Key Takeaways from Episode 7 of Rewilding Amazonia

• Ecotourism works because the product is the forest. Eduardo Nycander spent 35 years proving that a healthy ecosystem is worth more as an experience than cleared land. A peer-reviewed economic analysis published in PLOS One found that ecotourism-controlled land in Tambopata had a higher net present value than every competing land use studied — including logging, ranching, agriculture, and gold mining.
• Sustainable forestry can produce more forest over time. Conservacion Otorongo harvests less than one tree per hectare every twenty years. When Drago Bozovich’s team returned to their first harvested plot after two decades, they found more trees and more volume than before. The model is no longer a thesis — it’s a measured result.
• Poverty is the entry point to deforestation. Isabel Felandro of Cool Earth argues that communities don’t choose to sell their trees — they choose survival. A peer-reviewed study published in Science Advances found that cash transfers to communities in poverty reduced deforestation by thirty percent, with roughly half of those avoided losses in biodiverse primary forest.
• Indigenous and local communities protect 36% of the world’s intact tropical forests but receive less than 1% of international climate funding. Research by the Rainforest Foundation Norway found the gap is structurally embedded in the bureaucratic requirements of climate finance systems.
• Macaws don’t build nests — they depend on ancient trees. Research published in Ornithological Applications confirmed that secondary forests recovering after logging still lack the large, deep, high cavities macaws require, even after 18–34 years of regrowth. By the time population decline becomes visible, the generation that would have replaced the aging birds is already gone.
• Economic stability protects defenders. When communities have income, they have the agency to say no to loggers, miners, and coca growers — and the means to travel to a capital city and claim their rights.

The New Economy

You’ve been awake since 4am—not because you had to be, but because you couldn’t sleep. You’ve been looking forward to this since you booked the trip, maybe longer. Your guide is at the back of the boat, reading the river in the dark with the ease of someone who has done this a thousand times, and you’re at the bow, watching the sky lighten over the treeline.

When the clay bank comes into view, your heart leaps in anticipation.

The first macaws arrive in pairs, feeling out the bank from the canopy above, calling back and forth before dropping lower. Then more come, and more—until the clay wall is covered in a living, shrieking tapestry of color, hundreds of birds jostling for position, scraping clay with their beaks, and filling the river valley with a cacophony of noise. They’re here for the minerals in the clay, and they’ve been making this journey to this same bank for longer than anyone has been keeping records.

This isn’t just a spectacle of nature. It’s also a living example of how the forest can sustain communities economically. The lodge you slept in is co-owned by the Ese’eja community on the Tambopata River, your guide is Ese’eja, and the money you spent to be here flows back into the community who owns this territory. The forest is standing and the river is clean enough to fish because this—your presence, excitement, and four o’clock alarm—is worth more than destroying it.

Welcome to Episode 7 of Rewilding Amazonia. I’m Brooke Mitchell. Let’s discover how the forest pays for itself.

Eduardo Nycander: Ecotourism as Conservation

A Very Deep Question

We were near the end of our conversation when I asked Eduardo what had kept him going for thirty-five years. He started tearing up before he answered. And then, he told me a story about a macaw.

Eduardo: “I remember I was eight or ten years old, telling my mother I wanted a macaw. And she always said no. One time I asked her why — and she told me that when she was seventeen, a pilot who was trying to date her brought a macaw as a gift. They put it in the kitchen, closed the doors, and went to sleep. Next day, the whole kitchen was destroyed. My grandmother went crazy. Everybody crying. A terrible thing. So I understood that. And then I became a wildlife photographer. I went to the Amazon and I was working at the macaw clay licks with Wildlife Conservation Society. I had hundreds of macaws in front of me, five meters away, taking pictures of their faces. The noise, the color, the smell. I used to go to the blind at five in the morning, before sunrise, and sleep there until they came and woke me up with their noise. I lived there for six months alone — me, my boat, and my camera. I developed a huge attachment to the Amazon and to the wildlife. It’s like you find peace.”

Eduardo Nycander founded Rainforest Expeditions in 1989. He trained as an architect, published photographs in National Geographic, and spent six months alone at the clay lick when he decided that the only way to keep doing this work — to keep being near the thing he loved — was to build a business around it. His parents provided the initial investment, and for fifteen years, he paid himself almost nothing, reinvesting everything back into the company. From the very beginning, the model rested on a powerful premise: the health of the forest and the health of the business were the same thing.

Eduardo: “Ecotourism needs a big piece of land — and if the land is not in good quality in terms of the forest and the animals, your business is not going to work. What ecotourism came and proved is that the community’s knowledge has a value. Their culture has a value. Their language has a value. Little by little they started learning: the larger the forest, the more animals, the better the experience for guests — and the more money. So they will have their own motivation to protect the rainforest, because it represents a way of increasing their standard of life.”

An economic analysis published in PLOS One would eventually put hard numbers to what Eduardo had been testing by instinct. Researchers compared every major land use in the Tambopata region—ecotourism, cattle ranching, agriculture, unsustainable logging, gold mining—and found that the net present value of ecotourism-controlled land was higher than all of them. The forest left standing and managed for tourism was worth more per hectare than anything that required clearing it.

Walking House to House

The partnership with the Ese’eja community of Infierno came together in the mid-1990s through what Eduardo still describes as a moment of perfect timing.

Eduardo: “At the same time we were thinking of buying land to build a lodge in between our two sites, we got a letter from the community telling us they wanted to talk about how to work together in the future. It was a perfect combination — us needing a lodge, and the community wanting to work at a community level. So we did a joint venture. It took six months to walk from house to house. I prepared panels with drawings explaining how the project would work, and we walked — me and two members of the community — from house to house, from house to house, to explain literally how it would work. After six months we had a big assembly meeting, and they voted. Almost everybody voted yes. Just two people decided not to vote because they felt they didn’t understand very well. Not one vote against.”

Funding was the harder battle.

Eduardo: “I was doing fundraising for a year, putting money from the company to keep the project alive. But I never got the money — all the grants were saying it was difficult to give money to the private sector. Then I got a message from the MacArthur Foundation saying they would support all the training for the native community. And then a phone call from the Peru Bilateral Fund saying they would support the infrastructure. I said — great. We have the two most important things. So the project started. In the beginning it was rocky, then it became good, then rocky again — because NGOs and government didn’t like the idea of a private sector doing this. We had a lot of opposition from outsiders coming inside the community saying things that were not right. But the project went so well that the community started getting dividends. They saw: we are getting money, a lot of people are working. The community got strong enough to prevent outsiders from trying to poison the relationship. And now NGOs and government are the first ones asking us to give lectures and presentations. They use our model as a sample to follow. It was very wrong in the beginning. Then came the rocky period. And now it’s like cruise speed.”

A Parallel Economy

What Eduardo built over those years was more than a lodge. It seeded an entire parallel economy—guides trained at Rainforest Expeditions who went on to work across the region, chefs who moved into Puerto Maldonado’s hospitality sector, fish farmers supplying fresh catch to the kitchen, community members hired specifically to watch harpy eagle nests near the trails, university degrees funded by lodge profits, accountants and marketing professionals who came back to work in tourism.

Eduardo: “It promotes other economies in the community — it’s a team of activities. It’s not the golden bullet. But it spreads the benefit and trains members of the community to take other jobs. Now when other people come and say, we want to rent your land to do agriculture — they say no. Because they know: if you do agriculture, in three years the land will not produce and there will be no money. But if we protect it, the money comes permanently. Because the resources are not being destroyed.”

But the lesson Eduardo said he most wanted to pass on wasn’t about the economic model.

Eduardo: “I went to the community with a paternalistic mind. That is the worst way of working with local people. What I learned is that they are well prepared — you just have to be patient and learn the language they speak, and never think that your solutions are going to be the best alternatives. By giving the problems, and the alternative, and the opportunity, and the right for them to solve the problems — it gave me freedom. It was unbelievable. They came with ideas that were harder, stronger, and more radical than mine. Now when I talk with members of the community, we are at the same level. We have the same heart, the same mind.”

The Macaw Legacy

Near the end of our conversation, Eduardo returned to the macaws as a specific, urgent problem that his whole career has been trying to solve.

Eduardo: “Macaws don’t build nests. They evolved with the forest over millions of years. They use holes in very old trees — a branch breaks, insects eat the inside, and in fifty years you have a cavity that a macaw can use. These trees live hundreds of years. And sadly there is an industry that cuts trees that took five hundred years to form a nest — and cuts them in three days. What’s happening is that macaws are not having places to nest. You see the population looking apparently healthy, but actually they are aging. There are no juveniles coming into the next generation. Suddenly the population is going to collapse. My legacy should be that I provide nests that will stop macaws from getting extinct in the wild.”

Research confirmed what Eduardo observed firsthand — that secondary forests recovering after logging only partially regain the large, deep, high cavities that macaws require, even after 18–34 years of regrowth. By the time the population decline becomes visible, the generation that would have replaced the aging birds is already gone.

That invisible, slow-motion collapse is what Eduardo has spent thirty-five years working against. And in recent years, he’s concluded that Rainforest Expeditions alone can’t stop it.

Eduardo: “The philosophy of Rainforest Expeditions right now is training every ecotourism initiative in the region. Because if we don’t make this region completely well prepared for ecotourism, other activities that are not compatible with conservation are going to come in. Even Rainforest Expeditions — the largest company in the region — us by ourselves won’t be able to protect the Amazon. And if we don’t protect the region, I’m going to be out of business soon. So what I’m doing is teaching what I did to others. We become a huge group of people, companies, communities working well — and then together we will be able to protect the forest. When the big problems come, it’s going to be an army with no guns to stop the risks and the dangers to the Amazon.”

Drago Bozovich: Productive Conservation

An Oracle in the Office

After my conversation with Eduardo, I kept thinking about those centuries-old trees the macaws depend on. It made me wonder: is it possible to harvest trees sustainably in the Amazon at all? The question matters—the world still demands timber—and that line of thinking led me to a family that has been working in the Peruvian Amazon for nearly eighty years.

Drago Bozovich is the third generation of his family to manage forests in Madre de Dios. His grandfather arrived from Montenegro after World War II—a Yugoslav fighter who had fought with the Allies and couldn’t go home when the communists took over. He was offered two jobs by the Red Cross in Lima: work the docks at the port, or cross the Andes and work as a lumberjack in the Amazon.

Drago: “He was young, he was strong — one paid a lot more than the other, but was much harder. He didn’t think twice. He hopped on a truck, and four days later he ended up in a small town called Oxapampa, where a lot of European immigrants had gone, particularly after the first World War. Immediately he started working as a lumberjack. That’s where he met my grandmother. He got married, started working with his brothers-in-law, and founded a small sawmill.”

That sawmill eventually became a company. The company grew across three generations, expanding from Oxapampa to Lima, then from Peru to international markets in the United States, Mexico, and Asia. Drago’s father took it into the second generation. Then, in 2001, when Drago had just finished college, his father died suddenly and tragically. Thankfully, his grandfather was still alive and took Drago under his wing.

Drago: “Grandpa, we’re all in — whatever you do, we’ll do it. My grandfather lived five more years after that, and he could teach us. He was already semi-retired, but he would come to the office every morning at five AM and wait for me. I’d try to get there by six, just to have a quick chat and ask him questions — what would he do if he was me. He was like an oracle. Just show me the way, right or left.”

The Model

The third generation that Drago, his brother, and his cousin built is different from what came before in one important way: they turned the company’s sustainability commitments from a byproduct of how they operated into the explicit foundation of the business. Maderera Bozovich—the family timber company now over seventy years old—operates alongside Conservacion Otorongo, a separate company created specifically to manage their forest concession under a productive conservation model. Together, they oversee approximately 183,000 hectares of primary Amazon rainforest in the Madre de Dios region—one of the largest FSC-certified sustainable forestry operations in the Peruvian Amazon.

The harvesting itself operates on a twenty-year cycle. Each year, Drago’s team enters a new section of the concession and conducts a full inventory of every species present, commercial and non-commercial alike. From that inventory, they identify mature trees that are no longer producing seeds and meet national sustainability standards for harvesting. At least twenty percent of the best seed-producing trees are always protected. Brazil nut trees are never touched. The roads built for access are left to the jungle to reclaim.

Drago: “The intensity of our harvest is less than one tree per hectare every twenty years. It’s like pulling a hair from your head — that’s it. You’ll never notice. People sometimes forget that trees are living beings and they die, just like anything else. So you have two options: harvest this mature tree and make a product that gives jobs and pays taxes across the whole production chain — it’s beautiful material, you can build instruments from it — or just let it die eventually with no positive economic impact. The jungle manages itself. We’re just working with it.”

The proof of this approach can be seen twenty years later.

Drago: “Conservacion Otorongo is past the twenty year cycle now, so we’re back to plot number one. And it’s amazing — the regeneration power of this vibrant forest. The micro harvest we did with so little impact, us staying there all those years checking everything was going well — the second time we went into the same area we explored and harvested more than twenty years ago, we found more trees, more cubic meters of wood. It’s not a thesis anymore. It’s not a projection. It’s reality that we can measure. The model does work.”

Year-Round Employment

During the dry season, the work is timber. During the wet season, when machines bog down in the mud and harvesting is impossible, the forest offers something else: Brazil nuts. Madre de Dios is unusually rich in Brazil nut trees, and Conservacion Otorongo has built a second operation around the wet season harvest.

Drago: “During the rainy season we would hire more people — people that live around the concession in small towns. We get them organized, we finance them, we give them whatever infrastructure they need, and we collect the Brazil nuts together. Most of what we sell — the income, the money — goes to them. It’s a great way of having them working year round, having an income. Usually what happens to woodworkers in the rainy season is they eat up their savings. Sometimes they don’t make it to the next season. They get indebted. We take care of these people. We organize them, and together we sell to the factories that export. I think we’re now the largest production unit for Brazil nuts in Peru.”

A Sanctuary for Wildlife

Year-round employment in a region where the alternative is seasonal work and debt—that’s the social argument for productive conservation. But there’s also what it has done to the forest itself, and to the wildlife inside it.

A wildlife research institution has been monitoring jaguars on Conservacion Otorongo’s land for years. What their monitoring found surprised even Drago.

Drago: “We have a jaguar density that’s even higher than Manu National Park — which is a very well-known park in southern Peru. We’ve become a sanctuary for wildlife because of deforestation everywhere around us. There’s so little forest left out there, at least in this frontier land, so there’s a lot of migration of wildlife into our concession. We get to see these beautiful creatures from time to time when we go to the forest. There are scientists that spend their whole lives and can’t see one in the wild. In other environments they’ll smell you and run. Here, they don’t feel threatened by our presence. They’re not afraid of us.”

It isn’t only jaguars. Magali from Amazon Shelter—the wildlife rescue center in Puerto Maldonado that appeared earlier in this series—has released animals directly into the concession. In just three decades of management, Conservacion Otorongo’s forest has become, by default, one of the last large refuges in the region for the wildlife being pushed out everywhere else.

We Love This

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Drago the same question I’d asked Eduardo—why he still does this. His answer was different in tone, but not in essence.

Drago: “I just don’t think too much about it. We love what we do. We’ve invested so much — and I’m not talking about money — to have what we have: this privilege to manage these forests. Sometimes the return on investment is very small, if any. The banks ask us: why do you do it? There’s so much work, so much sweat and tears — and unfortunately we have to say blood too. But it’s just, hey — we love this. It’s not that we can’t do anything else. We just love this.”

That love doesn’t make him romantic about the stakes. When I asked about the limits of what his model can do—about all the land around him without a company like his managing it—his answer was blunt.

Drago: “You want the forest to remain forest? You need to give it economic value for the people that live in it or around it. If there’s no value for that standing forest, it’ll be destroyed. Where there’s not a private manager of the forest — the forest is gone. Totally gone. If it wasn’t for us, a big part of this beautiful forest would not be standing. Year after year it would just be burning down. We need more companies like ours — this model replicated two hundred times. There’s so much abandoned land now open to all these illegal, unsustainable activities. If these guys don’t have a job with us — illegal mining, drug trafficking, migratory subsistence farming. You choose. That’s the reality.”

Isabel Felandro: Cash, Trust, and Conservation

Walking Away from the Silo

Eduardo and Drago both reached the same core conclusion from very different paths: the forest survives when the people who live in it have a strong economic reason to protect it. But their models work best for communities that have either a wildlife experience to offer visitors or valuable forest products to harvest. What about the communities that don’t? The families living deep in the Amazon with no lodge, no concession, and no obvious product to sell.

This is where Isabel Felandro spends her days.

Isabel trained as an environmental lawyer in Peru, worked for the Ministry of Environment, attended international climate conferences, and eventually found herself at Cambridge doing a Master’s in environmental policy, even considering a PhD. Then she walked away from it all.

Isabel: “It felt a little bit like I was working in a silo. I wanted to do something more tangible that I could really see the impact of. Working in government sometimes felt very bureaucratic — so many steps, very top down. So I went back to Peru, because if I want to work on what’s really happening in the conservation crisis, where better to be than South America? And I was really lucky to find an organization like Cool Earth. It felt very honest. Working directly with indigenous communities — since I started in 2019 it’s been a long learning process. The most I’ve learned in this work is when I do field work. When I go, I visit the projects, I talk to the people, I really understand the context, the realities. And then every step after is easier.”

Poverty Is the Entry Point

Cool Earth is a global climate organization that has been working with indigenous and local communities for nearly twenty years, providing direct cash, data, and resources to protect rainforests. The model is built on a premise that Isabel states plainly.

Isabel: “People don’t choose deforestation. They don’t choose: oh, I’m going to sell my trees, sell my land, my territories. It’s more because they lack income stability. Selling the trees or the land sometimes becomes the only survival strategy. Imagine if your child is sick, if you want to provide food to your family. Sometimes the only way to get that easy cash is to sell a tree. Poverty is an entry point to deforestation in those areas — especially remote areas like the Amazon rainforest. They lack access to basic needs. The government has sometimes abandoned them. They have external pressures from coca growers, from mining, from logging. And now on top of that, they’re seeing more unpredictable and intense flooding, forest fires. So it’s becoming more challenging to live in that environment — and if they don’t have the income stability, protecting the forest becomes harder.”

A peer-reviewed study published in Science Advances found that cash transfers to communities in poverty reduced deforestation in participating villages by thirty percent, with roughly half of those avoided losses in biodiverse primary forest.

And yet the communities doing the most to protect the forest receive almost none of the money allocated to protect it. Research by the Rainforest Foundation Norway found that indigenous peoples and local communities protect thirty-six percent of the world’s intact tropical forests, but receive less than one percent of international climate funding. The gap isn’t just unfair—it’s structurally embedded.

Isabel: “The funding structure, the climate finance structure, is so bureaucratic. It’s very top down. For those communities to access that money is really hard — a lot of paperwork, a lot of legal requirements, language barriers sometimes. I remember this woman saying she had been applying for the Green Climate Fund for ten years and hadn’t gotten access yet. And the problem is mistrust. We don’t trust vulnerable people when it comes to providing unconditional direct funding to them. We celebrate them as the guardians of the forest — we read that in all the headlines — but we don’t provide the resources so they can continue doing it.”

Cool Earth’s answer to that mistrust is to simply not replicate it. Their model — unconditional cash transfers directly to communities, with no strings attached and no conditions on how the money is used — is the structural opposite of the climate finance system Isabel spent years working inside.

Designing Together

Three years ago, Isabel and her team took the model a step further, launching the first conservation basic income pilot in the Peruvian Amazon. Inspired by universal basic income principles—regular, individual, unconditional payments—the pilot was designed in partnership with two woman-led indigenous organizations.

Isabel: “When we pitched this pilot to the leader of ONAMIAP, she was very suspicious. Like: this organization is gonna come and just provide unconditional cash to us, no strings attached, no conditions? Historically there is a lot of mistrust, because communities have experienced the abandonment of the government, armed conflict, big organizations coming and giving very little back. So we had to explain the concept of what a basic income pilot was and why we wanted to trial it with them. But what was really interesting for that organization was that we said: we are going to design the pilot together. That was game changing for them. Because it’s very rarely that an organization comes and says that. Most of the time it’s a very top-down approach that has already been designed far away from the communities.”

In November 2023, Cool Earth sent the first payments to nearly two hundred people across three Asháninka and Yánesha communities in the Junín region. For two years, those communities received regular individual payments. Early assessments found that participants used the money primarily for basic needs, reported feeling less stressed and happier, and had more time to engage in conservation activities such as reforesting water springs and planting gardens. According to the communities’ own feedback, the stability also strengthened their ability to resist external pressures.

Isabel: “What we have seen is that people have been using the money to cover basic needs — and we knew that from other cash transfer experience that we had. But also they report feeling less stressed, happier. It has strengthened the bonding in their families but also within their communities. They have more free time to spend with their children. More free time to participate in communal activities — like reforesting water springs, buying seeds, starting gardens, planting trees. And just knowing that people feel happier, less stressed, and still committed to conservation — that’s an amazing outcome.”

Economic Stability as a Shield

There is another dimension to economic stability that goes beyond conservation outcomes. Isabel sees it clearly in the places where Cool Earth works.

Isabel: “When people lack economic resources, they become more vulnerable to pressure, to coercion, and sometimes to violence. When we are talking about defenders — those communities don’t just lack support, they’re exposed to more risk. Sometimes indigenous leaders give their lives in protection of their communities, their territories, their lives. And sometimes they do it with no agency, with no support, with no income. We have seen how indigenous leaders use the money we provide to travel to a capital city, to claim for their rights — to talk to the Ministry of Environment, to talk to Congress, because they want their rights to be respected, they want recognition of their land. Just providing economic support can help on their mission of doing that. And probably for them to be less vulnerable, less exposed.”

Isabel knows the model isn’t a silver bullet.

Isabel: “A big part of the work we do now is advocacy. We created the advocacy department two years ago because we want more governments to understand that this model works. Big institutions, governments — hopefully starting to run more basic income, unconditional cash transfers to indigenous communities in other parts of the world. And I was at the climate change conference in Brazil and there was more conversation around how we can shift the system so more indigenous people can get the funding. That also provides hope — that little by little, there are more conversations around that, and recognition that we have to provide more support to indigenous people.”

Conclusion

Eduardo, Drago, and Isabel are making the same argument from three different corners of the Amazon—that the forest survives when it has more value standing than gone. A community that earns its living guiding tourists to a clay lick has every reason to protect the old-growth trees the macaws nest in. A family that has managed 183,000 hectares for eighty years and found more trees on the second pass than the first has proof that the model works. And a community that receives unconditional cash no longer has to choose between feeding its children and protecting its forest. The economic case for the standing forest isn’t idealism—it’s evidence. But evidence only goes so far without the legal frameworks, finance flows, and political will to back it up. That’s where we’re headed in the season finale.

This is Rewilding Amazonia. I’m Brooke Mitchell. See you in Episode 8.