Alternative Economy jobs created

Too often the jobs Amazonian young people can actually get (if they are lucky) are in oil, mining, or timber  extraction which are damaging to the environment, (or, worse yet, coca/cocaine production and delivery).  The jobs young people aspire to are carried out in the languages of international commerce (Spanish or English).  The reality is that Amazonian languages will never become international languages of commerce. 

     

What then?  The proposed solution is for an expanded indigenous network to increase the productivity of a forest so that it yields not only food, medicine, and lumber but also jobs in birding, guiding, recreation, or managing tropical ecology research projects carried out in the forest, providing wild animal rehabilitation services etc.  In this way an alternative economy emerges where indigenous languages can flourish in the workplace and  traditional knowledge of forest and chacra are used in new contexts.  

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Donor purchases of  Amazonian forest for preservation are combined with acontribution of a salaries for local native persons to manage that forest.   This would be proportional to the size of the forest so that for example the purchase of each hundred hectares would be combined with the contribution of 1 job above minimum wage for x period of years.   The person hired would work in a team so that a one thousand hectare forest would have management team of 10 indigenous young people.

The teams work under the supervision of academic and indigenous experts to not only guard the forest but to increase its productivity.  Income from this productivity would be reinvested in the forest so as to create more green jobs to hire more of the local indigenous population. 

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