we passed the last house in town, the road turned from gravel to dirt, and the truck gradually ascended. The last remnants of semi-productive agricultural land eventually transitioned into fallow land, which later gave way to secondary-growth forest. The road ended at a small wooden house. The owner of the house, named Pedro Pablo, was waiting there with skinny horses. From the foot of his house we could see out over the valley of a hidden river, on the other side of which was a dense green mountain that rose up into the clouds.
We rode the horses down a trail beside a tract of land that had recently been slashed and burned. The land was still black with ash and burn marks, and not a single tree was left standing. Gabriel told us that someone from Camarones was planting corn there, though he clarified that it wasn’t the owner of the land who was doing it. The actual landowner was absentee. Someone from the community temporarily claimed that parcel, cut down all the trees, burned it, and would plant corn as soon as the rains came. A few months later the corn would be harvested and the land would be abandoned for a few years. After a few cycles of this, someone would finally bring cattle onto the scene, and that is the official death of the forest. The owner of the land had no clue that any of this was going on. We were the ones who eventually told her.
Almost the entire mountain was owned by one family back then. The family members, who were now in their 50s and 60s, inherited this land from their father. He accumulated thousands and thousands of acres of land during the middle part of the 20th century, back when people could simply stake their claim. In terms of land colonization, the process that unfolded in coastal Ecuador in the 20th century was very similar to what happened in the American West in the 19th century and the Midwest in the 18th century and the East Coast in the 17th century. In the hardest-to-reach parts of coastal Ecuador, such as this particular river basin, this process was still unfolding. It was maybe a decade or two from reaching the endpoint, whereupon all forest would be gone. This had already happened to nearly every other river valley in the entire province. This was effectively the last one standing.
Among the great landowner’s extensive holdings, the land in the upper reaches of the mountain range was considered the least desirable precisely because it was the most rugged and least accessible. Each of his children inherited multiple massive parcels of land in different parts of the region, and naturally they chose to develop the flatter properties closer to roads. The properties on this mountain were, for the most part, forgotten. But the hunters and loggers from Camarones knew it very well.
Gabriel’s father was not a wealthy landowner, nor was he one of the wealthy landowner’s children. He was a humble mountain man who had been bequeathed a parcel of land by the wealthy landowner almost half of a century ago. This was a common practice back in the day, and it was the cause of many bureaucratic headaches for us when it came time to purchase these properties. But on this day all of those legal details were far from our minds. We were merely exploring a wild land.
The trail crossed the river underneath the shade of a monstrous mango tree. Gabriel said this river crossing was locally referred to as “The Mango,” which was a landmark that people in the village all knew — mostly loggers. On the other side of the river was an abandoned house. Pedro Pablo said that some engineer owned it but hadn’t been there for years. The Spanish word for “engineer” is a general title used for anyone with any type of technical background in coastal Ecuador, so this did not establish much information.
The house was thoroughly abandoned and no longer livable, because the roof had rotted through, but it was also picturesque. It commanded a view of the entire valley, surrounded by many kilometers of forest on all sides. In the immediate area, though, it was surrounded by weeds and the occasional avocado tree. It was the only property in the Upper Camarones River Basin that had been legally sold, with title, to someone else. And the current owner was simply known as “the engineer,” although almost nobody had ever met this man.
The trail continued onward. After we passed the house, the weeds quickly gave way to secondary-growth forest. The trail then began a steep climb up the mountain, and the forest here was tall and mature. After a fairly long ascent, the trail briefly leveled out and crossed another stream, which we all drank from. This is where Gabriel’s father’s property began. The land right at this particular spot was a mixture of native forest and agro-forest. There were very tall rubber trees standing over a heavily shaded banana grove. There were also other trees with curious yellow pods on them. We had to ask Gabriel what they were, and he told us they were cacao trees. It was the first time I had ever seen a cacao tree. “It’s what chocolate is made out of,” he clarified. We nodded. As if we already knew that.
There wasn’t a house on this property, not anymore. Gabriel was raised in this forest, along with many brothers and sisters, but their old wooden house had been abandoned by his father many years ago and was quickly swallowed up by the forest. There was also a second house that Gabriel’s father had built for his mistress, which had also been swallowed up. The main house, which was run by Gabriel’s mother, was separated from the mistress’s house by a ten-minute hike through the wood. And those were the only two houses in this entire part of the mountain. What was that like? Fairly peaceful, according to Gabriel. Apparently the women had a constructive relationship. We would later name that section of the forest “Mistress Ridge.”
In any event, all that was left of either of these houses were the remains of a few wooden posts, which were cut from the indomitable local timber tree called Guayacán. This property, like all the others that surrounded it, was now uninhabited. The few families that once lived in the woods had all moved down to the village of Camarones, owing to the fact that there was now a vehicle-faring road down there and thus it was somewhat connected to the outside world so long as it didn’t rain. Heavy rains would render the river impassable for a few hours or days or even weeks. Still to this day, there are no bridges.
The forest was uninhabited but it was certainly not abandoned. Hunters and loggers from Camarones and neighboring communities routinely performed their economic activities here, with nobody around from whom permission needed to be asked. Therefore it was a free-for-all. As we walked, we could hear trees being felled by chain saws in the distance. This was a daily occurrence back then.
Nobody that currently lives in this area are indigenous to the region. The indigenous culture totally disappeared hundreds of years ago. The land was populated by an ancient kingdom up until the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, whereupon the local cultures died, mostly from European diseases, and the region was largely depopulated for a few hundred years. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that settlers from other parts of the country started to re-colonize this particular river valley. Ernesto Campo, an old man in town who never wears shoes, told me that his grandfather was the very first colonist to arrive. The year, he said, was 1901.
Logging, cattle ranching, corn, coffee, and cacao became the economic mainstays in this valley over the course of the 20th century. The logging that we heard on that very first day was an accurate foretaste of what we would continue to hear for a long time to come. In some ways the song of chain saws provided the soundtrack of our early years in the forest. That, plus the howler monkeys, and birds, and insects, and the sound of running water, and rain, and the movement of leaves in the breeze.
We gave up on the horses once we reached the foot of Gabriel’s father’s property; the hike upwards was too steep to ride on the back of an animal and anyway it wasn’t necessary. Pedro Pablo took the horses back down to his house and we did the rest on foot. The initial grove of overgrown banana and cacao trees soon gave way to a particular type of rainforest that is technically classified as “tropical moist evergreen forest,” although we didn’t know that at the time. To us, it was all just something exotic and wild. There were tall coastal Ecuadorian cedar trees and tagua palms, which produced “vegetable ivory” nuts, and stands of giant bamboo with rope-like branches armed with fierce spines, and the sounds of animals running through the brush and the wings of hummingbirds buzzing around flowers, and little streams coming out of nowhere with clean water.
The vegetation kept changing as we kept climbing upwards. Ferns appeared on the ground, at first sparingly, and then suddenly the entire forest floor was covered with them. The trunks of trees were covered with moss and the branches of trees were loaded with orchids and epiphytes and bromeliads, and fog now floated in between everything. The temperature dropped and the sun was blocked and everything became moist and wet, even though there was no rain. We were literally walking in clouds.
This is when I confessed to Gabriel that, when he first pitched this idea to us, I didn’t believe him about the cloud forest. He just smiled and said the Spanish equivalent of “told you so.” He said most people in this region don’t know about the forest up here, and later we would discover that this, too, was true. Not only was this ecosystem largely unknown to the international conservation community, it was also unknown to most Ecuadorians. It still didn’t even have a proper name. Different maps and different ecology sources called it different things. Today it is the site with the highest recorded density of endangered and threatened species of birds in all of Ecuador — a country credited with the highest avian diversity on the planet. Again, we had no clue about this at the time. We’ve discovered frogs here that were new to science — species that had never been recorded anywhere else on earth.
Reaching the top of the mountain was somewhat anticlimactic because of the fog. Periodically the clouds would briefly part and momentarily offer us expansive views. And what we saw in the distance, in all directions, was deforested land. This great, seemingly vast mountain of forest which we had just summited, so to speak, was actually an island of lush primary-growth forest in the middle of a sea of brown pasture grass. Nearly everywhere below us had already been deforested and converted into cattle pasture. The only forest left was relegated to the rugged terrain of the mountains, on which we were standing, and even that was under threat. From the high ridges we could hear no less than four different teams of loggers.
The other memorable thing that happened at the peak of the mountain was that Gabriel and his brother immediately whipped out their cell phones and started making calls. Apparently this was the only place that had cell phone reception for upwards of fifteen kilometers in all directions. In the communities at the base of the mountain — like Camarones — electricity was less than a decade old, and phone lines had not yet arrived. This spot right here, standing waist-deep in ferns at the very top of the mountain, was the only telephone access for as far as the eye could see.
We watched Gabriel and his brother make their calls, and listened to their mundane conversations with their wives, thinking that the whole thing was amusing. In the months and years that followed, our position on this matter was entirely reversed. We learned to take full advantage of the mountain-top cell signal. It was our only connection to the outside world. Sometimes we even climbed to the top of the mountain solely to make a phone call. These conversations always started out the same way: “Hey, I’m calling from the top of the mountain…” Reception was spotty and the call could drop at any moment, so pleasantries were kept to a minimum and key information was rapidly relayed. This was before the era of smart phones. We all had Nokias with about five applications: phone call, text message, clock, calendar, and calculator. The basics.
Instead of returning the same way we had come, we walked down the backside of the mountain to an even smaller village called Estero Seco. The steep hillsides were full of trellises with passionfruit vines. If wine could be grown in the tropics, this is maybe what it would look like. Also there were cacao trees and, below that, cows. The fence-lines were all marked with obo fruit trees which we all feasted on.
At the bottom of the mountain was a house where Gabriel’s wife’s parents lived. We arrived at dusk to the sight of the whole family standing outside waiting to receive us. I remember it being a very warm welcome. The temperature, as always at this time of day, did not deviate from Optimal by even one degree.
Their home was a wooden house standing high on wooden stilts, as is the custom, with livestock ambling around underneath it. We were all promptly served a massive dinner, and afterwards we sat together around the table and Gabriel asked us what we thought. After a private discussion in the darkness outside the house, amidst the pigs and chickens who were settling down for the night, we walked back in and announced that we will buy his father’s land. We didn’t have the money for it, we’d have to raise the money, but we believed we could do it and we shook hands on it.
That night we slept on the wood-slab floor of their house. In the morning they fed us a monstrous breakfast of rice with beef and fried cheese and fire-roasted green bananas. Then we hitched a ride on the back of a truck loaded with sacks of passionfruit, which took us all the way to the town of Jama, where we caught an eight-hour bus to Quito to start looking for the money. Thus began this new chapter in the lives of many people and one forest.
The first thing we did was create a US nonprofit foundation, with the pro bono legal help of a college friend of mine. We named it Third Millennium Alliance. In subsequent years, we would also register the foundation in Ecuador. That was a much longer process — Ecuador is not known for its speedy bureaucratic processes. In any event, we now had legal footing. The only thing standing in our way was money.
When I say “we,” I’m referring to the three co-founders of Third Millennium Alliance (TMA), which is Isabel Dávila from Ecuador, Bryan Criswell from Colorado, and myself. The three of us met in Valparaiso, Chile about two and a half years prior to this moment, where we were all living for different reasons. We were each dreamers, and initially our dreaming was only verbal. We only talked about the things that we wanted to change in the world. Now was our chance to actually do something about it. This was the basis of our partnership together — of creating something special together, something that will outlive all of us and maybe outlive all of our descendants, too. And hopefully have fun in the process.
We also knew that if we didn’t act now, this forest would be gone within ten years or so — and it did not take a fortune-teller to foresee this. The human race in coastal Ecuador, during this present era, is devouring land the way a fire devours a sheet of paper after you put a match to one of its corners. The flame starts at the corner and then expands outward and eventually burns up the whole thing.
This process certainly isn’t exclusive to Ecuador. It pretty much describes modern human development in a general sense. This particular forest was the most distant corner of the ecosystem; the rest of it had already been cleared. Thus the fire was headed in the direction of the last forest still standing. If we were dealing with an ecosystem as immense as the Amazon, losing a few thousand acres may not seem like such a tragedy — depending on your perspective.
One of the things we learned from our year sampling the various wildernesses in Ecuador is the fact that the Amazon is only one of the many different forest ecosystems in this country, and it’s not nearly as endangered as some of the smaller forests which most people have never heard of. This particular forest is a perfect example.
The land that Gabriel introduced to us was one of the very last major remnants of Pacific Forest in all of western Ecuador, which Conservation International identified as one of the most threatened tropical forests in the world. Whereas the Amazon has lost about 25% of its forest cover, this ecosystem had already lost a staggering 98% of its forest. In this particular river valley, a few thousand acres of contiguous forest is all that was left. With one hundred acres at the very peak of the highest mountain in the area, Gabriel’s father’s forest represented the geographical nucleus of all that remained.
The end of the forest itself was not the only concern. Also there was the issue of all the species that inhabited it. Whenever we heard a distant gunshot, there was always this fear — partially emotional, but also rational — that the last female ocelot had just been killed. Fortunately that has not happened. By this point we have dozens of camera trap photos that prove the ocelot population is still alive and well — not to mention the other species of wild felines that inhabit this mountain. The margay is like a mini jaguar that lives primarily in the trees. The jaguarundi, on the other hand, is more like a mini puma that prowls around mostly during the daytime.
The first thing that we had to tackle was the money issue. We started out by contacting everyone we knew, mostly friends and family. We told them about this forest, what was happening to it, and how we wanted to protect it. Gabriel’s father was an old man, whose health was failing, and he had long since given up on life in the forest. He now lived in a house with his daughter’s family in a nearby town — where there were things like electricity and television — and he wanted to cash out. We needed to raise $16,000 to buy it from him, whereupon we could manage it as a protected area in perpetuity. That was the plan.
People responded to the idea. A good number of friends and family donated amounts of money in the $100–200 range. The big break came when one of our supporters, who is our most loyal advocate, committed $10,000 to the project. He then proceeded to pitch our project to his friends and business partners, and suddenly we had the money. If it weren’t for this one man, this project may have never happened. That is the power of one person in the realm of rainforest conservation.
As soon as the slow bureaucratic process of purchasing the land was initiated, I started a funny phase of lone exploration in the forest. I would bring a tent and some food and spend a few days camping in the forest for as long as my food would last. The main objective was to learn the trails and acclimate myself to the forest and to this new life. The idea of acquiring a handheld GPS didn’t even occur to me at the time, which is how much of a novice I was. All I had was a compass and a topographical map that I photocopied from a military cartography office in Quito.
I got lost frequently, once very badly. I ended up spending the whole day without food and without knowing where I was, while nursing a semi-deep laceration from an altercation with bamboo spines. To play it safe, I dragged myself down the mountain via the watercourses, knowing that at some point I would hit the community of Camarones or, failing that, the ocean.
The watercourses are steep and frequently turned into waterfalls that cannot be safely maneuvered, so there were also many scrambles down steep slopes of vegetation that possess hazards ranging from bullet ants and nails growing on the trunks of palm trees to venomous caterpillar and coral snakes. At one point I remember lying on my back on the rocks next to the river, after having just vomited and trying to marshal my energy. I turned my head to the side as a big black snake, close to two meters in length, peacefully slid by me. Relative to the Amazon and the vast majority of other tropical forests throughout the world, it’s actually a very benign ecosystem. Visitors are always pleasantly surprised by how few mosquitos there are. The land is too steep for puddles of water to collect, which hampers their ability to breed.
Those initial forays all took place during the latter months of 2007, before we officially purchased the land. The watershed moment was the very first day and night that Isabel, Bryan, and I first set up camp together as owners of the land. We accessed the property from the Estero Seco side, which is a much steeper climb, on a day that just happened to be the very first heavy downpour of the rainy season that year. I believe it was either January 3rd or January 4th of 2008.
After having spent the entire day fully wet and climbing a mountain with lots of gear strapped to our backs, we got lost as soon as we reached the property. For our campsite, we chose a spot at the top of a tall waterfall under the shade of monstrous Ecuadorian cedar trees. Without any tools except for two machetes, we tried to build a roof using bamboo for a lattice and palm fronds for roofing. And technically we pulled it off. Something of a roof was constructed. But it only slowed the rain down a bit and did not actually keep anything dry. We were total novices. That was the absurdity and also the joy of it.
There is a photograph of the three of us on this day, which we took with a camera positioned on a log, set with a timer. It’s a blurry picture, and imperfect in many ways, and also priceless. It captures everything that the three of us were in that moment — idealistic, ambitious, naïve, almost even foolish, but endearingly so. We were the 21st century incarnation of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement, funded with money raised through the internet, in one of the most bio-diverse corners of the entire planet.
We laughed at ourselves and our badly-constructed roof, and also we suffered the consequences. We had tents, which also had holes, and the rain that day and that night never let up. We spent the day wet, we went to bed wet, we woke up wet, and we spent the next day and night wet as well. Fortunately the thermostat in this valley is permanently set to “perfect.” Even in the daytime, the temperature never leaves the 70s Fahrenheit, so long as you’re in the shade of the forest. At night it usually drops into the upper 60s, and in the sun it hovers somewhere in the 80s. This pattern applies to every single day of the year.
For food, all we brought with us was canned tuna fish, bread, and oatmeal — nothing else. Therefore one meal was tuna fish on bread, with no condiments, and the other meal was oatmeal that was soaked in cold water from the stream, with no flavoring or sweetener. To supplement this diet, we foraged for fruit in the forest. There were a few orange trees that Gabriel’s father had planted long ago, which were bearing fruit, and there was certainly no shortage of bananas.
We also harvested fruit from the feral cacao groves that had been abandoned in the forest over the years. We opened the pods with our machetes — which we were still learning how to use back in those days — and shoved the sweet pulp-encased seeds into our mouth, extracting as much of the juice as we could, and then spit the seeds out. This is how cacao was consumed for thousands of years in Ecuador before people started making chocolate in the modern sense. We didn’t know it at the time, but these were heirloom Nacional cacao trees that we were harvesting from. Ten years later, National Geographic would come to this forest to do a feature story on this historic cacao variety. Back then, it was just food to us.
We spent our days wandering the trails, often getting lost. Fortunately Bryan had the presence of mind to bring a GPS, which he already knew how to use thanks to his day job conducting forestry surveys in northern California. We still managed to get lost with the GPS because there were no pre-existing maps of this place, either on Bryan’s GPS or anywhere else, except for that photocopied topographical map that I had laminated and that we carried with us at all times.
More often than not, getting lost was productive. We usually ended up discovering some part of the forest that was previously unknown to us, for example a beautiful swimming hole in the stream or a 150-foot-tall strangler fig or a few illegal loggers at work or a strange animal like the tamandua. We gave names to streams and trails and peaks that didn’t have names. We named them after certain mountain men that we encountered in the forest, or after animals that we saw in those places, or after the biggest trees in that section of the forest. There is the Chila River, which we named in honor of old man Teobaldo Chila, and Dragonfly Peak and Armadillo Ridge and the Matapalo Trail, and so on.
At the end of each day, when we came back to our campsite, we were greeted by our shoddy roof and no place to sit except the wet mud. Sometimes it was too rainy to build a fire, and for some reason we used flashlights very sparingly — something about not wanting to waste batteries. After our dinner of tuna on bread we would just stand around in the pitch black of the night, listening to outlandish sounds coming from the forest and venturing guesses as to what kind of animal was making them. Then in the morning we’d wake up at first light, put on our wet smelly shirts that had spent the night hanging on a tree branch in the rain, and go exploring.
We would live this way for as many days as we could handle. Then we’d hike out of the forest and hitch a ride to the nearest beach town and spend a few days there to rest up, dry out, and fundraise. There are waves at this beach, which had more than a negligible impact on our decision to choose this forest as our project site. Also there was internet — albeit very slow internet. We conducted our business in public internet cafés with AOL-caliber dial-up connections. As a rule, the power usually went out — throughout the town — right before clicking “send” on that big email. An hour of work would be lost, and everyone would vacate the place until the power came back on a few hours later or the next day. After a few days of this, we headed back into the woods. Getting there always required hitching a ride on some random truck, carrying some kind of agricultural product like bananas or hogs.
After purchasing that first property, we purchased three more fully-forested properties within a span of about six months, which effectively expanded the size of our forest preserve to 270 acres. The price of land back then was as low as $80 per acre. At one point I purchased a twenty-five-acre parcel of rainforest with cash I withdrew from an ATM in Pedernales. We operated under the assumption that any forest that we did not protect would be cut down within years, and this assumption proved to be accurate.
We called our forest preserve the Jama-Coaque Reserve, which is the name of the pre-Colombian culture that inhabited this region from 500 BC until 500 AD. Incidentally, the Reserve is also located roughly equidistant from the coastal towns of Jama and Coaque, which is how that ancient kingdom derived its modern-day name. And more than one occasion we have unearthed ancient artifacts in this valley while digging holes to plant trees. One time this actually happened while National Geographic was shooting video. The whole thing seemed too contrived, as if it was staged, and that particular shot wasn’t included in the segment that eventually aired. But that’s how it really happened.
One of those properties we purchased during that first wave of expansion included that idyllically abandoned house at “The Mango” crossing which we saw on that very first day with Gabriel. As it turned out, the owner wasn’t exactly the mysterious “engineer,” but that’s a whole other story. In any event, we now had a house — kind of. Owing to its strategic location, and its beautiful views, we decided to make this house our headquarters.
We completely disassembled the house, salvaged about half the wood, and rebuilt it using mostly native bamboo harvested from the site. The “Bambu House” is what we called it. It became our home, our biological research station, and also the site of our organic food forest and cacao plantation. It is still alive and well today, albeit with a new roof and many additions and improvements over the years. It is where I am writing this right now, in the middle of a forest preserve that currently protects over 1,500 acres in one of the last surviving remnants of Pacific Ecuadorian Forest.
It is still too early to declare “mission accomplished” with this project. Our goal is to double the size of the Reserve over the next five years, effectively protecting all of the contiguous rainforest that still remains. We’re basically building a state park without much help from the state. In other words, we’re trying to do today what the conservationists of the American West did a century ago, in this case primarily funded by a small group of people and a few private institutions. Our team on the ground is a mix of people from Camarones and other parts of the world. At stake is the existence of a natural wonderland. If we’re successful, it is a forest that will outlive all of us. In the meantime, it’s a beautiful place to live and work.
Visit www.tma.earth to learn more about how we’re scaling up our work in the Pacific Forest in Ecuador. We’re currently in the process of building a 40,000-hectare rainforest conservation & restoration area called the Capuchin Corridor, named after the Ecuadorian capuchin monkey which is endemic to the area and critically endangered.
END OF PART 1
