Rainforest Conservation
Rainforests cover just 6% of the Earth’s surface, but are home to 80% of all terrestrial species. They are relied upon for shelter, food, and medicine - they clean the air, absorb greenhouse gas emissions, and stabilize earth’s climate, both locally and globally. Though critical to every life on earth, we are destroying rainforests at an alarming rate.
As human populations rise and forests are cleared for industry and subsistence agriculture, the future of natural habitat is at risk.
We work with people who want to conserve their forest homelands, but have struggled as they have lived at the whim of governments who have historically sold their lands off to the highest bidder for industrial farming, mining, and logging.
Commercial poachers also take their toll, while service roads have cut through primary forests, opening up vast, previously unreachable areas of wildlife habitat, which, in less than a decade, has caused more than a 60% drop in the region's forest elephant population.
This devastating scale of commercial degradation has led to conservationists pleas to end the destruction. In response, and under international pressure, governments working with western, international NGOs have created national parks and “protected areas” by forcibly removing indigenous people and local communities from their homelands. These parks are achieved and maintained through violence, as large scale, top-down conservation programs place locally disputed areas under strict preservation by “eco-police.” Informed by a past forged by colonizing forces, this approach has generated little benefit to nature conservation and has been a bane to traditional forest-dependent communities who have not been respected as intrinsic components of living ecosystems. People who have thrived for thousands of years alongside wildlife and within the forest, find themselves with their human rights violated, in forced poverty at the margins of their ancestral homelands, all in the name of protecting the natural world.
Millions of people are now living in the Congo Basin Rainforest without adequate food, clean water, healthcare, education, electricity or transportation, while their traditional homelands have been ripped out from under their feet. Disempowered and fighting to feed their families, they’ve had no choice but to resort to unsustainable farming and fishing techniques which have further harmed the forest, and the lake. They want to preserve their homeland, but support and resources are necessary so they can implement viable alternatives.
Our Inclusive and Participatory Approach
Go Conscious Earth works within a framework that proves community-based conservation is best for both forests and wildlife. We work with communities that want to protect their lands. We support policies that insist on full and prior informed consent, inclusive of all people within a community forest. We encourage participatory mapping, inclusive conservation planning and monitoring, and we always honor traditional life ways and cultures in our approach.
We find that communities are able to orient around connection - to each other, to the land, rivers, lakes and wildlife - when we take this holistic approach. By supporting relationships within and between communities, as well as endangered wildlife species, and their shared placement within whole ecosystems, conservation goals are not only more easily met, but people are empowered to serve positive changes within their communities. Village networks are strengthened, and the future grows brighter.
Go Conscious Earth understands the best way to protect forests is to focus on not only endangered wildlife and ecosystems, but also local forest-dependent people who’s sustenance replies on an ongoing relationship with their ancestral lands.
