Dispatches on the people, places, and partnerships behind Sense of Source, starting with why we're working with the Waorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
The Waorani have lived within and cared for two million acres of Amazon rainforest for generations. Their ability to keep protecting it shouldn't depend on whether the outside world decides that forest has financial value. Here's why the Foundation is partnering with them, and why the people behind the forest are the point.
Ryan Lynch runs Third Millennium Alliance on a stretch of Ecuador's Pacific coast that has lost 98% of its original forest. Here's how his work on cacao, corridors, and conservation joins the Waorani of the Amazon and El Monte in the Mindo cloud forest as the third piece of the Sense of Source story.
Robert met Tom Quesenberry in 1997 at a flower farm in Guayllabamba, where Tom had built a device to remove leaf-miner pests without harming the insects that prey on them naturally. A year later, Tom and Mariela Tenorio opened El Monte Sustainable Lodge in the Mindo cloud forest, and later helped Otobo build his own lodge on the Cononaco.
Sense of Source