By María José (Chochi) Iturralde
Executive Director of Fundación Pachaysana, the nonprofit behind Humans for Abundance
I was born and raised in Ecuador, a country famous for the Galapagos Islands, but also one of the 9 countries that host the Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical forest in the world. It contains more than 60% of the biodiversity of the planet and it is a very, very important forest -for all of us- not only because of its biodiversity and its capacity to regulate climate, but because it contains 200 billion tons of carbon that are being released at enormous rates into the atmosphere due to deforestation.
It is here, in the Amazon, where my journey as a forest restoration leader began.
As an educator, and especially as a mom, I dream of changing the systems that are not working so that the next generations can thrive in the future. And life in the Amazon Rainforest, at this very moment, is definitely not working for anyone. Not the trees, the habitats, the species, nor the people who live there, not for the rest of the planet.
But my intention is not to share the bad news you probably already know. My intention is that you see what I've seen through this journey, and that, by the end of this story, you feel inspired to move into action after recognizing the great opportunities that are arising at this very moment where indigenous communities, especially the ones led by women, are ready to take us on a different path.
RESTORING
Five years ago, I decided it was time to leave my job and create a project to save the Amazon Rainforest. I was ready and inspired, and I dreamt big! I came up with the idea of RESTORING forests by paying farmers so that they can stop monoculture and deforestation and transform their lands by adopting a more sustainable forest management system that includes ancestral Indigenous systems and modern regenerative agriculture practices.
The project would not only provide people with an income, but it would also offer people workshops in regenerative systems, nutrition, entrepreneurship, accounting and more. It would include close mentorship for community members and a verification process that used science and technology to measure increments in biodiversity and carbon sequestration. It sounded like a flawless idea.
I created the Humans for Abundance project and teamed-up with other people. I raised $250,000 dollars to ignite it and started selling “eco-actions” through our website to people around the world -co-restorers- who were interested in saving the Amazon as well. We were really excited because we thought we had found a scalable, friction free solution that could be sustainable and, at the same time, be beneficial for the restorers on the ground.
We partnered with Mushullakta, our pioneer Indigenous community. We met José and his wife, Mayra, the leaders, who shared their story: decades ago, they had been pressured by the government to exploit their natural resources. The government threatened to take away their land if they didn’t “work it.” As a result, they and many other families began cutting down their trees to sell the timber and plant naranjilla, a monoculture crop that requires high amounts of pesticides to grow because the soil in the Amazon is poorly suited for modern agriculture.
They were forced to end their sacred relationship with the forest who, in return, could no longer provide their food and sustenance, and instead adopt the system imposed by the colonial engine that had them buying most of the food from a truck that visits the community once a week.
This decades-long activity had left all the families in a situation of extreme poverty, malnutrition, and constant physical and emotional illness. When we arrived, José and Mayra, and a few more families, were ready to do whatever it took to change their situation and give their children a better life, and the idea of being celebrated and financially recognized for being restorers sounded ideal for them.
José was the leader of the community, but he had recently lost his eyesight after drinking altered alcohol at a party. Abuse of alcohol is common in these communities as it is the only way to numb their hardships. That night, two men had died from alcohol poisoning, and two were left blind. One of them was José.
And it was because of this that Mayra had no other alternative but to do all the organizing and managing of the project with the community.
This is where the magic began.
Maybe inspired by own leadership, as it is not common yet in Ecuador to see women leading organizations, Mayra began to move 12 families of the community- at an impressive rate- into action. With the funds that were coming in, they built a state of the art nursery and a two story bamboo office building. They were growing and planting close to 1000 trees every month on their deforested farms.
I was really pleased with how things were going.
But as we started facilitating the different workshops, the complexities of modern life mixed with centuries of wounds caused by colonialism began to arise. As educators with many years of experience working with marginalized communities, our team had learned that theater and other creative arts are some of the best ways to help wounds out onto the surface so that they can be seen, discussed, processed and healed. And as these techniques gave a voice to the women (who usually did not speak much in front of the men), they began to show us that they were pleased with the planting of trees, but that they wanted more.
They showed a deep sadness with their current situation especially because, once their children turned 12, they had to leave their community to go to high-school in a far away city. The families had to either rent a room and send their 12-year-olds to live on their own or with a distant family member, risking losing their children to drugs, gangs or depression. Or, to prevent this from happening, they would divide the family up so part stayed in the community and part would accompany the high-schoolers.
To make matters worse, the young people who left to get a high school diploma never came back to the community. They had been convinced that in order to be valuable to society, to be seen and make a decent income, they had to become scientists, engineers, lawyers, bankers. Their forests were worth nothing, their ancestral rituals and spiritual cosmovision were seen as ridiculous. Their ancestral food forests -called chakras- were considered not profitable.
As Scott Turow says:, “Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?” And the stories these families had been pushed to believe about themselves after centuries of oppression, racism, neglect and abuse were horrifying. These stories were keeping them in a state of lack, anger, and feelings of inferiority. They were convincing them to abandon their forests to mining, timber and other extractive industries, to send their kids to western schools, and live profit-centered lives like everyone else.
RE-STORYING
These wise women were showing us that they should not just be restoring their territories with trees. If they were to be successful at protecting their forests for many generations, they should also be RE-STORYING their identities, rituals, ancestral knowledge, and their sense of worth and pride for being Indigenous.
Theater, once again, was the vehicle for this process of re-storying to take place. It was really beautiful to see how all restorers, men and women alike, began to remember who they were before colonialism and what was their relationship to their forests and to their own selves.
As we talked about “ecosystems”, they corrected us by replacing our limited western word and definition with their Kichwa phrase “Sumak Kawsana” which means the “wellbeing of all living things”.
As outsiders, we began to learn that our western definitions are very simplistic and human-centered compared to the many layers of Indigenous wisdom acquired by millenia of observations and research done by their ancestors. It was clear that Indigenous people possessed a life-centered view that we all know needs to come back urgently as our planet faces environmental collapse.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully explains this:
“In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation”. We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.”
And this is exactly what we experienced in Mushullakta where, every morning, we were invited at 5am in the morning to drink the tea from their sacred guayusa plant to obtain its guidance and protection.
The families began to really question who they were today compared to who they had been in the past as the process of re-storying gained momentum. They discovered that even though they were taught to be ashamed of their cosmovision, it turns out they were right all along. Their supposedly “ridiculous” beliefs helped them thrive for centuries in their forests, when our supposedly “modern”, profit-centered design, destroyed almost everything in the last five decades.
With a new story playing out in their heads, they began to think about who they wanted to be from now on. They began to redesign the way they wanted to live and the inheritance they wanted the future generations to receive.
RE-WORLDING
They began to act differently. They got organized to dismantle the systems that were not working for them and chose to implement the ones that they thought were best, both from ancestral and current times, becoming pioneers at RE-WORLDING our world.
They began to use regenerative systems to restore their soils and protect their aquifers from further contamination. They started to increase the diversity in edible plants in their chakras and raise fish and chickens for protein and better nutrition. They planted coffee and cacao under the forest canopy to not destroy the animals’ habitats while having organically grown products that could provide extra income. They made home improvements using bioconstruction and built phytoremediation systems for their bathrooms.
But most importantly, they began to revive their culture by bringing back ancestral pottery, basket weaving, jewelry making, and ancestral dance. They brought back their healing practices and justice systems, and decided to feel proud of their language and heritage. They began to regularly perform their rituals that build community and their early morning gatherings around the fire where they make decisions together after listening to the wisdom of the guayusa plant.
And perhaps the most difficult dismantling of a system that was violent to them was the decision to hack the western education program and build their own Forest School, an Indigenous led school where the forests, chakras and rivers are the teachers and the members of the community the facilitators. This transcendental move allows the youth to stay in the community and learn about their traditions, stories and relationships with the other beings of the forest so that they can protect them from outside pressures.
You see, the women knew that the western world had disconnected their heads from their hearts and had convinced them to use intelligence separated from wisdom. Thankfully, they had the courage to restore this connection.
To me, this is the true power of the feminine essence.
And when this mind/heart connection is restored, the ecological regeneration process comes naturally. Families willingly remove the obstacles so that nature can recover on its own. The biodiversity on their lands makes a comeback and the soils begin to sequester and hold carbon again. The forests give back by providing more nutrition, medicine, peace and teachings.
This is the symbiotic relationship that Indigenous Peoples have known and maintained for millennia, and it is THIS RELATIONSHIP the one that is creating healthy, stable ecosystems once again in Mushullakta.
In summary, we tend to think that solutions that are under this category of “RESTORATION”, such as tree planting or carbon offsetting that are so popular now, create the positive changes we want. But through this journey, I’ve learned that THIS HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP with the forest is the one that really creates the long-lasting, scalable, friction free and truly transformational changes. And we bring back these healthy relationships unless we create spaces and opportunities to go from RESTORING, TO RE-STORYING and RE-WORLDING.
COLLECTIVE RE-WORLDING
The transformation in Mushullakta is a powerful example of what’s possible, but it wasn’t achieved alone. Co-restorers from around the world shared resources, and our organization played a vital role as the bridge between restorers and supporters.
Now, more than ever, we have the opportunity to replicate this success. Imagine regenerative communities like Mushullakta emerging around the world, where people live in harmony with their ecosystems, guided by Indigenous wisdom.
This is an invitation to join us in this process of collective re-worlding. Whether through financial support, participation in programs, or sharing these stories, every action matters. Together, we can move beyond transactional relationships with nature to truly transformational change.
Will you join us in this collective journey toward a thriving, biodiverse future?