How to save the worldA global journey into making our lives better…

Saving our world’s rainforests and their incredible beauty and diversity is, undoubtedly, one of the most important challenges of our time. The gradual deforestation process around the globe is easily ignored, but is significant enough to trigger the sixth massive extinction of species since the beginning of the world.

Stopping the world’s ecosystem collapse into an irreversible nose-dive requires more than dramatic action: it requires a massive culture shift. It requires us to learn how to live in harmony with and in nature, develop sustainable communities and develop a real sense of care for life in general.

Today I want to give a new community the opportunity to share their fantastic work on building and pioneering a sustainable way of life at the very heart of the rainforest. Erica Hogan has kindly answered our questions about her community, Finca Bellavista, in Costa Rica. Here is the transcript of the interview:

When the first humans arrived in the Philippines thousands of years ago they found a group of 7,000 islands remarkably rich in natural resources. The seas where inhabited by the globe’s most diverse communities, providing an abundant source of food throughout the year. The land was covered almost entirely by rain forest that provided them with food, building materials and seemingly everlasting supplies of clear, fresh drinking water.

Few countries in the world were originally more thoroughly covered by rainforest than the Philippines: Brazil has extensive savannah and brush, Indonesia has many dry islands, Kenya and Tanzania have only small patches of rainforest…

Because the sea around the Philippines is very deep, no path were open for wildlife to cross during ice ages, when the sea levels were lower. This resulted in a country that has more unique species acre for acre than anywhere else in the world. More than 510 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians exist nowhere else in the world. As a point of comparison, Brazil, often referred to as the “storehouse of biodiversity”, has only 50% more unique species whilst being 28 times larger.

Willie Smits set out with a mission to save orang-utans some years ago. Facing tremendous degradation of their natural habitats, those intelligent animals on the verge of extinction are being killed for food, traded as pets or simply failing to thrive as their home gets degraded.

In the following video, you will see how the process of saving these creatures led him on to restoring the rainforest, creating job, preventing the creation of yet another desert and giving people and the nature a chance to develop together in harmony.