Center for Amazon Community Ecology

It's been quite sometime since I have uploaded a blog. I have been busy working on various projects that will bring new, inspirational, encouraging and motivational content to this blog. I will be changing a few things around to reflect this, but until then, please enjoy this post.

The Amazon Rain Forest has the largest concentration of animal and plant life in the world. It is also home to hundreds of indigenous groups and tens of thousands of other people who make their living in the forest.

One of the best strategies for conserving the Amazon forest is to strengthen communities at the front lines of deforestation and unsustainable development pressures.

Supporting people's intimate knowledge and use of plants for traditional medicines reinforces the connection between healthy forests and a community's well being. People who can harvest fruit and fish are less likely to burn forest to raise cattle or cash crops to buy other foods from the city. People can sell NTFPs (non-timber forest products) as one way to buy basic necessities and help local development projects. Self-sufficient communities are better able to resist accepting outside proposals that bring in short-term cash as the expense of their environment.

Dr. Campbell Plowden, Ph.D. and founder of the Center for Amazon Community Ecology (CACE), has worked for tropical forest conservation since 1985 with various groups such as Greenpeace, the Environmental Investigation Agency, Amazon Watch, and the Humane Society of the U.S.

Dr. Plowden earned a Ph.D in ecology from Penn State University. He has since published numerous articles on various tropical forest issues, helped formed the Timbre' Indian Support Committee with State College Friends Meeting and other,s to support land rights, cultural preservation and other development projects.

The following is Dr. Plowden's story..."For me, I have been an environmentalist my whole life. I worked initially on the Save the Whales Campaign. From that I heard about the tropical forest issue which ultimately become the endangered species issue. I started my first organization in the late eighties, visited the Amazon for the first time, and got an overview of the issues that were happening in the Rain Forest.

I worked on Rain Forest issues there for a few years (global/political) level. There was a lot of attention to convince the world about making changes on their foreign policies regarding the tropical Timbre' issues. I got to a point where I felt I was not being effective working at that global advocacy style.

As we were learning about these various threats to the Rain Forest, it wasn't just about the trees, but also the people and a lot of these forest projects involved relocation of the people or activities that would destroy the natural resources that they depended on for food, shelter, medicine, etc. The point that I came to was that it is one thing to point out the problems and consequences of certain activities, but 'what do we do?' A lot of campaigns have tried to support the rights of these Amazon people, but what does that mean.

In one sense, these people should have the right to stay in the territory that their ancestors have lived in. With that, though, was the applied conservation strategy that the people were better stewards of keeping the land intact. While this is true up to a point, but it becomes not so easy to remain that way if the borders are not protected. But also, do you expect indigenous people to stay living in an absolute primative state. No. The don't want it. It is not viable. You would be hard pressed to find any indigenous group on the planet that once they have an outside society that they want to live in the same way.

It is certainly the extent to where they want to engage. It varies from place to place, but the trend is that people want to integrate with the outside world in some way to have better health care, better education, better economic opportunities, the ability to buy stuff. So, when I left Green Peace, I went back to school and cam to Penn State. I wanted to look at non-timbre forest ways of harvesting but in the indigenous context.

In Brazil there had been a lot of movement about giving indigenous people the rights to their land without much attention to the economic development side of it. So I spent the better part of two years living in a small Indian village in the Amazon doing case studies on a half-dozen, non-timbre forest products. I looked at fruit, fiber, liquid resin, a solid resin and a latex. This allowed me to develop field skills for learning the sustainable harvest of a wide variety of these types of products. My hope was that this would open up possibilities for the village I was living in. Unfortunately that did not happen. What I found was that, for one reason or another, it is not easy to find products that can provide a steady source of income. Either they are very rare, but if they are abundant, sometimes they might spoil before getting to market. Or when harvesting, you have to do it carefully or you will kill off the population.

All the factors have to work out to come up with viable products. Then what is the market like? Usually it generated very little income for the harvesters.

Local villages started bringing in handi-crafts to barter with in the indigenous villages as a way to obtain what they needed. I brought a few of these items back her inbetween my trips and started selling them at our Quaker meetings. I was getting far more than what other non-timbre' products were bringing in. If I could sell these products for $20-25 and get that for just one product verses hours of backbreaking work to get less, I was on to something. This was the only way for these people to get ahead.

When I finished my work, there was one product that fascinated me, it was a resin from a tree called Kopal. I started looking around for study sites about this. I found a gentlemen in Peru that was doing something similar. Although it wasn't the same, it was the same type but from a different species. I was doing this in the early 2000's while still looking for jobs in the U.S. No luck in academia, so I went back to environmental groups for a little while and spent six months working with the Amazon Watch. I left because my heart was no longer into hard hitting environmental work. I then moved to another group that did undercover investigations that impact wildlife issues around the world, but being Quaker for about ten years, I came to the conclusion that the things I had to do was not what I wanted, no longer could do, so I left that group.

Since I could not find anyone to help me do what I wanted to do, I decided to start my own group. I started in 2006, and with the help of a couple of friends, they gave me enough money to go to Peru and get started for one month. For the first couple of years, I really depended on friends. We got our 501c3, a couple of small grants, and slowly build up.

From the beginning the focus was on Kapul and knowing I wanted to do something with that. Fortunately, I met a woman from Los Angeles who was the president of a specialty fragrance company, I went from the idea of using Kapul resin to making incense. Our first batch not not good. I knew nothing about making incense except what I learned on the Internet. So, fortunately this woman happened to be coming to Peru and asked if I had ever thought about making essential oil. We could use the resin and leaf to make the oil.

This was the beginning of the Rosewood Project. It started with the Kapul. We got ourselves a small distilling unity and produced some oil that was nice smelling. We sent samples to the woman in Los Angeles. Some of the bathes weren't good, but one was. I turns out that she wasn't impressed with it as a fragrance which can from the most common species, but was impressed with the one which was the rarest species. We put this on hold for awhile.

I was approached by a colleague from Penn State to review a grant proposal on this other group in Southern Peru. They were working on a project to document a plant for medicinal use by native Shamen. I then found out about this little foundation in Los Angeles and wondered if they wanted to fund us. We submitted a proposal outlining the work we were doing with the essential oils and handi-crafts. They gave us a small grant for a year.

At the end of the year, they looked at our work and the work of another group and suggested we may want to work together. Another year went by. They provided us a small grant so that we could visit and see how our projects worked. That is when things clicked. We wrote a joint proposal which became the Rosewood Project. It was a combining of their expertise of planting trees and our relationships we had developed with the local communities.

Things progressed and we are now looking for a way to produce a line of essential oils from the trees that we can sell in Peru and the United States. It could be used in the fragrance area, but we found another gentlemen who is into using oils for aromatherapy in the states. Research is still needed on this project for the use use of oils for aromatherapy."

I concluded by asking Dr. Plowden several questions.

In your Mission Statement, you state, 'one important path to creating a sustainable future for the Amazon is to strengthen its traditional communities.' Why do you believe that is important?

Because I have seen examples of that when it happens and examples of failure when it doesn't happen.

Every indigenous community is under pressure to let go of their cultural heritage, language, festivals, etc. To successfully integrate in the modern world, some of these traditions need to be let go, but not all of them. I have found where I worked in Peru, it is a ethnically rich area. There are fifteen communities that are under this one federation which represents four different ethnic groups. The Yawa, which was the oldest and largest in the area, have been the most fractured when the modern world came in. As non-natives moved in, the traditions and language were lost.

The other three groups which were brought from Columbia to Peru as slaves. The have held onto their traditions more so than the original group before them. We have most success in the Columbian communities because they have a sense of pride of their language and traditions.

We mostly work with women artistians to help them get what they need for their families. We work with them to help develop their styles of handi-crafts that can sell in the United States to help them get what they need/want. This lead to them making guitar straps, water bottle carriers, hot pads, placemats, etc. One thing that has been very successful are the Christmas tree ornaments. We are also getting them together in "like" groups so we can produce more of these products to sell.

You just celebrated your tenth anniversary, how does that make you feel?

I feel good about what we have done. We've done okay. We have made progress and I see another ten years ahead.

The CACE has been recently accepted into the Fair Trade Federation. The items that the sell are now fair trade. Being a member of the FTF will give them the opportunity to expand so they can make a major difference in the Amazon communities economically.

For more information, please visit their website at: http://www.amazonecology.org/

Dr. C