I may be the chair of RP and know something about climate change, carbon offsets, alternative energy, etc but I had never been south of the US, except across the border to Nuevo Laredo or Juarez. So I jumped at the chance to visit Peru when our founder and ED, Niyanta Spelman, was going to be there.

What can I say about the trip? I was blown away by the beauty of the Andes, the cloud forest, the rainforest, the people. I was horrified by the amount of low level air pollution on the east side of Lima. I was sleep deprived due to traveling overnight across the Andes by car, sleeping on stone floors in mountain village community centers and school buildings, having diarrhea (Montezuma’s Revenge!), meeting local communities and regional government representatives at any time of the day, and trying to get by on my two months of Spanish lessons (honestly I do speak French quite well but that didn’t help too much on the ground!). Thank God for Lucia Eslava , a recent graduate in forestry from the university in Lima, who joined us as adviser on many things relating to trees, agriculture, the communities we visited, and most importantly acted as translator! We have now taken Lucia on as Rainforest Partnership’s first intern – she is wonderful.

Many of the communities with which we met were tiny, had no electricity or running water, apart from a stand pipe or a stream which was often polluted. Occasionally, if there was electricity, there would be one TV in the village. Our community meetings were often held in the middle of the only street running through the village, with chairs being provided for Niyanta, Lucia and me and everyone else who could attend standing around us. Here’s the really fascinating thing, these communities understand the value of the forests, they don’t want to cut down trees thoughtlessly, they want to be able to prohibit indiscriminate logging, stop other people from stealing butterflies and orchids, but they need to be able to find additional ways of making a living. That’s where we hope Rainforest Partnership may be able to step in, acting as a catalyst to help these communities give life to their own alternatives to cutting down the forest through providing information on avoided deforestation, aforestation, shade grown products, etc; aiding the formation of partnerships between local communities and with local non-profit organizations; helping communities gain title to their land; helping communities gain Rainforest Alliance certification for forestry and agricultural products which will in turn bring them higher commodity prices; raising funds to initiate projects like trout farming or ecotourism; and creating marketing links between products from the communities and the US (particularly in the Austin area to begin with). As we reiterated every time we talked to communities, we want every dollar which Rainforest Partnership raises for project support to go directly to the community projects.

There are so many relatively simple steps that can be taken to start things happening – a couple of thousand dollars can meet the costs of obtaining community title to the land in many of the small communities we visited; we can make it possible for students from the Austin area to spend time in the communities teaching English (ability to speak English being one of the keys to being able to develop ecotourism); our local universities in Central Texas can help with soil and species surveys and GPS surveys of existing rainforest.

Through Niyanta’s work in Ecuador and Peru, we have already formed a partnership with a non profit organization, Conservation y Desarollo (CyD), which will work with us to establish support for local projects.

Now we, the Rainforest Partnership board, need to get down to the in depth planning of how and where we are going to act. To this end, later this month when Niyanta is safely back in the US, we plan a two day retreat. Watch this blog for more info on this and how we intend to officially launch Rainforest Partnership!