The actions, more trees

Effective scalable grassroots adoption

After bringing to market a biodiversity crediting protocol that generated $30/ha/yr in conserved side of deforestation borders, which halted the deforestation in our zone, we turned our attention to the deforested side of the plots for reforestation.

We have 104+ ecological project sites in our pipeline in 26 countries, the most developed countries are Colombia (11), Ecuador (4), Panama (4), and Mexico (3). This gave us an excellent opportunity to watch different agroforestry solutions operating in situ across the world before selecting two that had serious value to Nature, and were appealing to grassroots practitioners.

We knew we needed a systematic agricultural protocol that could replace industrial monoculture, and one that valued Indigenous chagra systems (Hernandez Marentes et al. 2022), also known as chakra (Vera V et al. 2019) or chacra (Caradonna and Apffel-Marglin 2018), and other forms of holistic traditional cultivation. These protocols were very different but describe an observed spectrum of grassroots solutions. We decided that if we could address both ends of the spectrum, we could monetize most projects.

The chief paradigms of Indigenous systems are better characterized in Indigenous literature. But we often recommend the work by Dr. Lyla June as a starting point on “architecting abundance” (Johnston 2022). As Lyla has pointed out, Indigenous food systems are biologically engineered for overproduction. For instance, pre-contact Hawaiʻi supported an estimated population of 300,000 with ahupuaʻa systems integrating uplands, streams, and fishponds. Precolonial Arctic clam gardens are complex geoengineered structures that holistically benefit the surrounding ecology while providing relatively passive food sources (Nelson and Reed 2025). These paradigms have been suppressed in colonization, but not lost, and we often find them reemerging when Indigenous practitioners are involved in the co-design of agricultural methods.