# The why, experience
We feel it is wise, and honest, to start with the knowns and unknowns of our endeavor. In the form of a story.
At the time we write this, the human species has crossed seven of nine planetary boundaries (Sakschewski et al. 2025). The latter article was written after the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) in Belem, when scientists of The Earth League concluded that “too little was done too late” (Rockström et al. 2025). The (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research 2025) has called it “a time of rising planetary risks after a missed decade of action”.
This book chapter is written on behalf of tangibility. It is written for the youth of today, on behalf of the youth of tomorrow, and it is written about #SexyTrees.
Throughout this chapter, Nature is capitalized deliberately. We intentionally defer extended commentary here — this is not our epistemology to define. Our Indigenous co-founders, friends, and collaborators have done a good job of speaking in their own voices on the topic, and we instead refer to their explanations. Capitalizing the word summarizes our view that Nature is living sovereign, of which humans are one part among many, laws of Nature preexist and supersede human law, and more. This is not a rhetorical choice — it is an operational constraint on our science, our economics, and our protocol design.
Nature does not take payment in the form of talk. Reports, conferences, spreadsheets, analysis, research, artificial intelligence (AI), or protests mean nothing to Nature. These are human endeavors that organize us and give us meaning, but they are not a mechanism of negotiation with planetary boundaries. Nature is implacable and beautiful, in its simple focus on tangibility. Carbon markets were designed to transact on behalf of planetary boundaries (Newell et al. 2014), and reform efforts are underway (Rights and Resources Initiative; Rights and Resources Initiative). However, these markets continue to struggle scientifically, economically, and structurally — and their structural exclusions fall disproportionately on the smallholder and Indigenous farmers best positioned to deliver results. (Roston 2025; Swinfield 2025).
What is not failing — and what the effects of deforestation on our planet’s biogeochemical cycles (Schlesinger 1997), and atmospheric ‘sky rivers’ (Sheil 2018) so clearly illustrate is essential to the maintenance of our planet, other species, and human food systems — is #SexyTrees.
What makes a tree “sexy”? This meme came from Savimbo out of desperation. Our first funding came from urban venture capital firms in the heart of Austin, Texas. This was at the height of consumer optimism and carbon greenwashing in 2022, the peak of carbon’s Gartner Hype Cycle ‘inflated expectations’ (Mingay 2022). Finance had separated Savimbo’s three founders and put them in increasingly disparate and disconnected contexts. During the accelerator, Drea Burbank, the American co-founder of Savimbo, worked out of a penthouse in downtown Austin’s tallest skyscraper, next to a petroleum microtrading firm, implementing their first investment dollars to make a business case for the grassroots Latin American project. She struggled to divert funding to the jungle, training the first grassroots staff virtually in broken Spanish. Jhony Lopez and Fernando Lezama, the two Indigenous cofounders of Savimbo in the Colombian Amazon, struggled to understand the planting instructions, but they took tangible action anyway, supplementing pragmatic solutions and reporting their success in photographs and pilot data of their first reforestation project, carefully negotiated with a friendly smallfarmer who had deforested land they were willing to replant.
In Austin, starting at a sea of urban faces, trying to make an argument for the planet, for smallfarmers, for tangible action in the height of an inflated urban startup finance bubble, Drea forgot the pitch. And instead stood silent, wordless, with the challenge of communicating the Amazonian reality in that setting. Then said simply, staring at the uncomprehending audience, “If you’re nice to me, I’ll send you a sexy photo of a tree.”
But this simple message landed where nothing else had. Dozens of laughing people, some still subscribers to Savimbo today, came up randomly from the audience and asked for a photo of a #SexyTree.
The first photo, immortalized here, is a .gif of Jhony framing a hand-tended, hand-carried planting of Amazon trees. The first reforestation plot in an area with a 10% deforestation rate in the last two decades due to illegal economies (Agudelo-Hz et al. 2023; Global Forest Watch 2024). A symbol of hope, holistic Indigenous reforestation, founders struggling to maintain their connections past the cultural barriers tearing them apart, and the seemingly insurmountable task ahead. Reforesting an entire state with minimal resources, a tradition of slash-and-burn farming, and impoverished communities with a history of violence, forgotten by governments and excluded from international markets (Gatehouse 2012).
#### **Figure 1**. Savimbo founder Jhony Lopez opening Savimbo´s first #SexyTrees reforestation plot.
When the accelerator ended, Drea packed her bags and returned to the Amazon with a Starlink, a GPS, and an office packed into a bag. Then Savimbo was co-designed from below the canopy in a windowless hut, next to a pristine river and a primary forest in the heart of the Colombian Amazon. It was made for, and from, a jungle paradise. It was built by the three founders fighting together to stop deforestation, with restricted resources, chain-saws at the borders of protected lands, and in real-time negotiations with its neighbors and 70 enrolled smallfarmers with land rights. And if you want to know why Savimbo is different — this is why.
The first year in the Amazon, Drea learned humility, because the grassroots economics Fernando and Jhony managed so effortlessly were completely distinct from any economics she had ever witnessed. This chapter explains what we have learned about executing projects on the ground and how that has changed our science and finance perspectives and methodologies.
This chapter is about “#SexyTrees”, a symbol of tangibility and of Indigenous and Western science working in harmony. It is about grassroots economics and how to optimize for local action. But please don’t forget, mired in the complexity of science, policy, technology, economics, and law — what #SexyTrees represent. They represent tangible work done by a standing army of the one billion people who live in tropical forests (Newton et al. 2020); based on tough below-canopy negotiations; on their terms, and with their resources, knowledge, and impact.
We are negotiating for the living planet with the best science and the toughest, smartest people our species has to offer, and with the help of other species that live in symbiosis with us, and under the laws of Nature, which will always supersede human laws.
And we are not negotiating alone.
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