In Sibundoy, the ancestral territory of the Kamentsa and Inga indigenous people, both the elders and lands that sustain traditional knowledge are disappearing. To keep pace with climate change, globalization and the region’s mining development, local groups are banding together to record this information before it disappears.

Indigenous representatives of the Caquetá department are participating in the Congress of Indigenous Communities, an activity that is part of a project to strengthen the indigenous organizations of Caquetá, executed by the NGO Amazon Conservation Team (ACT).

It is hard for me to believe that I will have lived on planet Earth for 80 years as of this Thursday. I was born on April 3, 1934 and the world has changed in almost all ways possible. I write this article from a laptop computer while flying in an airplane to Nebraska, where I visit every year to see the migration of the majestic Sandhill cranes…

“What’s wrong with your foot?” asked the medicine man as I ducked into his grass hut to escape the tropical downpour. He could see that I walked with a slight limp. Like many an aging athlete, I had injured myself while training for a hike. I knew I had to condition myself to be able to walk 50 miles carrying a backpack at 9,000 feet.

As you watch the NBA playoffs this spring, impress your friends with this fact: the idea for those Nikes worn by LeBron James and Kevin Durant was actually born in the rainforests of the northeast Amazon.
In 1775, French botanist Fusee Aublet observed local Indians there coating their feet with rubber tree sap and holding their feet over the fire, creating the first custom-made athletic shoes.

Diverse tropical ecosystems like rainforests and coral reefs may harbor microorganisms able to produce compounds that — when made less toxic, more effective or used as inspiration to develop new medicines — may give us new antibiotics, new treatments for cancer and new treatments for stress. Western medicine, in spite of the superlative nature of its success, does have its holes.

An hour before dawn, we landed at a small airstrip deep in the mountains of the Colombian Amazon. This remote forest — ringing with the sounds of frogs, monkeys and parrots –seemed surreal, as did my reason for visiting. Over the next five days, I would photograph the annual conference of the region’s female indigenous healers.