🔅 Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Activities
Water Literacy and Education
TBS ran trainings and workshops for farmers, youth, schoolchildren, and local officials—often through village heads—so communities could see how conservation linked to their own well-being and to the land’s productivity.
Resilience Circles
With Jump/Scale, Spruce Root runs Alaska Native Resilience Circles—a year-long cohort for Indigenous entrepreneurs that treats business viability and personal and cultural well-being as one fabric. Strong communities need viable enterprises; sustainable enterprises need healthy people and cultures. The program strengthens Alaska Native businesses in ecosystem care, long-term economic resilience, overall wellness, and community mental health. Cohorts meet in person and online for workshops on personal and business finance, marketing and branding, physical health and nutrition, mental health, and Indigenous culture and values. Financial skills sit alongside cultural grounding and wellness practice. By year’s end, participants leave with sharper business tools and a denser peer network among Indigenous entrepreneurs. Spruce Root and Jump/Scale describe the work as more than training: it is part of reclaiming Indigenous knowledge, wellness, and economic sovereignty across Alaska.
Salmon Biocultural Credit Program
Salmon Returns is developing a Salmon Biocultural Credit program—a verified unit of ecological and cultural regeneration representing the restoration of salmon lifeways, habitats, and the relationships that sustain them. Unlike carbon credits that excuse harm through offsets, biocultural credits fund repair, channeling capital into living systems and turning finance from a tool of extraction into an act of reciprocity and responsibility. These credits are governed and validated by Indigenous Nations and local communities, blending traditional knowledge and science to measure real improvements in ecosystem health and cultural continuity.
Te Kawa Waiora
In 2020–2021, Te Kawa Waiora examined mauri—life force—along the Wairoa River and its margins, centring Indigenous partners and asking what a renewed, place-based ethics of care might look like. Findings pointed to a “new sacred”: honouring tūpuna insight while meeting present and future pressures. Lasting river health, the work argues, needs shared responsibility across hapū and towns. Co-designed with mana whenua, wānanga brought leaders and knowledge holders together. Outputs include a living framework for decisions that protect ecosystem mauri, intergenerational wellbeing, and relational duty. Te Kawa Waiora still orients regeneration efforts across the region.
Osa Regenerative Learning Center (El Local)
El Local is a community hub and learning center that anchors regenerative projects. It hosts youth programs, intergenerational exchange, local storytelling, and skills for land-based living. The curriculum draws on Indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledge, local farming, and wider regenerative education. A school meets there; the space is multi-use and oriented to solidarity and reweaving community, with meetings, gatherings, visitors, and work traders keeping it active.
Nila Vena Sustainability Forum
For roughly three years, representatives of all six tribes have met through the Nila Vena Sustainability Forum, using a council format akin to their regional health board—one appointed delegate per tribe. That familiar structure has supported dialogue on cultural revitalisation, clean energy, and regenerative economy.
Indigenous Taxonomy & Zoonosis
One line of work compiles an Indigenous taxonomy guide—how Maasai classify and relate to plants, animals, celestial bodies, and weather signs as predictive tools. A parallel track examines zoonotic disease through Indigenous lenses: how illness was understood to move among wildlife, livestock, and people, and how colonial-era shifts toward pharmaceutical reliance changed prevention and care.
Decolonizing Human-Wildlife Conflicts
Conflict-reduction programmes often lean on technical packages while understating long-standing Maasai practices. In MIKIA’s documentation, fence-heavy conservation has blocked elephant corridors, concentrated animals and people, and raised rather than lowered incidents. When Indigenous knowledge is sidelined, communities may be pushed toward lethal or noisy deterrents instead of approaches grounded in landscape relationships.
Guided Tours
Tours respond to a simple demand: visitors and locals want to know the story of the land. Guides frame history as orientation—where communities come from shapes where they can go. The format is participatory: guests walk with neighbours who move cattle on foot to high pasture, share meals such as balmoș on the slope, join mushroom forays, and help with hay in July or plum harvest in September—rhythms of work rather than packaged spectacle.
Sustainable Ethnobotanicals Research Program
SERP documents and studies ethnomedicines and native forest foods—safeguarding ancestral healing knowledge and testing regenerative health products. It supports cultural revitalisation and could widen the enterprise beyond annual crops when the knowledge base matures.
Native Tree Reforestation Campaign
A long-horizon campaign targets 749,000+ native trees on degraded ancestral land—guided by Indigenous ecological knowledge, aimed at biodiversity, food sovereignty, and climate resilience. Delivery includes nurseries, a core field team, ecological assessment, and harvest rules aligned with forest health.
Native Crop Regeneration and Supply Chain Development
Wild cacao and wild pepper anchor the model—food and medicine—restoring degraded forest while standing up processing and trade. Early revenue is meant to keep operations on the ground. Economic integration targets agroforestry on an initial ~2,200 ha, processing infrastructure, and a demonstrator that forest-based communities can earn livelihoods while protecting and restoring land. Pepper and cacao are the live cases; a later phase may extend toward ethnobotanical products.
Watershed Conservation and Payment for Ecosystem Services
The Babagon catchment is a 3,001 ha forested watershed serving roughly 57% of Greater Kinabalu’s water demand, yet its three Indigenous Dusun communities have seen little benefit. Babagon Dam (1997) flooded Kg Tampasak—graves, orchards, padi—forcing resettlement below the impoundment with lasting harm. To protect water quality, the state restricted livelihoods on upstream Dusun lands and pressed for state-led stewardship of territories communities had long managed. After four months’ scoping and a one-year PES readiness phase, Forever Sabah brokered a multi-year dialogue among communities, government, and private actors to design Payment for Ecosystem Services. The fund model treats communities as trustees with government and others, pooling and returning payments from prospective streams—if cabinet approves and territorial rights are recognised, that could support durable jobs in monitoring, catchment care, and restoration. Mirani Momogompi Tadon Waig (MMTW) is the trained local team for monitoring, nurseries, and restoration, blending science and customary practice—including dragonfly and fish indicators—to read watershed health.
Hala Traditional Agriculture Mapping
Traditional Hawaiian land management is a layered bioregional system. At broad scale, moku were political regions aligned with environmental gradients (temperature, sun, rain), shaping how entire landscapes were used. Over roughly seven to eight years, a documentation effort has combined those customary frameworks with geospatial analysis to inform present land-use choices. The work maps historical agricultural signals against environmental layers—botanical surveys (including 29,000 kukui trees along the Hāmākua Coast), soils, archaeology, archival checks, and modeling at roughly 85% accuracy. A flagship line traces the kou (candlenut-based) system: mapping kukui and breadfruit exposed a sharp break at Laupāhoehoe—breadfruit drops out, kukui patterns and soil fertility shift, coinciding with the boundary (Humuʻula) between the moku of Hilo and Hāmākua. That alignment shows large-scale land care tracked political lines that themselves tracked ecological gradients—even where drivers such as soil fertility are not obvious on the ground. Nested ahupuaʻa ran from mountains to sea, often organized around water, so communities could access a wide resource gradient. Finer kaluulu-style belts (for example Kona’s breadfruit zone) matched environmental limits and cultural preference.
Oral History Collection and Memory Mapping
In trawün (community meetings), elders remembered when *pitrales* and *gualves*, *canelos* and *lumas* dominated the land—recorded in this account—along with stories of change, place, and legends such as the Girl of the Radales, who appears to those who walk the radal groves. Memory work recorded sharp losses: puma, skunk, monito del monte, burrowing owl, and other beings elders knew from lived experience. Legendary fires turned routine; crops sometimes burned before harvest while families fought only to save houses. As one elder observed: “Before, the puma could be found in any sector, because there was more forest and houses were far apart... we were living in a space where we coexisted with wildlife” (elder testimony). That reality had changed sharply, calling for a coordinated response. The project also built a documentary archive of territorial memory and linked youth to ancestors. Naming dozens of plants, animals, and relations, the community still carries biocultural depth that can ground regeneration.
Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond
The Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond (DZCIB) links investor repayment to five holistic outcome streams—habitat, knowledge/circling, economy, relational connection, and ecocentric wellbeing—rather than treating ecology as the only ledger. Partners launched design work in 2019 in ethical space hosted by Chippewas of the Thames First Nation. The five-year pilot began March 2020, spanning 60 ha in the zone, to accelerate healthy landscapes, nature-based solutions, reconciliation, and human–nature relationship. - Capital: CAD $130,000 from VERGE Capital (Pillar Non-profit Network), structured as a repayable prototype via the VERGE Breakthrough Fund (5% interest, three-year term). - Habitat delivery: Indigenous TEK and Western science together; 53 projects with nine partners (First Nations, trusts, municipalities, ALUS, etc.), typically with 1:1 in-kind match. - Outcome payers: Third-party evaluation gates repayment. Payers include 3M Canada, multi-year public anchor funding, and Pollinator Partnership—grants legally conditioned on outcomes. - Leadership: Carolinian Canada, VERGE, Thames Talbot Land Trust, Deshkan Ziibiing, Ivey Business School—explicitly Two-Eyed Seeing in design and review. Five pillars (each with a pay-for-success benchmark): habitat gains; people learning on the land; intercultural economic opportunity; nature connectedness; ecocentric sightings—broadening “success” beyond hectares. Through July 2021, the pilot reported 69 ha improved, 39,000+ native plants, and ~450 people in land-based learning—spanning volunteer planting (e.g. Briscoe Woods), invasive control and corporate seed collection (Hawk Cliff), bilingual trail and language work (Anishinaabensag Miikaanens), and multi-site work with conservation authorities and First Nations. As Robin Wall Kimmerer notes in the report, restoring land without restoring relationship is empty; relationship is what endures.
Healthy Landscape Strategy
Carolinian Canada's Healthy Landscape Strategy aims to grow Canada's Biggest Wildlife Garden connecting Toronto to Windsor with healthy habitat. The strategy is informed by ecologist Doug Tallamy's research demonstrating the ways in which native plants support greater insect populations, biodiversity, and landscape health than non-native plants. The Healthy Landscape Strategy includes four key activities, linking restoration and conservation priorities based on the latest local and global science: 1. Save local nature: Increase commitment to saving habitat with long-term agreements. 2. Steward healthy landscapes: Use best ecosystem practices to increase habitat quality. 3. Seed, grow, create, or restore high-quality habitat: Use native plants sourced locally, ecologically, and ethically to increase habitat quantity and connections. 4. Lead healthy resilient communities: Connect communities to nature through strong equitable collaboration, positive engagement, First Nations leadership, and an ethical, local native plant industry. Support a climate-smart, green economy for thriving local communities through cross-sector collaboration. Native plants hold cultural and relational significance to many Indigenous peoples who view native plants as relatives and friends, not commodities. As the demand for native plants increases, part of Carolinian Canada's strategy is to ensure an ethical seed strategy for native plants within the region.
Project Portfolio Development
CEDPO has backed about 15 initiatives chosen through its systems map—spanning environment, society, and economy. Examples include: - Ngäbe communities: knowledge exchange, seed saving, traditional agriculture and medicine, productive-system strengthening, and ecotourism grounded in Ngäbe practice (phase one complete). - AsaOsa (recyclers’ association): operational support for the peninsula’s main recycling hub, where informal wages lag the environmental service provided. - Women-led enterprises: native vanilla in agroforestry (including export links) and meliponiculture for pollinators and income. - Marine work: Racing Coral trains divers in reef gardening in the Golfo Dulce; Mar y Tierra links land use, education, and monitoring to integrated watershed–coastal management.
School Community Network
Through schools, the initiative supports an intergenerational zone where people learn with and from each other in real community settings and take collective action on regenerative Legacy Projects, using a land-based learning model. Core teams combine a student EcoLeader, a teacher (often with parents), and an Elder-in-Residence; those teams extend engagement outward through neighbourhoods.