Indigenous people own and preserve a disproportionate amount of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Why? And what can we learn from them?

In order to scale Indigenous outcomes to the rest of the planet, we need to look at how they are doing it. And the shift is radical: for Amazonian Indigenous communities, there is no such thing as Nature.

Our current understanding of conserving biodiversity is based on the wrong ontological foundation. This article is to reframe an industrialized-world understanding of social and natural capital to one from an Indigenous perspective. Then bring it to scale thanks to Savimbo’s infrastructure and social capital.

Fernando Lezama, is a Taita (traditional indigenous healer in Colombia) and an indigenous activist. He started Savimbo because people came to him from around the world in search of healing, then wanted to help the jungle in return. Like many have done before he could have just started a charity. But, Fernando didn’t want another charity. He saw that what his people are doing with the forest is a valuable service, worth payment, not charity. He wanted impact. He wanted to build a business by and for Indigenous communities with global reach.

The magic happened when he met the two other Savimbo co-founders: Johny López, an indigenous conservationist who had been tracking jaguars for twenty years and Drea Burbank, a US-born technologist who had come to meet the jungle on its terms. They realized that together they were holding an unseen combination of social capital that could serve communities living in highly valuable - and threatened - ecosystems. 

What is social capital?

Social capital can be technically defined as "the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively". 

But that definition isn’t very intuitive. 

Instead, think of it in terms of your friend driving you to the airport to catch a flight. If you had paid for a rideshare, the ride might have cost $100. So your friendship, the fluid exchange of help, respect, and trust you have built up with your amigo is worth $100 but it's not exchanged in money, it's exchanged in social capital. 

Many Indigenous communities conduct the majority of their transactions communally, not in money, but in the complex web of equitable exchanges that keep friendships, families, and relationships alive and healthy. 

And this social capital, and the psychological security it provides, is the very thing that industrialized cultures miss without knowing they’re missing it.

Bridging vs bonding social capital

In the last two decades, there has been an increasing distinction between bonding and bridging social capital. Here’s why.

Bonding social capital describes the networks of relationships among people who are alike, generally within a group or community; as Robert Putnam put it, it is capital to “get by”. 

Bridging capital, however, refers to relationships between social groups, class, race, gender, religion or other important sociodemographic or socioeconomic characteristics; Putnam describes this type of social capital as the one to “get ahead”.

The meeting of the three Savimbo co-founders led to the realization that together they were bringing a very rare combination of different forms of bonding and bridging social capital that could enable them to tackle the issue of biodiversity conservation of biodiversity at scale. What is that? 

On the one hand, Indigenous communities rely on very high levels of bonding capital in order to live in societies that provide for almost everything in the midst of complex ecosystems without involving a lot of monetary exchanges. (And believe us, “getting by” in the forest while preserving it is no small feat!)

To understand how they do it, we need to look at the way they interact with their ecosystems through their eyes.

Natural capital as social capital

Taking the Indigenous view: could natural capital only be another form of social capital?

Something that most people who do not live in the rainforest do not realize is that for many indigenous communities in the Amazon, nature does not exist. 

Indeed, as the anthropologist Philippe Descola showed, Amazonian Indigenous animist ontologies do not ontologically separate humans from non-humans.

In this understanding of what the world is, there is no such thing as Nature, a unified system defined in opposition to humans. Instead there is constantly-maintained web of relationships with humans and non-humans. That might be a deeper reason why “nature” hasn’t been destroyed by those communities: because there is no foreign thing to tame and exploit, but a diversity of beings to relate with.

In other words, it can be argued that what is generally called natural capital, is here seen in Indigenous terms as a form of bridging social capital: networks of relationships between unlike animated beings that enable a - more-than-human - society to function effectively and sustainably. The human and non-human realms are one whole; no separation.

Lets focus on an outcome such as forest biodiversity being preserved over time; allowing human societies to thrive in its midst. We can see that reframing the way Indigenous societies interact with their non-human environment make more sense in terms of (bridging) social capital. A more-than-human social capital through a web of relationships between humans and non-humans that provides services. For example, traditional medicine in the Amazon is generally a business of enlisting the support of plants’ friends, both in matter and spirit.

How can we bring an Indigenous co-existence model to scale? 

For many decades, Indigenous communities have been mobilizing horizontally. Applying strong bonding capital by organizing locally and transnationally to resist extractive industries. The conservation of what is left of the Amazon owes a lot to that resistance; sometimes, forging more or less successful alliances with non-profit allies from the Global North too. But that was mostly to get by in the face of a malignant extractive complex.

This is where Savimbo enters the scene. 

Both co-founders Johny and Fernando had been at the forefront of this reality, having worked and fought tirelessly the last twenty years to preserve the forests of El Vides in Putumayo, Colombia (have a look at that river!). 

When Drea Burbank showed up in the valley, she brought another layer of bridging social capital completing the puzzle that is Savimbo. Adding to the existing bonding and bridging indigenous social capital, Burbank brought to Savimbo a global network of technologists, ecologists, lawyers, scientists, and activists.

Tapping into this bridging capital, Savimbo is able to enlist the most recent tech to build an Indigenous-led infrastructure that is designed to pay directly people and communities for the work they already do to preserve the forest. Savimbo is the bridge that allows a new reality where local conservation along Indigenous standards is being funded by global climate and biodiversity credit markets.

Savimbo’s brand of social capital

• Locally: Indigenous communities govern (bonding social capital) large territories and have an intimate knowledge of their ecosystems establishing nurturing relationships with the non-human world (bridging more-than-human social capital).

• Translocally: Indigenous communities have developed trust networks and can mobilize together bringing effective solutions to scale (bridging social capital).

• Globally: the Savimbo organization taps into a global network of experts of many trades to craft its infrastructure delivering global finance directly to local communities (bridging social capital).

Conclusion on social capital

Savimbo was designed by, and for Indigenous communities. But its impact reaches beyond its initial owners.

While Savimbo’s biodiversity crediting methodology stems directly from Indigenous wisdom, it can be used by any individual landowners.

Using the protocol for its financial incentives in the form of biodiversity credits, they are subtly nudged to become porous to the view of traditional Indigenous communities by monitoring indicator species - which are traditionally known as totemic species. Doing this, participating owners develop a refined understanding of who inhabits the land and are incentivized to regenerate the forest supporting higher levels of biodiversity. Thus, Savimbo not only spreads a methodology but an Indigenous way of “composing the world”

That is the real secret of an ancient way of protecting biodiversity, where humans and non-humans live together, not separate.

At Savimbo we do not compromise on the fact that we are Indigenous-led and serve Indigenous and local communities first. In order to do that, we realign technologies and concepts - such as social capital - on Indigenous terms. We are open to everyone joining this movement, on our terms.

Written by Adrien Labaeye, Griffin Flannery, and Drea Burbank. Adrien is transformation catalyst, and Griffin is an impact strategist, and Drea is a delinquent savant.