This machete grows trees!

Dear Friend,

I hope you had a beautiful Earth Day weekend and that you found a moment to appreciate the beauty of our natural world. When the day began in 1970, it was a "teach-in", where teachers and youth United States gathered to learn about how they could help the environment. The vision of an action-oriented andyouth-led movement for our planet is worth embracing.

The machete project, focuses on supporting youth agents as they connect with farmers in the rural tropics to engage in conversations about forestry and climate change. The project and its digital platform seek to capture that energy of a young generation that is eager to take action to slow climate change and create a better future.

The digital platform continues in the development phase, with software architects and programmers meeting regularly with our team to ensure that the digital platform will enable a new social connectivity, one focused on forests. You can read more about the platform development, which you have helped to support, in a press release linked below.

Your support has also been vital this dry season as our team has worked to combat wildfires (at least 5 extinguished) that could degrade the forest and reverse reforestation activities. We are watching to see if an El Ninno year develops because this climate phenomena is associated with extreme drought in western Central America. Drought leads to great wildfire risk. 

Thank you for your support this dry season as we work to protect the trees and forests, and as we develop the digital platform that will connect youth and farmers.

With gratitude,

Sarah

Links:

• Press release about progress on the Machete Project

Dear Friends,

As the rainy season wraps up and we celebrate the end of the year, I would like to express my gratitude to you for helping us to further restore forests. Your support for this campaign is also helping us to build on our digital platform that will enable us to grown millions of trees through the leadership of small-scale farmers and youth. 

During this summer and fall, your support enabled us to plant 350 native trees at two properties in the Paso del Istmo Wildlife Corridor in southwestern Nicaragua. At the same time, we worked across six properties to patrol and protect 500 acres of forests where we had planted native trees in 2007.  We also managed reforestation at a property recently reforested, known as the Mono Bayo Reserve. There we removed weeds and prevented wildfires. We have seen the positive impact of this habitat restoration efforts. Just last week, our rangers photographed this puma (see attached) resting in the forested areas of the property. Your support helps us to sustain the diverse trees in the forest, and the fauna that depends on it. Thank you.

I am also thrilled to share more on the progress we are making on building a digital platform that will help to connect youth and farmers in a join campaign to restore forests. We are calling the project the Machete Project, because this traditional agriculture tool can be transformed into a force for farmer-mediated restoration of forests by using it to prune trees, promote regrowth, and removing weedy competitors.

We have spent the past eight months working on design details with a digital team from the software company SoftServe. The programmers in Eastern Europe, including the country of Ukraine. There have been some delays due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but we are nearing a product which we can pilot to help build a movement around tropical forest restoration.  This is a new idea and an important puzzle piece for mitigating climate change in a way that considers rural people and the young generation. Our progress on the machete project has only been possible thanks to people like you. Thank you. I look forward to sharing what comes next as we begin testing it on the ground in several tropical countries. 

In the meantime, I wish you happy holidays. Thank you for helping to grow forests in Central America and beyond.

Your truly,

Sarah

I would like to update you with some good news about our reforestation efforts made possible thanks to you. 

Last month, I traveled to El Salvador where I met with several farmers in the rural countryside. They shared information about their efforts to rebuild forests quickly by using cuttings from trees, and by planting seedlings sprouted from a seed and managed in an at-home nursery. The information they shared will go into the tree planting manual that we are developing to be both a manual and digital guide. 

During this same trip, I met with local children and local surfers at the La Punta or Punta Roca surf break to locate sites for tree-planting. Then, we led a public tree-planting together with the World Surf League nonprofit WSL PURE and the tourism development association Oriente Salvaje. This planting only involved some 30 or so native plants, but it went a long ways towards building awareness around the relevance of river and forests to ocean conservation. Thank you supporting our efforts to restore native vegetation.

We are also getting closer to our big vision to support "farmer mediated natural regeration" with  people, young and old. To reach many people and grow more trees, we have designed a digital platform that will promote restoration using native species. Recently, with your support, we have been meeting weekly with a global digital company that is offering us pro-bono support to build a business plan for this digital, forest-promoting project. We will keep you updated as we develop this digital reforestation plant. We are grateful that you support our ambitions to plant trees and create social and economic benefits for farmers. Thank you.

Finally, it is rainy season and so we have also begun efforts to cut back weeds and competing grasses from recent reforestation areas in Nicaragua. Your support makes it possible to do the long, committed work of sustaining trees even after the first few months. 

Thank you again for your incredible support! We could not do this work without you.

Sarah

Links:

• Restoration with the local communities and #WeAreOne coalition
• Video summary about the Rio Chilama reforestation effort

We are so grateful for your support for this project that aims to catalyze farmer-led forest restoration and slow climate change. We have used your support to bolster our restoration efforts on the ground and to gather resources for a training manual. Here are some updates: 

Your gift made it possible for us to hire a part-time intern to support our exeuctive director with project research and to gather training materials for our restoration platform. Training materials are for youth and farmers to develop skills in farmer-mediated natural regeneration, restoration mapping, and digital media and story-telling, Materials gathered thus far include scientific literature, restoration training manuals from around the world, and a compilation of existing apps and software for restoration purposes.

We mapped Paso Pacifico's current restoration areas in RESTOR and Explorer.Land mapping platforms. Each of these formats gives us the ability to add data layers like carbon, biodiversity, and farmer profiles. Our project profiles are not yet public on these platforms due to privacy concerns for landowners in Nicaragua.

In addition to these platforms, we mapped individual trees at the Mono Bayo Reserve using GreenStand. The next steps for this work will be to digitally tag each mapped tree with its species names. Now that we have made it through the rainy season, our ranger team on the ground is clearing weeds and vines around these trees to make sure they grow strong and healthy while they remove carbon from the atmosphere. Thank you for helping us to make it possible.

Finally, I would like to mention that your support has enabled us to pinpoint opportunities to link forest products with potential markets. This is important to our long-term restoration goals because farmers need to make a living from the trees that they grow. Balsum oil and native-bee honey are two such products. Balsum oil is extracted from native balsum trees using an artesanal approach. We have shared a sample of Central American balsum oil with a beauty company in France in hopes up opening up that market connection.

The digital platform to facilitate the interactions between youth and farmers grow in 2022. We are pleased to share that we have received a generous grant from the Bruce and Marilyn Wallace family foundation that will enable us to contract a Chief Product Officer to help lead the digital build-out of the product. 

We hope you have a wonderful new year!

With gratitude,

Sarah and the Team

Links:

• Zoom in on map to see the trees planted in Southwest Nicaragua