Posts by Amazon Conservation Team

Five centuries ago, before the Spanish made their way to the Caribbean on their route to the Indies, a major portion of the communities of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta lived along the ocean, undertook long journeys in search of fish, and gathered caracuchas, similar to a snail, which they consumed crushed and mixed with coca leaves in order to improve their thinking and communication.
“The sea was our mother”: so says the creation myth of the Kogi.

An agreement for 1.3 billion pesos to be disbursed from a special government royalty collection fund was signed yesterday between the Governor of Caquetá and indigenous communities in the department.
The signing of this agreement is intended to support the organizational strengthening of at least 12 indigenous groups in the department, a process that will be led by the communities themselves, as related by Wairanina Jacanamejoy Mutumbajoy, coordinator of the Departmental Indigenous Council.

As a partner within the RAISG network through ACT-Suriname, ACT is delighted to announce the publication of the RAISG atlas “Amazonia under Pressure.” RAISG (Red Amazónica de Información Socioambiental Georeferenciada) is a collective of organizations working in Amazonia that utilize and share georeferenced socio-environmental information to achieve pan-Amazonian representations of the environmental and social health of the region.

Jane Goodall greets the audience by imitating a chimpanzee, then launches into an hour-long talk on her relationship with apes and how, from being a primatologist, she became an activist to protect them.

At 78, Goodall, who has 53 years of studying chimps behind her, is still criss-crossing the planet to raise the awareness of populations and their leaders on the fate of the apes and the need to protect the environment.

Technology can do a lot to help an organization with its social mission, but it can’t make up for real, on-the-ground interaction with the problem you’re trying to fix.

Schaufeld’s philosophy on “making an impact” reaches beyond her neighborhood with her involvement with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization that works to protect the earth’s most diverse terrestrial ecosystem in partnership with the land’s indigenous people. Having visited the rainforest and learning that protecting the culture and way of life of the tribes is imperative to saving the land, Schaufeld recognized the groundbreaking work of the small group and became a board member.

In a speech delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Brazil, Ashley Massey, a researcher from Oxford University, recently explained that certain cultural beliefs are in fact beneficial to the well-being of the natural world, especially when it comes to keeping some forest areas safe from harm.

Four years ago Jeff Skoll arrived via small plane in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon region, just in time for the Waura people’s festival of the pique fruit, where he sipped from a bucket of its bitter, bright-yellow brew. The eBay billionaire was there to see work being spearheaded by Mark Plotkin and Liliana…

Colombian society is wonderful and yet violent, contradictory and uneven. Every day, we are amazed by stories, events and realities that make Macondo just one of multiple fantastic realities. Within a week, many more amazing events occur here than in half a century in Sweden. One of those wonderful and amazing stories of our current society was presented to us by Roberto Franco on August 21st in the Bogotá Botanical Garden.